IT innovation adoption by enterprises: Knowledge discovery through text analytics

a r t i c l e i n f o Enterprise adoption of information technology (IT) innovations has been a topic of tremendous interest to both practitioners and researchers. The study of technological, managerial, strategic, and economic factors as well as adoption processes and contexts has led the field to become a rich tapestry of many theoretical and conceptual foundations. This paper provides a comprehensive multidisciplinary classification and analysis of the scholarly development of the enterprise-level IT innovation adoption literature by examining articles over the past three decades (1977–2008). We identify 472 articles and classify them by functional discipline, publication, research methodology, and IT type. The paper applies text analytic methods to this document repository to (1) identify salient adoption determinants and their relationships, (2) discover research trends and patterns across disciplines, and (3) suggest potential areas for future research in IT innovation adoption at the enterprise level. Adoption of information technology (IT) innovations has been a topic of significant interest to researchers and practitioners over the past three decades (e.g. [18,53,56]). Broadly, there are two complementary perspectives on IT innovation adoption: the first and more frequently examined perspective includes the adoption of IT innovations by the individual user. Often referred to as the bottom–up view, individual IT innovation adoption research has focused on user characteristics, behavioral motivation, and contextual elements. Enterprise IT innovation adoption on the other hand focuses on the firm and firm-level characteristics. 1 This perspective has gained particular interest due to enterprises' increasing dependence on IT as well as some highly publicized successes and failures over the past two decades. Consequently enterprise-level IT innovation adoption studies have focused on why, how, and under what conditions enterprises have succeeded or failed in adopting and implementing IT innovations. These issues have been examined for a wide range of different IT innovations, including enterprise information systems, electronic commerce, database management systems, network and telecommunications infrastructure, computer hardware, enterprise architecture components, and business productivity applications, among many others. As a result, previous studies have identified drivers and inhibitors, explored the influence of important technological, individual, organizational, strategic, economic, and managerial , and environmental factors, and examined key processes and stages associated with the adoption of IT innovations. Because IT touches upon virtually all aspects of an enterprise's value chain, researchers have drawn on theories, frameworks and models from a variety of complementary academic reference disciplines such as information systems, …