Exploring the roles of people, governance and technology in organizational readiness for emerging technologies

The rapid development and release of emerging technologies have made their adoption challenging. Most often there are failing issues in organizational adoption of emerging technologies. It is yet unclear which component(s) of organization play the prominent role(s) in organizational readiness to adopt emerging technologies. Using a mixed method, this study conducted an online survey of 83 South African organizations for server virtualization adoption. Server virtualization is an emerging technology being widely adopted in most organizations in developed countries. IT executives rated server virtualization as the second-most important technology to help achieve cost reductions and optimize productivity in recent surveys. Very little is known about server virtualization adoption in organizations in developing countries. It was found that people and technology play prominent roles in South African organizational readiness to adopt server virtualization. Server virtualization has certain inhibitors such as lack of IT skill, and software and license costs that the IT industry and adopting organizations should consider.