Abstract: While IT researchers have long focused on achieving strategic benefits provided by IT investments, recently some have claimed “IT doesn’t matter. ” We believe that most large organizations have both highly strategic and highly commoditized IT investments, and that differences in the strategic importance of information systems help explain where firms will adopt new technologies. We develop a framework that considers the tradeoffs between features, risk, and cost in IT adoption, and show how it can be applied to explain the adoption of open source software in large firms. We discuss a planned survey to provide empirical support linking the framework to enterprise deployment of open source software. The two decades from 1980-2000 marked tremendous growth in the organizational adoption of information technologies, through new users, new uses, and new technologies. Some (mainly smaller) firms adopted their first computers with the availability of desktop computing, while at larger enterprises, computing shifted from being a back office data processing system to become an integral part of daily operations and even used as a competitive weapon. Much of the growth came from innovations leading to new technologies such as RDBMS, 1 RISC-based computing, local area networks, and web-based intranets. However, this huge growth in technology adoption masked a contrary trend in the declining real cost of computing, by more

Lately we have seen a growing interest from both public and private organisations to adopt Open Source Software (OSS), not only for a few, specific applications but also on a more general level throughout the organisation. As a consequence, the organisations ’ decisions on adoption of OSS are becoming increasingly more important and complex. We present three perspectives organisations can employ in their decisions: seeing OSS acquisition as a business case, as COTS acquisition, and as architectural change within a governance framework. We present case studies of decisions on OSS adoption, and categorise the decision criteria we have found. Our results indicate that for large-scale adoption of OSS, focus will be on architectural considerations: enterprise-wide architectures will at first be a barrier, but in the long term OSS’s support of open standards can be a major enabler for OSS adoption. In contrast, in smaller organisations and in small-scale adoption of OSS, the cheap price of OSS is a major enabler, as it provides a good opportunity for experiments and short-term economic benefits. For small organisations these experiments can lead to development of a common IT-architecture, and in larger organisations OSS can be adopted in niche-areas, without significantly

This paper explores the non-technical issues that arise with migration to

Open Source software (OSS) is coming to the attention of individuals, organisations, and governments ’ worldwide, and is increasingly being adopted by firms for specific business purposes (Overby, Bharadwaj et al. 2004). Organisations such as Beaumont Hospital Dublin have claimed cost savings in excess of €8m over 5 years as a result of migrating to OSS desktop

The decision about the adoption of Free/Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS) is a key issue in Small and

Software in Hospitals Open source software (OSS) has gained considerable attention recently in health care. Yet, how and why OSS is being adopted within hospitals in particular remains a poorly understood issue. This research attempts to further this understanding. A mixed-method research approach was used to explore the extent of OSS adoption in hospitals as well as the factors facilitating and inhibiting adoption. The findings suggest a very limited adoption of OSS in hospitals. Hospitals tend to adopt general-purpose instead of domain-specific OSS. We found that software vendors are the critical factor facilitating the adoption of OSS in hospitals. Conversely, lack of in-house development, as well as a perceived lack of security, quality, and accountability of OSS products were factors inhibiting adoption. An empirical model is presented to illustrate the factors facilitating and inhibiting the adoption of OSS in hospitals.

Despite a considerable body of literature on factors involved in the Open Source Software (OSS) adoption process, there is little research into concerns of OSS by public sector organisations. So it was important to reassess the factors inhibiting OSS adoption in order to enhance OSS utilization within public sector organisations. This study explored various factors that may inhibit OSS adoption within Australian Public Sector (APS) organisations by interviewing those involved in software procurement. The findings were analysed through the lenses of technology adoption theories (i.e, Diffusion of Innovation (DOI) theory and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM)) and OSS adoption literature. Inhibitors to OSS adoption in APS organisations was contingent upon critical factors such as perceived lack of availability of support and training to sustain long-term usage, economical disadvantages associated with OSS applications such as higher support, maintenance and training