Unified Modeling Language (UML) IT adoption - A holistic model of organizational capabilities perspective

a r t i c l e i n f o This study develops an integrated research model to examine various factors affecting the IT adoption in the context of the Unified Modeling Language (UML). UML is one type of business process modeling techniques, which in turn is a key aspect of the business process reengineering. The proposed research model is based on IT adoption framework and organizational culture theory. The model identifies fourteen variables, covering seven broad categories (IT characteristics, organization technology, environment, organization structure, organization process, organization culture, and project culture) that could potentially impact UML adoption in organizations. This comprehensive conceptual model is further validated by survey data collected from 251 North American organizations across five different industries. Our results support the proposed conceptual-ization and shed new light on the key factors associated with firms' adoption of UML technologies. Theoretical and managerial implications of the findings are discussed. The significance of understanding Information Technology (IT) adoption is well documented [1]. Considerable scholarly research has focused on investigating the impact of one or several of these factors (e.g., IT characteristics, organization technology, environment, organization structure, organization process, and organization culture) in different environmental settings [32,57,58,76]. Extant research has recognized the importance of technological, organizational, and environmental factors (TOE framework) in influencing IT adoption [8,14,80,83]. In spite of prior research that has found strong empirical support for the TOE framework, much fruitful theoretical work remains to be conducted. For instance, previous studies have proposed that IT adoption is affected by organization structure [14,17,60], organization process [12,14,56,76] and organization culture as well as project culture [52,60,80,84]. In spite of extensive prior studies, there is a lack of comprehensive and integrative understanding, from the organizational culture perspective, on the IT adoption process, which is crucial for both practitioners and researchers in terms of generating deeper understanding of IT adoption. To fill this void, we extend the TOE framework in our research to incorporate organizational culture theory such as organization structure, organization process, organization culture, and project culture. Thus, practitioners may benefit from the holistic analysis of the determinants of IT adoption, and managers interested in introducing new technologies may be able to understand and act more effectively in terms of how to better facilitate IT adoption. The objective of this paper is therefore to identify a holistic IT adoption model to investigate three research questions on how various organizational factors will …