Information technology governance and innovation adoption in varying organizational contexts: mobile government and software as a service

This cumulative dissertation contributes to the question of the theoretical relationship between information technology (IT) governance and the adoption of IT-based innovations. IT governance has been described specifically as the locus of responsibility for IT functions within organizations. Innovation adoption in this context refers to the decision of an organization to make use of a technological innovation. Two principal research questions (RQ) guide this dissertation: (1) how does the mode of IT governance influence adoption of new technologies, and conversely (2) how does the adoption of new technologies affect organizational IT governance? In order to address RQ1, I conducted four studies in a public sector context regarding innovations in Mobile Government (M-Government) referring to the use of mobile technology to improve government services and internal processes. In a survey with 50 German municipalities, I investigated the strategic motivations for adopting a broad range of emerging M-Government services. The results indicate that municipal governments take a different pace in IT-based innovation adoption and therefore can be described by clusters of “Innovators”, “IT experienced”, “Efficiencyoriented” and “Laggards” (Chapter 4.1). By an in-depth analysis of interview data from 12 municipalities, I derive a well-grounded framework of drivers and inhibitors of M-Government adoption. Furthermore, based on cross-case analysis, I provide empirical evidence that the mode of IT governance—more precisely, the question of whether responsibilities for IT and organization are effectively aligned—is a crucial prerequisite to foster innovation adoption in public sector organizations. The findings also show why most municipalities focus on internal M-Government innovations (Chapter 4.2). For this reason, I examined M-Government adoption on the citizen level in a survey with more than 200 participants. The model tests indicate that external M-Government services, such as urban sensing, are also effective means to enable more citizen participation, while perceived privacy risks are not major inhibitors (Chapter 4.3). Finally, applying a simulation approach and a case validation, I demonstrate that such services can improve a municipality’s level of environmental information at comparable cost to internal information acquisition procedures and— in this sense—simultaneously allow for implementing service and process innovations (Chapter 4.4). Regarding RQ2, I consider the adoption of enterprise Software as a Service (SaaS). In this context, it is hypothesized that for some applications SaaS-based provision leads to a ‘governance shift’ of IT responsibilities from IT towards business units. Based on an in-depth analysis of four cases of SaaS adoption, I take a multiplecontingency perspective to isolate the factors that potentially influence the allocation of application governance (Chapter 5.1). An operationalization and test of the proposed contingency model in a survey with 207 large firms reveals, that responsibility for SaaS-based applications is indeed allocated more frequently to business units. Drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives, this can be (partly) explained by a smaller scope of the use of SaaS-based applications and the changing competency requirements for SaaS-based delivery. However, the locus of the initiative emerges as the most determining factor for explaining application governance (Chapter 5.3). Recognizing the inherent limitations of a factor-based approach, two cases of SaaS adoption are compared in detail by applying a process-theoretic paradigm. Here the