Adoption of Service Oriented Computing from the IT Professionals' Perspective: An e-Government Case Study

The case study reported in this paper focuses on the question: what are the critical factors that influence IT professionals’ intention to adopt the Service Oriented Computing (SOC) paradigm? This work reports a case study examining the e-Government initiative in a middle-sized European city. It uses an initial SOC adoption model developed through a proceeding interview-based exploratory study [2]. The current study has two principle aims. The first aim is to “shed some light” on the IT professionals’ acceptance of such complex technological approaches as Service Oriented Computing in the e-Government sector and to report key learning issues emerging from the case study. The second aim of the case study is to bring further credibility to the first study and to validate empirically its assertions. Some of the major findings of the study are the replacement of the complexity variable by the variable of maintainability, and the replacement of the trust and dependency variables (both of interpersonal rather than of technical nature) by the variable of external involvement. The results of the study also suggest the introduction of the “champion” of the approach variable. Theoretical and practical implications that follow are presented and discussed.