Technology Adoption

Frameworks and empirical research on how individuals and organizations adopt, use, and continue using information technologies.

36 posts Category
AI & Agentic Systems 117IS Theory 111IT Governance & Strategy 107Organizational Theory 99Comps & Reflections 94Platforms & Ecosystems 59IS Research Methods 57Trust & Security 47Sociotechnical Systems 36Technology Adoption 36
2026-05-16 7 min read

Marketing Runs on IS It Cannot Name

Marketing departments spend billions on martech stacks but study none of it through an IS lens. TAM explains adoption, but not why the same Salesforce instance ...

Activity theory says you cannot understand tool use without the full activity system around it. The same tool in two systems means two completely different thin...

2026-05-14 6 min read

The Door Handle Is Not for Everyone

An affordance is not a feature. It is an action possibility for a specific actor with a specific goal in a specific context. Most IS papers get this wrong.

Rogers, Granovetter, and Burt explain why the department with the AI champion adopts faster while the department across the building with the same budget does n...

2026-05-14 6 min read

Why AI Pilots Don't Become Products

Almost every large organization has run an AI pilot. Very few of those pilots make it to production. That gap is not a data science problem.

Access to AI tools is not the barrier. The belief that you can use them effectively is what separates who gains and who falls behind.

Star and Griesemer's boundary objects are plastic enough to serve local needs but robust enough to hold shared identity. That is why the spreadsheet survives.

2026-05-14 6 min read

There Is No Best IT Strategy

Contingency theory says the right approach depends on the situation. Applied to IT, this is why best practices keep failing in unexpected places.

2026-05-14 6 min read

The Enterprise Blockchain Gap

Satoshi's 2008 insight was genuine. What enterprise blockchain often misses is that the insight only matters when the parties don't already trust each other.

The person who signs the check never has to use the tool. That structural gap explains more about enterprise adoption than any UX framework ever will.

2026-05-14 6 min read

Why ERP Implementations Keep Failing

After decades of high-profile disasters, large organizations still repeat the same ERP mistakes. The problem is rarely the software.

2026-05-14 6 min read

The Real Test Is Month Seven

Bhattacherjee's ECM shows continuance is driven by confirmed expectations, not by initial adoption drivers. The expectation gap is what kills systems at month s...

Weick's sensemaking theory says people act first and make sense later, preferring plausibility over accuracy. That explains everything from the Twitter rebrand ...

Spence (1973) showed that costly observable signals communicate unobservable qualities. Technology choices do this constantly. What you run says something beyon...

Social capital theory says the network around a system determines whether the system works. IS treats this network as a constant. It is not.

Rogers showed that the S-curve is a social process with five failure points built in. Most product teams read it as a timeline and miss the diagnostic entirely.

The TOE framework explains why identical technology adoption fails in one organization and succeeds in another: context is not background, it is the whole story...