Achieving It Diffusion Within The Fragments - An It Culture Perspective

Many organizations still fail to make a return from the huge investments they make in implementing complex Information Technology (IT). This is usually due to cultural forces that inhibit the level of usage required to facilitate IT Diffusion. An emerging stream of research highlights the IT culture perspective, a perspective vital for understanding individuals’ social practices when they interact with IT. This paper adopted a case study approach to explore how the IT culture perspective may explain how organizational diffusion of an IT may happen despite opposing cultural forces causing a stalemate to the diffusion process. This study identified three IT culture archetypes embracing, rejecting and confused, depicting a fragmented IT culture during the adaption, acceptance and routinization stages of diffusion of an IT. This study highlights how a salient element of a fragmented IT culture embracing IT culture archetype could explain how diffusion of an IT happened despite the manifestations of negative IT culture archetypes – ‘confused’ and ‘rejecting’ during the diffusion process.