Understanding the Progressive Nature of Inter-Organizational Systems (IOS) Adoption

Inter-organizational Systems (IOS) cannot be adopted by any organizations in isolation from their trading partner. Their adoption requires cooperation and collaboration between trading partners and, therefore, is reliant on the nature of relationships between the parties involved. For organizations to progress in their IOS adoption, improvement in relationships between trading partners is required before they can adopt a more sophisticated IOS. In addition, through IOS adoption, trading partners can actually improve their relationships overtime. There has been some research that investigates relationships and how organizations progress from one level to the next level of adoption. However, these studies do not clearly define the concepts of relationship, IOS adoption and IOS adoption maturity. Furthermore, they do not adequately justify the exclusion of other variables in defining the relevant concepts and are not theoretically based. This research extends the Kurnia and Johnston (2000) process model of IOS adoption by incorporating the notion of IOS adoption maturity and reducing the scope from a supply chain to a dyadic level to enable better evaluations of IOS adoption progression. We argue that with the proposed model, the dynamics of IOS adoption maturity can be better examined empirically.