Swiftness and Intensity of Administrative Innovation Adoption: An Empirical Study of TQM in Information Systems

Considerable attention has been directed toward developing a more complete understanding of innovation adoption by Information Systems (IS) departments. Much of this research has focused on the adoption of technological innovations, and limited research has focused on the adoption of administrative innovations. This paper focuses on an administrative innovation that is increasingly becoming popular among IS departments, namely Total Quality Management (TQM) in systems development. A synthesis of the IS innovation and TQM literatures was conducted to identify environmental, organizational, and task‐related factors that should relate to both the swiftness and the intensity of TQM adoption. The relationships between the identified variables and TQM adoption were examined using data collected from 123 IS departments in Fortune 1000 firms and large government agencies in the U.S. The results indicate that TQM adoption in systems development is influenced by the host organization's quality orientation and factors internal to the IS department including IS management support for quality, the presence of a separate quality assurance function, and the structural complexity of the IS department. Implications of this study for theory, future research, and practice are discussed.