Getting Heads into the Cloud: Pre-Adoption Beliefs and Attitudes

INTRODUCTION Individual level attitudes and beliefs about information systems are influenced by a variety of factors, including perceptions of control (Jasperson, Butler, Carte, Croes, Saunders, & Zhang et al., 2002), service quality (Delone & McLean, 1993; Tan, Benbasat, & Cenfetelli, 2013), computer efficacy (Keith, Babb, Furner, & Abdullat, 2011), social interactions (Furner, Racherla, & Zhu, 2012) and perceived utility (Keith, Babb, Furner, & Abdullat, 2010). In addition, attitudes are dynamic, changing as the user accumulates more experience with the system (Brown, Venkatesh, & Goyal, 2012). In particular, Bhattacherjee and Premkumar (2004) note that as users continue to use a system, they experience changes in satisfaction with the system and confirmation or disconfirmation of expectations about the system, which results in modified beliefs, attitudes and usage intentions. The implication is that understanding user attitudes and beliefs about a system is best accomplished with longitudinal research. Longitudinal approaches are relatively rare among attitudinal information system studies, which is surprising given the dynamic nature of beliefs and attitudes about information systems, and the importance of these attitudes to information systems usage outcomes. When a new system is introduced that is substantially different from the traditional system, users' pre-adoption attitudes and beliefs about the system, its utility and ease of use are formed based on limited information and no experience (Brown et al., 2012). In these situations, users will form their attitudes and beliefs based on information provided to them by the system's provider, social interactions and their computer efficacy. These pre-adoption beliefs and attitudes are important as they are expected to influence expectations about the system, which will interact with their actual experience with the system to flavor post-adoption attitudes and continued usage intentions. Bhattacherjee & Prekumar (2004) argue that individual characteristics have the initial impact on pre-adoption attitudes, which shape use intentions. There are a number of individual characteristics and pre-adoption attitudes that may come into play, and in order to create actionable guidelines for system designers, researchers are tasked with identifying and investigating these factors (Petter, Delone, & McLean, 2013; Wu & Chen, 2005). As part of a larger effort to understand the factors and dynamics that influence attitudes and intentions, the current study examines individual level characteristics that influence pre-adoption attitudes and intentions regarding a real cloud based computer system that will replace a desktop based system at a mid-sized University in the Southwest United States. The cloud computing context is becoming increasingly relevant to practitioners as well as IS researchers, particularly in the study of adoption (Cegielski, Jones-Farmer, Wu, & Zhazen, 2012; Loebbeck, Thomas, & Ullrich, 2012). The current study contributes to research on individual differences in IS attitude formation (i.e. Agarwal & Prasad, 1999; Alwahaishi & Snasel, 2013) while employing a sample of real, working users for whom adoption is mandatory in a context relevant to researchers and practitioners alike. The primary research questions are as follows: 1. What individual level factors influence pre-adoption attitudes? 2. How do pre-adoption attitudes influence usage intentions? The results reported in this manuscript are part of a longitudinal study that seeks to model the influence of pre-adoption attitudes, experience with the system, disconfirmation and satisfaction on post adoption beliefs, attitudes and usage intentions. Information systems researchers have sought to identify the factors that make information systems successful for decades (e.g. Swanson, 1974). …