Exploring Organizational Level Continuance of Cloud-Based Enterprise Systems

A growing trend in today’s enterprise applications market is the installation of cloud-based enterprise systems (ES). From consumer goods companies, such as Starbucks, to financial service companies, such as Allianz, more and more companies are implementing cloud-based ES for specific lines of businesses, such as human resource management (e.g. SuccessFactors) or customer relationship management (e.g. Salesforce.com). In addition, there are also a wealth of functionally integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) service offerings (e.g. SAP Business ByDesign), which now make sophisticated ERP systems affordable to small and medium sized enterprises. As cloud computing has become a mature technology broadly being adopted by companies across all industries, cloud  service  providers  are  increasingly  turning  their  attention  to  retaining  their customers. However, only little research has been conducted on investigating the antecedents of service continuance in an organizational context.

In a recent research project, we carried out a quantitative-empirical study to address this gap in research. We developed a conceptual model that builds on previous research on organizational level continuance. We tested this model, using survey data gathered from IT decision makers of companies which have adopted cloud enterprise systems.

Organizational-Level Drivers of Cloud Continuance

The data was analyzed using PLS. The results show that continuance intention can be predicted both by socio-organizational and technology-related factors. The variables identified were able to explain 55.9% of the variance in continuance intention. System quality had the highest positive effect on the dependent variable, followed by system investment. Information quality showed no significant effect.

The research results have recently been accepted for publication:
Walther, S., Sarker, S., Urbach, N., Sedera, D., Eymann, T. and Otto, B. (2015): Exploring Organizational Level Continuance of Cloud-Based Enterprise Systems, Proceedings of the 23rd European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2015), May 26-29, Münster, Germany. (Link)