Incorporating Enterprise Architecture in the Supply Chain

Abstract

Diffusion of innovation literature proposes a variety of conditions and antecedents that may facilitate the complete incorporation of a technological innovation into an organization. To date, no one study assimilates the myriad factors that theory and past research has identified as potentially affecting incorporation into a unified model. In addition, many of these proposed factors have not been empirically tested to determine if they predict or facilitate incorporation of technological innovation into an organization. This dissertation serves as an initial investigation into the factors that may facilitate the organizational incorporation of a technological innovation. Whereas earlier studies employ a stage-model approach to address this topic, this study begins with the development of a unified model of technological incorporation, which provides insight regarding the factors that may contribute to the incorporation of enterprise architecture into the supply chain. Using this model and the factors identified in extant research, the significance of 17 factors is tested to determine which are related to the incorporation of enterprise architecture into organizations in the supply chain. This dissertation is organized into five chapters. The introduction chapter provides the background and motivation for this study’s topic. The second chapter provides the conceptual basis for the remainder of the dissertation and builds a unified framework of technological innovation incorporation. The third chapter covers the research design and methodology. The fourth chapter begins with a summary of the data and concludes with the presentation of the model results and the results of the hypothesis tests. In chapter five, the implications of these findings for theory and practice are discussed. The dissertation ends with a discussion of the study’s limitations and potential future research directions.