Distinguishing the adoption of business intelligence systems from their implementation: the role of managers’ personality profiles

Abstract

For decades, the marketing guidelines of enterprise software providers have focused on those managers who are likely to be more innovative in adopting new information systems. The current study argues that this approach demands improvements for two reasons: (1) this tactic may be biased, since past studies have only examined the single trait of innovativeness and its impact on an individual adoption intention and (2) the organisational implementation intention might be more important than the individual adoption intention, but the former has been largely ignored in the existing literature. Based on the case of business intelligence (BI) systems and data from 62 senior managers, this study is a pioneer in that it empirically reveals that managers’ individual adoption intention is distinct from their organisational implementation intention. Further, while managers’ innovativeness may be a significant determinant of their individual adoption intention towards BI systems, the issue of whether managers actually implement BI systems in their organisations is dominated by their involvement characteristics. Fruitful suggestions are proposed for practitioners and scholars.

Keywords:

• individual adoption
• organisational implementation
• innovativeness
• involvement
• business intelligence system

Acknowledgements

The authors are grateful to the Editor-in-Chief of Behaviour & Information Technology, the Associate Editor and the three anonymous reviewers for offering constructive comments.