Technology Support and Post-Adoption IT Service Use: Evidence from the Cloud

Management Information Systems Quarterly, 2018, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 961-978

Posted: 23 Oct 2012 Last revised: 10 Sep 2018

See all articles by German Retana

German Retana

INCAE Business School

Chris Forman

Cornell University - Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management

Sri Narasimhan

Scheller College of Business, Georgia Tech

Marius Florin Niculescu

Georgia Institute of Technology - Scheller College of Business

D. J. Wu

Georgia Institute of Technology - Ernest Scheller Jr. College of Business

Abstract

Does a provider’s technology support strategy influence its buyers’ post-adoption IT service use? We study this question in the context of cloud infrastructure services. The provider offers two levels of support, basic and full. Under basic support, the provider handles simple service quality issues. Under full support, the provider also offers education, training, and personalized guidance through two-way interactions with buyers. Using unique data on public cloud infrastructure services use by 22,179 firms from March 2009 to August 2012, we find that buyers who receive full support use the service 34.85% more than other users. We further show that buyers who have full support deploy infrastructure services more efficiently, increasing the fraction of servers they run in parallel by 3.53 percentage points relative to those who do not. Furthermore, buyers who drop full support and switch back to basic support continue using 15.01% more of the service and have a proportion of servers running in parallel that is 2.82 percentage points higher compared to buyers who have never received full support. These findings provide suggestive evidence of buyer learning as a result of provider support.

Keywords: IT service, organizational learning, IT use, cloud computing, Infrastructure-as-a-Service, technology support, service strategies

Suggested Citation

Retana, German and Forman, Chris and Narasimhan, Sri and Niculescu, Marius Florin and Wu, D. J., Technology Support and Post-Adoption IT Service Use: Evidence from the Cloud. Management Information Systems Quarterly, 2018, Vol. 42, No. 3, pp. 961-978, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2165649 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.2165649

German Retana (Contact Author)

INCAE Business School ( email )

La Garita, Alajuela 960-4050
Costa Rica
+506 2437-2374 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://www.germanretana.net

Chris Forman

Cornell University - Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management ( email )

Ithaca, NY
United States

Sri Narasimhan

Scheller College of Business, Georgia Tech ( email )

800 West Peachtree St., NW
Atlanta, GA 30308-1149
United States
404-894-4378 (Phone)

Marius Florin Niculescu

Georgia Institute of Technology - Scheller College of Business ( email )

800 West Peachtree St.
Atlanta, GA 30308
United States
404-385-3105 (Phone)

HOME PAGE: http://scheller.gatech.edu/directory/faculty/niculescu/index.html

D. J. Wu

Georgia Institute of Technology - Ernest Scheller Jr. College of Business ( email )

800 West Peachtree Street, NW
Atlanta, GA 30308
United States
404-894-4364 (Phone)
404-894-6030 (Fax)

HOME PAGE: http://scheller.gatech.edu/wu

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