User Participation and Technology Acceptance: Towards Ex-Ante Acceptance Predictions

The current work is positioned at the point where technology acceptance research and user participation in information systems development research intersect. More specifically, this paper purports to achieve three objectives: (a) explain how technology acceptance determinants can be elicited from users during their participation in the ISD activities, (b) investigate the influence of user participation on these determinants, and (c) investigate if the elicitation of these determinants at early stages of the ISD is predictive of post-implementation usage behavior. To this end, the research recommends adding new categories to the traditional system development stages so as to elicit acceptance determinants. Ten hypotheses are advanced to investigate the ex-ante predictability of acceptance determinants and how user participation impacts them. The proposed model, through its robust theoretical foundation, holds the promise of predicting systems acceptance/rejection at early stages of the development process thereby increasing the likelihood of successful systems development.