7. Conclusions
BIS are valuable tools for SMEs in competitive and uncertain environments. This study explores how technological, organizational, and environmental factors affect individual BIS adoption stages. Drawing on the technology-organizationenvironment framework and IT adoption literature led to the development of research hypotheses and a conceptual framework that explicates these relationships in the BIS context. We conducted an empirical study among small and medium firms to test the research model and hypotheses.
Our study contributes to understanding of BIS adoption at the firm level as, to the best of our knowledge, no study has so far examined this phenomenon. Second, this research provides a reliable and valid instrument for predicting BIS adoption. In particular, we propose BIS is part of ERP as a novel determinant of BIS adoption. Further, most studies in the area of IT innovation adoption focus on the adoption stage of the adoption process, yet this is one of the few studies to conduct comprehensive research on all three adoption phases, i.e. evaluation, adoption, and use (for other works, see Bose and Luo, 2011, Chan and Chong, 2013, Thomas et al., 2015, Zhu et al., 2006b, Martins et al., 2016). Lastly, by examining both the direct and total effect of the independent variables we provide a broader understanding of the BIS adoption phenomenon given that evaluation, adoption, and use are not individual processes but are related and codependent stages of the adoption process.
