Investigating Factors Influencing Decision Makers

Over the years, the emergence of innovative and revolutionary integration technologies (e.g. Enterprise Application Integration [EAI], Service Oriented Architecture [SOA] and more recently – Cloud Computing) has highly influenced the top management in their decision-making process – decisions that are imperative to transform Local Government Authorities (LGAs). LGAs that plan to adopt such integration technologies may consider this as a serious investment. Advocates however claim that such integration technologies have emerged to overcome the integration problems at all levels (e.g. data, object and process) and offer the opportunity to achieve competitive advantage through integrated Information Technology (IT) infrastructure operations resulting in quality service delivery. With the emergence of electronic government (e-Government) service provisioning, LGAs have turned to integration technologies to fully automate and offer their services on-line and integrate their IT infrastructures. While earlier research on the adoption of integration technologies has considered several factors (e.g. pressure, technological, support, and financial), inadequate attention and resources have been applied in investigating the individual, decision and organisational context factors, influencing top management’s decisions for adopting integration technologies in LGAs. It is a highly considered phenomenon that the success of an organisation’s operations, relies heavily on understanding an individual’s attitudes and behaviours, the surrounding context and the type of decisions taken. Given this increasing importance, this paper attempts to investigate factors influencing decision makers while adopting integration technologies, using two case studies. The findings illustrate two different doctrines – one inclined and receptive towards taking risky decisions, the other disinclined. Several underlying rationales can be attributed to such mind-sets in local government. The authors aim to contribute to the body of knowledge by exploring the factors influencing top management’s decision-making process while adopting integration technologies vital for facilitating LGAs’ operational reforms.