Content area
Full text
1. Introduction
While new technologies come and go, organizations still face the dilemma of identifying, adopting, and implementing the “right” solutions for their current and future business needs (Ward and Peppard, 2002). Particularly in times when budgets are tight and proven business cases are essential, decision makers must make informed technology adoption and implementation decisions before making substantial upfront investments (Ward and Peppard, 2002). The technology adoption decision is further complicated by various other forces such as compatibility with business strategy, integration with existing legacy systems and infrastructures, global competition, influences of suppliers, partners, and customers, etc. In a nutshell, today’s business decision makers face tremendous pressure not to miss critical business opportunities as well as not to make technology investments that fail to deliver business value and expected benefits (Barua et al., 2004).
The adoption and implementation of information systems particularly interorganizational information systems continues to be an interesting research topic. Advances in information and communication technologies provide organizations with a plethora of potential opportunities to increase operational efficiency, reduce costs, and increase business value (Christensen, 2004; Basole and DeMillo, 2006). As technologies become an integral aspect of organizations, decision makers must understand and critically evaluate the forces and factors that shape the adoption and implementation decision. However, this decision is very complex. In today’s global and competitive business environment, executives and information technology (IT) decision makers must make smart and value-justified decisions about their technology investment and strategy (Rouse et al., 2000; Ward and Peppard, 2002). The complexity of the technology decision increases even further when the technology under consideration is just emerging and its value is still not very clear (Easton, 2002; Daley, 2005). In this research study the complexity of technology adoption in one such case, namely Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology specifically for retail organizations is investigated.
According to Das (2006), the Retail sector will comprise 44 percent of the global RFID market value for systems including tags by the year 2016. On the other hand, according to a survey sponsored by NCR (NPN, 2006) only 9 percent of participating retailers have an RFID implementation timeline as compared to 44 percent of participating manufacturers. About 60 percent of the retailers in this group are large retailers with more...