Article Preview
Top1. Introduction
Adoption of mobile cloud computing (MCC) presents strategic competitive advantages to organizations. It reduces the upfront cost of computing and the costs incurred due to underutilisation of investment in ICT infrastructure (Almaiah & Al-Khasawneh, 2020, Carreiro & Oliveira 2019). VM Ware (2008) found that servers use only 10-30% of their capacity and desktop computers less than 5%. MCC is, particularly, important for financial services firms, given the major advantages such as cost reduction and strategic benefits, more efficient and effective processes and technologies and strategic advantages in global advertising (Zheng, et al. 2019, Qiu, et al. 2018). The same global survey also found that 81% of businesses are in the early or advance stages of planning or are already fully implanting cloud technologies despite concerns about provider performance, downtime and data security. Interestingly, academic research in adoption of MCC by organizations, particularly, in developing and remote island countries such as Fiji, is still limited. Furthermore, the need for identifying the factors that influence the adoption of MCC by financial services firms such as banks has been highlighted in the literature (Almaiah & Al-Khasawneh, 2020, Carreiro & Oliveira 2019). The Fijian context is unique in many respects. First, such remote islands suffer from the tyranny of distance which makes it harder for the businesses in these countries to participate in the wider world market and grow. ICT innovations such as MCC are considered as a solution to help businesses in these countries grow and thereby contribute to the overall growth of the economy. Second, Fiji is characterised by large scale poverty. It is estimated that 31% of the total population lives in poverty (ADB, 2014). ICT innovations such as MCC would enable provision of social and economic services to the poor by government (GoF 2006). Last, Fiji and other island countries can reduce costs and increase efficiency by fully utilising ICT resources through MCC.
Against the above background, the present study seeks to address the following research question:
Qualitative semi-structured interviews of relevant senior managers in financial services firms were conducted. The research is drawn from the diffusion of innovation theory (Rogers, 2003) and the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework of Tornatzky & Fleischer (1990). The next section provides the literature review, followed by the Fijian context, methodology and data, results, discussion and the conclusion.