모바일 기기의 수용형태와 사용에 관한 연구:PDA 시스템을 중심으로

With a recent advance of mobile technologies firms begin to apply such technologies to enhance mobility in their business processes. Even though it is estimated that mobile business will rapidly grow, empirical research relevant to adoption of mobile technologies has not been systematically conducted. In addition, enterprise-wide adoption of mobile technologies can cast a question of voluntariness in individual use and its impact on the usage level and the future use. Focusing on the PDA systems, therefore, this research attempts to examine the adoption factors of mobile devices in both voluntary and involuntary settings. The research model of this paper extends the traditional technology acceptance model(TAM) by adding constructs, such as application variety, mobility, and security, related to the characteristics of mobile devices. Results show that adoption factors found in previous research, such as professional fit, self-efficacy, fun, result demonstrability, can be applied to the adoption of the PDA systems in general. Also, users with high professional fit perceive PDA more useful than those with low professional fit. This indicates that firms need to provide PDA users with long-term professional career plans in order to motivate effective use in involuntary setting. Mobile characteristics of PDA systems can be differently perceived in terms of systems usefulness and ease of systems use depending on the voluntariness of the system use. It is found that voluntary users perceive the variety of applications as both direct and indirect cause of their use while involuntary users recognize only direct link between the variety of applications and their use. However, the variety of applications shows a negative impact on the ease of use, and the reason revealed by post interview with respondents is that there are serious integration problems among applications that have adopted different types of user interfaces. Unexpectedly, mobility is not perceived as direct reason for adoption. Rather, mobility can lower the perceived usefulness and give negative influence on both group of users. This research puts a focus on the current users rather than potential users, and measures users’ usage level and intention of future use. Respondents, therefore, might not be fully satisfied with current mobile technologies that is limited with the transmission speed and data volume, even though they have great expectations for mobile capabilities. Also, this research reveals that user education can positively influence the ease of systems use in general, but more significantly in involuntary user group than voluntary one. Technical support, however, shows negative impacts on the easiness especially in voluntary user group. This indicates that current technical support has not satisfied voluntary users, and such unsatisfactory support might negatively influence current users’ future use. Firms related with mobile devices including hardware manufacturers and application developers, therefore, need to improve the quality of technical support and enhance mobile capabilities with applications integration while firms that want to fully utilize mobile devices in their organizations need to understand the users’ job characteristics and professional fit with mobile activities.