| IT management is under attack. A struggling economy, shrinking IT budgets, and an increasingly competitive, global business marketplace means that IT must deliver systems that, not only, have an immediate impact, but that are faithfully used and accepted by end users. Despite this challenge, academic research knows little about the process of end user acceptance from a cognitive perspective; such knowledge could help practitioners as they seek the outcomes that they desire. From a research perspective, two main theories have emerged to understand the user acceptance process: the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the diffusion of innovation perspective, examining the Perceived Characteristics of Innovations (PCI). Yet, both of these theories have problems, including measurement issues, context-issues, and theoretical-issues, the most relevant of which is a lack of defining what it means for an individual to accept a technology. In this dissertation, a new definition of information technology acceptance is developed using etymology (or tracing the history of words), to arrive at a view of acceptance as having five dimensions. Using data collected from two organizations (one deploying an ERP and another implementing a document management system), these five dimensions are combined to create a definition of information technology acceptance as "the continual process of an individual user psychologically receiving, grasping, assessing, and being given and submitting to an information technology application." Each of these dimensions is linked to outcomes that management cares about (i.e. devotion, faithfulness of appropriation, satisfaction, perceptions of value, and routinized and deep usage), and mediators and moderators that affect the process are offered and then empirically tested. Conclusions are offered and the implications of this conceptualization are presented for both researchers and practitioners. |
