Factors Relevant to Senior Information Systems Managers' Decisions to Adopt New Computing Paradigms: An Exploratory Study

Recently, there has been considerable interest in the promise of new computing paradigms (CP) like the diskless computing paradigm, running applications off a network. The discussion on these CPs has focused mainly on the costs of ownership of the CPs. In this work, we adopt a grounded theory approach to identify and operationalize factors that are important in the decision space of senior IS managers, when deciding to adopt a CP for their organization. Using conjoint analysis, we measure the relative importance of these factors in their minds, and also whether the effect of these factors is linear or not. Our findings show that the software quality associated with a CP is the primary factor considered by IS managers. The effect of the cost factor is less important, non linear and in many cases unexpected.