ICIS 2007

PERCEPTION AND DIFFUSION OF IT: GAINING SUSTAINED COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE

ABSTRACT

There is no doubt that IT has contributed major impacts on various socio-institutional contexts (e.g. firms, industry, or society). Firms, in particular, are in huge dependency on IT as a technology artifact that is capable to achieve sustained competitive advantage. However, a firm consists of a hierarchical structure of individuals and each individual perceives IT as an artifact to increase one's power and influence as well as to help firm reaches its goal, which is sustained competitive advantage. This paper uses bibliographic research to investigate how IT as a piece of artifact is perceived, accepted, and adopted by individuals in an organization, diffuses among the hierarchy structure of a firm thus affecting organizational behavior, and achieves sustained competitive advantage.

Keywords: IT artifact, sustained competitive advantage, IT acceptance, IT adoption and diffusion, organizational behavior

Yep, I came up with that abstract couple of days ago. This is supposed to be elaborated as a research paper for the International Conference on Information Systems (ICIS) on December 2007 at McGill University, Montreal, Canada. Well, I'm not gonna be presenting alone though, my classmates and my Professor will colaborate with me. This is a chunk to a larger research paper. But *sigh* this is such a big conference. It's considered the most prestigious gathering of Information Systems academics and research-oriented practitioners in the world. It's tough to get paper published at this kind of conference.

I consulted this abstract to a third-year IS Ph.D. student at my school, overall she likes the topic. But she said the research method (bibliographic research) used in my abstract would get my paper nowhere. Well, what to do? I'm a first-year IS Ph.D. student, and the only research method that I've learned so far is case study research method. I'm taking qualitative research method and the philosophy of science class this semester and I'm planning to take the quantitative research method class 2 years from now before doing my Ph.D. comprehensive exam (so I'll be able to take applied multivariate analysis and applied linear regression before taking quantitative research method). Well, back to the main problem, bibliographic research doesn't have the rigor to make a "research" scientific and presentable enough in academia. Well, I haven't learned more qualitative methods though as this is just the mid semester. There are more qualitative methods to be covered for the rest of semester, which are action research, ethnography, grounded theory, etc. Well I'm in a middle of educating myself in grounded theory though, as this concept is required for my work as a Graduate Research Assistant. This method will actually be covered some time in mid November, so I'm one month ahead of my classmates =) But I don't know, the Professor hasn't given me a feedback on my abstract so I don't know whether I should change the research method. I don't know, I personally like this topic and I'm planning to evolve it to be my dissertation topic in couple of years from now (and I'm planning to use quantitative method instead). What do y'all think?