"Factors Influencing the Decision to Adopt a New Technology: A Study Regarding the Adoption of Computer Operating Systems"
Name: ELIZABETH MERLO
Publication date: 26/06/2009
Examining board:
Name |
Role |
|---|---|
| HÉLIO ZANQUETTO FILHO | Internal Examiner * |
| MÔNICA DE FÁTIMA BIANCO | Internal Examiner * |
| TERESA CRISTINA JANES CARNEIRO | Advisor * |
Summary: The research was conducted because of the importance of business software in the information society and this dichotomy between free software and proprietary software standards. The analyzed situations are related to companies that migrated their technology park from proprietary software to free software, and vice versa. It was identified financial, technological and institutional issues in these processes. We used the categories of evaluation of some theories of adoption of technology, applied in three situations of research: the first one was exploratory, seeking to understand the subject; the second the second was exploratory in depth, made with two organizations in order to refine the issues identified; and the third was of quantitative nature, using a questionnaire sent to 1,740 people in the area of related to IT, returning a sample of 38 companies. The final considerations show that the feature of being free or proprietary software influences the decision to migrate. Although it is not because of the availability of source code - the factor that differentiates most of the other standard - but because of issues of reliability and usability found in each of these standards. They also suggest several hypotheses to be tested in future research.
