System response delay has been cited as the single most frustrating aspect of using the Internet and the most worrisomeaspect of Web application design. System response time (SRT) research generally concludes that delay should be eliminated where possible to as little as a few seconds, even though delay reduction is costly. Unfortunately, it is not clear if these conclusions are appropriate outside of the developed world where nearly all of the SRT research has taken place. Cultural effects have been, hence, generally missing from SRT research. The one SRT study to date outside of the developed world did report differences using the theoretical construct of cultural chronism, and this finding could limit the generalizability of SRT research findings from developed countries to many economically developing nations. However, limitations and potential confounds in this single study render those findings tentative. The end of Apartheid in South Africa allowed an opportunity to conduct a longitudinal free simulation experiment that overcomes the critical limitations of this previous research. Subjects were members of historically polychronic and monochronic groups who had been segregated by Apartheid and now live in an integrated society with shared infrastructure and computer access. Results find that members of the historically polychronic group are more accepting of longer delays and are more willing to trade longer delays for improved functionality than are their historically monochronic counterparts. Furthermore, tests find that members of the historically monochromic population that came of age in a desegregated, majority-polychronic culture appear to be polychronic themselves and to differ significantly from the older monochronic generation. Results from this study can be applied to design culturally sensitive applications for users in the developing economies of the world.

Information System Development (ISD) agility is concerned with why and how ISD organizations sense and respond swiftly as they develop and maintain Information System applications. We outline a theory of ISD agility that draws upon a model of IT innovation and organizational learning. The theory adopts March's concepts of exploration and exploitation to investigate agility in the context of ISD organizations. Depending on their learning focus, ISD organizations make choices as to what sensing and responding swiftly means. This is reflected in how they value speed in relation to other ISD process goals, including quality, cost, risk and innovative content. The paper examines two specific Research Propositions: (1) ISD organizations locate themselves into different innovation regimes with respect to their need for exploration and exploitation, and (2) their perceptions of agility differ in those regimes as reflected in their process goal priorities. We validate these propositions through an empirical investigation of changes in ISD organizations' process goals and innovation practices over a period of over 4 years (1999–2003), during which time they shied away from exploration to exploitation while innovating with Internet computing. These ISD organizations viewed agility differently during the studied time periods as reflected in how they traded innovative content or speed vis-à-vis the other process goals of cost, risk, and product quality. In conclusion, this paper discusses implications for future research on agility in ISD organizations.

To trust means to have expectations about others’ (the trustees’) socially acceptable behavior. One of the central effects of this trust in the context of IT adoption is to increase the perceived usefulness (PU) of Information Technology (IT) associated with the trustee’s agency. One way of increasing this trust is through greater sociocultural similarity. Taking previous research into the realm of electronic voting, this paper posits that because trust is culture-dependent, it should decrease considerably as cultural diversity and differentiation increases. To investigate the role of trust in IT adoption in different cultures where dissimilar concepts of socially acceptable behavior exist, this study compares trust-related perceptions of an emerging IT (i.e., electronic voting) between the United States of America (USA) and the Republic of South Africa (RSA). More specifically, the question was addressed by comparing the unique circumstances of the cultural changes in the RSA with the more socially integrated mainstream USA culture. In both cultures, a perceived sociocultural similarity between the individual and the agency in charge of the electronic voting IT contributed to both the establishment of trust and to an increase in the perceived usefulness of the IT, supporting and extending the extrapolations of past propositions to this new realm. However, only in the USA did trust contribute to the PU of the IT. The results suggest that when cultural diversity is large, trust becomes of lesser importance, perhaps because it can no longer reduce social uncertainty. Implications for researchers and governmental voting agencies are discussed, and future research directions are proposed.