Research On The Mechanism Of Adoption,Assimilation And Value Of E-Government Cloud Service

Currently,China's e-government has entered a new stage of promoting resource integration and business collaboration.With the technological advantages and characteristics of large-scale computing and storage capability,virtualization,dynamic scalability,on-demand service,and flexibility,cloud computing becomes the way to solving the issues of e-government development(low resource utilization,rising IT costs,repeated construction and investment waste,long IT procurement deployment cycle),and the effective approach to promoting share of e-government infrastructure,improving resource utilization,and achieving cooperation of government affairs and connectivity of interdepartmental information.Under the guidance and support of the"Twelfth Five-year Plan of National E-Government" and a series of policies,local governments focus on programming e-government cloud service system,and vigorously promote the construction and application of the centralized and unified e-government public cloud platform in accordance with the national disposition and requirements,which effectively support business at all levels of government departments and promote the construction of e-government from the traditional model to intensification model.Although the usage of e-government cloud continues to increase,adoption rate and the degree of e-government cloud is still far lower than some European and American developed countries.This is because the e-government cloud is a new mode of innovation,and its characteristics have brought many management challenges for governments.Previous studies have shown that the benefits of the investment in information technology usually depend on the effective use of information technology.Therefore,in order to improve deployment rate of the e-government system in the cloud platform and rate of infrastructure utilization,and increase the cross-level,cross-sector information resource sharing and business collaboration,exploring adoption process of e-government cloud in the government departments is of great significance for government departments,e-government cloud service providers,cloud services industry and national e-government strategy.Around the related issues of e-government cloud,a great number of scholars have done a great deal of research.However,throughout the research results at home and abroad,we can see that the theoretical study of adoption and value of e-government cloud is still in the initial stage.Many scholars are mostly to study the adoption of cloud computing from the perspective of the enterprise,while pay little attention on the cloud computing adoption in the government and the public sector.The research on e-government cloud is mainly focused on the technical structure,advantages and risks,and the implementation of cloud technology in e-government.A small amount of research focus on the adoption of e-government cloud,and the research are mainly conducted based on investigation,case study and grounded theory.Empirical studies focus on the direct effect of cloud technology factors,while pay little attention to the external environment and organizational factors and internal mechanism(indirect effect)of cloud adoption.In addition,there is little research about how to assimilate e-government cloud to achieve the IT value in the post-adoption stage of e-government cloud.Therefore,in order to answer these questions:What are the key factors affecting the adoption of e-government cloud?What are the influence mechanisms of these key factors?What are the strategies of e-goverrnment cloud assimilation?How these strategies affect the organizational IT value?It is necessary to develop a comparatively complete theoretical framework to explore the key factors of e-government cloud adoption,e-government cloud assimilation and its IT value impact mechanism,which is of great significance to the current research on e-government cloud and IT adoption behavior.Based on IT innovation adoption process theory,this study divides the process of e-government cloud adoption into two stages:the pre-adoption and the post-adoption of e-government cloud,and conducts a series of research,along with the research line of"e-government cloud adoption?e-government cloud assimilation?e-government cloud value".On the one hand,in pre-adoption stage,this study focuses on systematically identifying the key factors and influence mechanism of e-government cloud adoption from the aspects of technology,organization and environment.On the other hand,in the post-adoption stage,this study focuses on the analysis of the influence mechanism of e-government cloud assimilation strategy on organizational IT value from cloud.This study analyzes the above research questions through the exploratory case study and the empirical study on the adoption and assimilation of e-government cloud in government agencies in China contexts.Specifically,the main contents and the main conclusions are as follows.(1)This paper studies the key factors and their influencing mechanism of the adoption of e-government cloud in government agencies in China contexts.Based on the TOE(technology-organization-environment)framework and the trust theory as the theoretical basis,and combined with the institutional theory and the two-factor theory,this paper adds the factor of trust on basis of the three dimensions of technical factors,organizational factors and environmental factors,and develops the concept model of determinants of e-government cloud adoption.In the technical dimension,based on the two-factor theory,the e-government cloud characteristics are divided into perceived advantages and perceived risks,meanwhile,the cloud provider capability is considered as the composition of the technical dimension by taking into account the service attributes of the e-government cloud.The organizational dimension is considered as organization readiness including the top management support and organizational resources.The envirornmental dimension is the external pressure based on institutional theory.The results of empirical research show that cloud provider capability,organization readiness,external pressure,and cloud trust have significant positive impacts on e-government cloud adoption,and also find that perceived advantage and cloud provider's capability on e-government cloud adoption has significant positive indirect influences.Cloud trust has the full mediation and partial mediation effect in relationship between advantages,cloud provider capability and e-government cloud adoption.External pressure has a positive role in the relationship between cloud trust and cloud adoption.The findings of the above have filled the gap of the previous research that pay too much attention on the direct effect while pay little attention on indirect effect of factors,which enriches the mechanism of IT innovation,cloud computing and e-government adoption.