The relationship between interest in evaluating an application of information technology and organizational culture

The role of culture in the early phases of the information technology assessment and adoption process has largely been ignored in the body of literature surrounding IT adoption. This research proposes that interest in evaluating an application of IT is related to a person's interpretation of his/her organization's culture. It is based on the premise that both organizations and applications of IT are embedded with a set of cultural beliefs and assumptions about the kind of problems that need to be solved and the best way to go about solving those problems. We hypothesized that the similarities and differences between those embedded sets of beliefs and assumptions have a direct influence on a person's interest in evaluating the application of IT. We found strong direct relationships between interest in evaluating externally focused IT and both current and preferred externally focused cultures. Particularly between a person's preferences for management and leadership aspects of culture that are externally focused. We also found that externally focused IT generally garner more interest than internally focused IT. Finally, regardless of their culture assessment, we also found that people who consider themselves to be innovative, and those that have been with a company longer, generally report more interest in IT in general. Additional future research is strongly suggested along these lines.