Stratified Users and Organisation Preparedness for Information Technology Acquisition: A Causal Model

Business processes have been exploiting the continual growth of information technology, and as a result, these are becoming very complex with time. Without adequate IT support, a business organization can hardly survive these days. For an organization, IT acquisition involves two important process dimensions, one, suppliers’ capability to adequately evaluate the IT needs of the organization and two, users’ capability to properly assess its own IT requirements. User’s role cannot be underestimated in organising an acquisition process (Gallivan and Keil, (2003))130. Any mismatch in the understanding of the IT dimension by business process owners and IT managers, IT acquisition in many cases result in failures. Research reveals that fewer attempts are made to involve the end-users in the acquisition process and their preparedness receives the least attention. User’s involvement may help an organisation to prevent post adoption shocks. This paper first discusses IT acquisition process, various stakeholders in the IT adoption process and the associated phases. It further discusses a model to ascertain organisation’s preparedness based on preparedness of users, information system and technology in the pre-IT acquisition process. Through this research, the model is tried with thirteen sample organsaitions to examine the role of organisational preparedness to predict the health of IT acquisition process. 1 Institute of Rural Management, Anand, [email protected] 2 Department of Computer Science, University of Reading, [email protected] 3 Faculty of Business Administration, Utkal University, brajaraj [email protected] Vilakshan, XIMB Journal of Management 1