(2)This paper studies the mechanism of e-government cloud assimilation and its organization's IT value.Based on the theory of IT assimilation,this paper divides E-government cloud assimilation into two dimensions from deployment and implementation of e-government cloud,namely,e-government cloud assimilation depth and cloud assimilation breadth.Based on the sequential relationship of E-government cloud IT value,the e-government cloud IT value is defined as the short-term IT business value and the long-term IT strategic value.At the same time,from the theory of resource orchestration and the dual theory,the alignment strategies of assimilation depth and assimilation breadth are defined:balance alignment and complementarity alignment.Based on this analysis,this paper develops the model of e-government cloud assimilation and value influence mechanism,and explores the influence mechanism of e-government cloud assimilation depth and breadth,and their alignment strategies on the IT business and strategic value of e-government cloud.The results of empirical research show that the assimilation depth and assimilation breadth of e-government cloud have positive impacts on the short-term IT business value,and the e-government cloud assimilation depth is more obvious compared with the cloud assimilation breadth.At the same time,assimilation depth and breadth of e-government cloud have positive indirect impacts on the long-term IT strategic value through the short-term IT business value,and the indirect effect of assimilation depth is also more obvious compared with the cloud assimilation breadth.The study also finds that the complementary alignment strategy of e-government cloud assimilation depth and breadth has a positive impact on long-term IT strategic value,while the balance alignment strategy has no significant effect on long-term IT strategic value.The above findings of e-government cloud assimilation and the value influence mechanism,can fill the gap of the previous study paying too much attention to pre-adoption while neglecting the impact of assimilation mechanism,and extend IT assimilation to e-government cloud environment from the traditional IT construction model,which enriches the theory of IT assimilation and IT value.The innovations of this research mainly have the following four points:(1)Exploratory study of e-government cloud adoption in government departments.The application of cloud service has gradually become the focus and core in e-government development and research,while previous research has focused on the technical structure,importance and significance,advantages and disadvantages.Although the research of cloud computing services adoption becomes more and more popular in enterprises domain and foreign countries regions,the results of the research are not fit to the Chinese context,because the cloud computing services requirements and application models of different types of organizations in different countries regions are obviously different.This study takes the Chinese government department as the empirical research object,and the research conclusions are more meaningful for Chinese governments.(2)In-depth analyzing the e-government cloud adoption process based on IT innovation adoption process theory.Previous studies on cloud computing and e-government cloud adoption focus on the important factor identification in a certain adoption stage,and can not effectively and in-deep reveal and explain the adoption process of cloud computing in the organization.From the perspective of adoption user(government department),this study not only explores the influencing factors and their mechanism of the e-government cloud adoption in pre-adoption stage,but also analyzes the depth,breadth of IT assimilation and their alignment strategies on IT value of e-government cloud in post-adoption stage.This study is conducive to a better understanding of e-government cloud adoption process in governments,which riches IT adoption process theory,and fills research gap of the e-government cloud adoption process in governments.(3)Integrating different IT adoption theory to construct e-government cloud adoption model.Different theories and models of IT adoption have different special emphasis point.Considering that the research based on one special theory is more one-sided,this study reviews IT innovation adoption theory,develops the e-government cloud adoption model based on TOE framework,trust theory,institution theory,two-factor theory,and conducts a multi-dimensional,in-depth study,at last obtains the innovative results.This research model not only enriches the research of government-level IT innovation adoption behavior,but also can be extended to other types of IT innovation adoption.(4)Exploring the mechanism of IT assimilation and IT value in e-government cloud.Previous research pay little attention on post-adoption of e-government cloud,although some research have explored the key factors of e-government cloud implementation in post-adoption stage,there still lack the in-depth interpretation of mechanism between e-government cloud assimilation and e-government cloud IT value creation.Therefore,this study takes the Chinese government department as an example,based on IT assimilation theory,IT value theory,resource orchestration theory and dual theory,explores the influence mechanism of the e-government cloud assimilation breadth,depth dimension and their alignment strategies(balance and complementarity)on IT value of e-government cloud.This research deepens the concept of IT assimilation and IT value,enriches the research on IT assimilation and e-government cloud assimilation,and IT value and e-government cloud value,and effectively makes up the related research of e-government cloud in post-adoption stage.