A Conceptual Model for Enterprise Adoption of Open Source Software

Stephen Kwan, Professor and chair of the Management Information Systems department at the College of Business, San José State University. He is the Principal Investigator of the Silicon Valley Open Source Research Project., and Joel West, Associate professor of technology management and research director for the Silicon

2/01/2008
(Original Publish Date: 9/22/2004)

While IT researchers have long focused on achieving strategic benefits provided by IT investments, recently some have claimed “IT doesn’t matter.” We believe that most large organizations have both highly strategic and highly commoditized IT investments, and that differences in the strategic importance of information systems help explain where firms will adopt new technologies. We develop a framework that considers the tradeoffs between features, risk, and cost in IT adoption, and show how it can be applied to explain the adoption of open source software in large firms. We discuss a planned survey to provide empirical support linking the framework to enterprise deployment of open source software.