Web services innovation research: Towards a dual-core model
Introduction
Information Systems (IS) are still generally viewed as proprietary within organizations where they used to buy or lease their own hardware, wrote or licensed their own applications, and hired systems professionals for implementation and maintenance (Hagel & Brown, 2001). IS has been used to facilitate the operations of individual companies, tie together far-flung supply chains, and increasingly link business to the customers they serve, and these have totally transformed business processes (Carr, 2003). Consequently, the heart of enterprise IS is information technology (IT) which has clearly become the backbone of commerce, and continues to progressively penetrate core business activities (Porter & Millar, 1985). Among such emerging technologies, Web Services as a representative of IT innovation, has gained increasing attention and received extensive investigation from both academia and industry.
Broadly speaking, the term “Web Services” refers to the technologies that allow for making connections. More specifically, Web Services is “any service that is available over the Internet, uses a standardized XML messaging system, and is not tied to any one operating system or programming language.” (Cerami, 2002). Hence, Web Services (we address that a service is the endpoint of a connection, which has some type of underlying computer system that supports the connection offered. Web Services herein used as a plural form to emphasize a whole subset of their functionalities) are perceived as building blocks, which are fundamental for creating distributed applications, and are able to be published and accessed over the Internet, as well as corporate intranets. Understandably, from this conceptual viewpoint, Web Services could be thought to construct co-operative Inter or Intra-Organizational Systems (IOS) that allow trading partners to conduct transactions through connecting separate computer applications. IOSs are referred to telecommunication-based computer systems that are used by two or more organizations to support the sharing of data, and sometimes applications, among users in different organizations (Barrett & Konsynski, 1982; Cash, 1985). In order to be classified as a full-fledged IOS, Web Services must be deployed at departmental level within an organization; or at organizational level among firms. However, due to the fact that each individual organization adopts different policies towards introducing new technologies, the depth and breadth of Web Services innovation in organizations, therefore, may vary considerably because such decisions are all inherently consistent with each firm's adoption strategy (which is affected by contextual factors).
As an emerging technology, theories about Web Services innovation and its adoption in organizations are still lacking. It is commonly presumed that classical technological innovation theories can provide useful guidelines for studying the phenomenon. Nonetheless, any borrowed theories should be tailored to a particular context in studying a specific innovation. The implications of this proposition suggest that, when featured variants are introduced to certain empirical frameworks with respect to distinct characteristics of each innovation, the research methodology should be reconsidered, and the early frameworks might subsequently need to be amended in order to design an appropriate research model which is used to conduct further study.
In the effort to study Web Service innovation, we first identify its unique characteristics which make it distinct to all other innovations; we then examine the appropriateness of two prevailing models in this respect. We further recommend a dual-core research model in order to clarify the ambiguity in understanding the adoption of Web Services innovation in organizations.
Section snippets
Literature review
IT usage has been recognized by many researchers as a key dependent variable in MIS research (DeLone & McLean, 1992; Karahanna & Straub, 1999). Historically, its determinants have been empirically examined in wider contexts (Adams, Nelson, & Todd, 1992; Davis (1989), Davis (1993); Mathieson, 1991; Moore & Benbasat, 1996; Taylor & Todd, 1995; Thompson, Higgins, & Howell, 1991; Iacovou, Benbasat, & Dexter, 1995). Most of studies have used the diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers, 1983) to
Dual-core research model
The rapid change in IT causes an already uncertain business environment to be even more unpredictable (Galliers & Baker, 1994). Therefore, in efforts to merge applications and data silos within the company, as well as to interlink external business environments, have all demanded enterprises to continuously invest in their IS. Although enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, for example, have solved problems in terms of data integrity by unifying incompatible applications on a common
Conclusion
It has been observed that innovation diffusion is an unstructured and emergent phenomenon that is “too multivariate and convoluted for modelling in steps or stages” (Baskerville & Pries-Heje, 2001). However we can still find that empirical innovation theories are helpful in the analysis of complex IS innovation. In the effort to identify major factors affecting Web Services adoption, the use of Tornatzky–Fleischer's contextual framework and Swanson's innovation typology has led to research
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