الملخص الإنجليزي
The small and medium size enterprises play important role in economic growth in Oman, but in order for the SMEs to survive under the circumstances of global economic recession and continue in the market, they need to adopt new technology to insure their existence in local market place.
Cloud computing presents a new model for delivering IT resource online at low cost. For this reason, many organizations in Oman including SMEs are approaching CC vendors to cut the operation cost and invest only in the resources they need to achieve their business objective.
However, despite the potential benefits, previous studies have found that the adoption rate is still slow among SMEs.
Hence, this research aims to investigate the factors that influence the adoption of Cloud Computing (CC) services by Omani SMEs. A research framework was developed through the integration of the Technology, Organization, and Environment (TOE) with Human, Organization, Technology (HOT-Fit) and Fit-Viability model to examine the factors that is expected to have influence in CC adoption. Data was collected from 370 IT specialist and potential cloud adopters working in SMEs in Oman using a cross-sectional survey. Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) was used to perform reliability and validity checks, and Structural Model (SM) was used to test the proposed model.
The result shows that behavioral intention (BI) towards CC adoption in SMEs was influenced by vendor lock-in, CIO innovativeness, cost, government regulation, top management support, sharing and collaboration and perceived technical competence, in their order of influencing power, and that these elements explained 76% of the variance of BI. However; complexity, compatibility, security and data privacy, technological readiness and asset specificity did not have an influence
on BI. This study provides an insight into CC adoption by Omani SMEs. Specifically, this study will help to improve our understanding of the factors influencing CC adoption in Omani SMEs.
Keywords: Cloud Computing, Small and Medium Enterprise size SMEs, TOE Framework, HOT- Fit, FVM, Oman, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM).
