Configuration Analysis of Inter-Organizational Information Systems Adoption

Investigations of the adoption of Information Systems (IS) have successfully sought to predict a singular organization’s or user’s propensity to adopt an IS. Encouraged by the success researchers have approached the diffusion of Inter-Organizational Information Systems (IOIS) as a special instance of IS adoption and extended existing diffusion models with extra-organizational factors. Unfortunately, the validity and usefulness of these models have been inadequate in explaining IOIS diffusion. In this paper we dismiss the organization as the unit of analysis and we propose an alternative unit for IOIS adoption studies that we call an adoption configuration. Each such configuration has a diffusion scope determined by its topology, a way of relating adopters defined by its underlying mode of interaction, and a style of using the service determined by the mode of appropriation. Configuration based analysis calls for a redirection of IOIS diffusion studies both at the theoretical and the methodological level. Diffusion theories need to synthesize across multiple adoption levels. Methodologically scholars need to work with sparse and incomplete multi-level process data as to explain the emergence and dynamics of viable (and failed) configurations.