Empirically Testing a Model for the Intention of Firms to Use Remote Application Hosting

In light of the new interest in remote application hosting, or application service provision (ASP), this study aims at empirically testing the ASP Intention Model (AIM), by surveying 143 decision makers in organizations. The model, based on institutional theories, reflects factors affecting organizational intention to adopt remote application hosting: perceived business benefits of ASP, perceived ease of ASP implementation, and institution-based trust. While the first two factors have previously been suggested in organizational IT adoption models, institution-based trust was not. Besides contributing to research by validating a new model, and to practice by highlighting plausible explanations for the failure of first-wave ASP, we also argue that AIM can be generalized to other web-driven organizational applications, such as B2B e-commerce, e-markets, inter-organizational systems and web-services.