The adoption of IT-enabled management ideas : insights from shared services in government agencies

Abstract: Organizations increasingly incorporate general IT-enabled management ideas, which frequently are based on best practices that stem from experiences of organizations that have faced challenging situations in the past. During the incorporation, the general ideas are usually modified and adopted by organizations to become locally meaningful and useable. There is, however, a limited understanding of how such adoptions are influenced. Therefore, this dissertation addresses the question of how contexts and characteristics influence the adoption of IT-enabled management ideas.This study shows how an IT-enabled management idea – specifically the shared services idea – was adopted in six government agencies. It describes six individual configurations and shows how the general shared services idea was concretized at an organizational level. The study identifies a number of key characteristics, which are suitable to describe the shared services idea. It also explains how these key characteristics were influenced during the adoption and reveals common adoption patterns. From the specific findings, conclusions are drawn concerning how an organization’s contexts and an idea’s characteristics influence the adoption of IT-enabled management ideas in general. A framework is developed to clarify how contexts and characteristics influence the adoption of IT-enabled management ideas. This framework can assist researchers as well as practitioners who are interested in the adoption of IT-enabled management ideas.