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Opening the Black-Box of IT Artifacts: Looking into Mobile Service Characteristics and Individual Perception

Shahrokh Nikou, Opening the Black-Box of IT Artifacts: Looking into Mobile Service Characteristics and Individual Perception. TUCS Dissertations 149. Åbo Akademi University, 2012.

Abstract:

The exponential growth in the mobile telecommunications has created fierce
competition for all participants in the mobile industry and enabled service and
application providers to develop mobile services that can be used by a large
number of users. From the users’ perspective, the services should be innovative,
useful and fit into their daily routines. From the network operators and service
providers’ perspectives services should be adopted by a critical mass of users
and be used in a global scale to earn back huge investments made in network
licenses and technology. The core objective of the current dissertation is to
create an understanding of individual acceptance of IT artifacts i.e., mobile
services and provide insight to the characteristics of the IT artifacts. Moreover,
consumers’ awareness of mobile service platforms is explored. To do so,
empirical studies using various statistical methods and tools are conducted to
evaluate service characteristics and investigate users’ perceptions and
acceptance toward IT artifacts. In addition, an experimental study is also conducted to investigate users’ perceptions towards usefulness of the converged rich communication services which have recently been developed by a number of telecommunication companies, as an alternative to the dominant iOS and Android platforms.

The findings indicate that mobile services have to be evaluated and judged on their own merits, and not only with established acceptance theories. The results show that service characteristics such as innovativeness, usefulness, ease of use and context of use influence individual perceptions and these characteristics are highly relevant criteria toward the acceptance, adoption and use of mobile services. The results show that application costs are by far the most relevant criterion for selecting a service regardless of the platform. Furthermore, operating systems offered by Apple (iOS) and Google (Android) are preferred over other operating systems offered by Nokia (Symbian) and BlackBerry. New innovative services have to be developed while taking into account the differences in daily routines, frequency, urgency and intensity of use. Presumably, device manufacturers can win the platform battle against their rival ‘Telecom operators’, if they can provide innovative services and applications that fit into users’ daily routines. In particular, this dissertation suggests that Telecom operators should settle for becoming a bit-pipe provider and let other market participants i.e., large companies e.g., Google and device manufacturers e.g., Apple be involved in the mobile service market.

The findings contribute to the discussion on mobile service platforms by suggesting that service platforms need to be aligned with users’ preferences and devices they already use. In future research, researchers should pay more attention to issues such as service functionality and simplicity that play a significant role in consumers’ decisions and refrain from research that only discusses mobile services and applications in generic terms. If scholars pay more attention to techno-economics e.g., service characteristics, innovativeness, service platforms, payment, and context-of-use, new theories can be developed that might be relevant to study the next generation of mobile service.

Files:

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BibTeX entry:

@PHDTHESIS{phdNikou_Shahrokh12a,
  title = {Opening the Black-Box of IT Artifacts: Looking into Mobile Service Characteristics and Individual Perception},
  author = {Nikou, Shahrokh},
  number = {149},
  series = {TUCS Dissertations},
  school = {Åbo Akademi University},
  year = {2012},
  ISBN = {978-952-12-2798-1},
}

Belongs to TUCS Research Unit(s): Institute for Advanced Management Systems Research (IAMSR)

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