An Investigation of Organizational Level Continuance of Cloud-Based Enterprise Systems
Sebastian Walther · EPub Bayreuth (University of Bayreuth) · 2014
Cloud-based enterprise systems are a growing trend in today's business software market.With a steadily expanding number of implementations, cloud service providers are now turning their attention from adoption issues towards retaining their existing customer base.The difficulties even established cloud players, like e.g.Salesforce.com, face, in retaining their customers, have been emphasized by tech bloggers and practitioners alike, where the subscriptions of cloud-based enterprise systems are cancelled even at an early stage after the system has been adopted.This discontinuance of enterprise systems at an early stage is a rather new phenomenon, which is related to the subscription-based payment model of cloud services, which (theoretically) allows service cancellation without the customers having to fear financial penalties.In contrast, traditional on-premise systems (e.g.SAP ERP) are on a long term license base, where customers are contractually bound.Therefore the research question of the thesis is as follows: What factors influence the organizational level continuance intention of cloud-based enterprise systems?In an effort to answer this research question, the thesis presents five interrelated papers.The first paper develops a conceptual model to study the continuance of cloud-based enterprise systems.Building on this, paper two develops a formative measurement instrument to assess the success of operational cloudbased enterprise systems.The third paper quantitatively explores the influence of the variables identified in the conceptual model.Building on these findings, paper four conducts a stakeholder analysis to solve the problem of broad samples.Finally, the fifth paper uses the formative measurement instrument to test the final research model, which is a revision of the a priori conceptual model.The results show that continuance intention is influenced both, by information systems success variables as well as continuance inertia.In addition, behavioral variables, such as attitude towards usage also explained a decent amount of variance in the dependent variable. 2.1.