Hypothesis four posed that awareness about DM and perceptions of the impact or benefits that DM could bring to the Jordanian publicly listed companies, may have been driver in the intention to adopt such technology. Therefore it was hypothesised that there will be a relationship awareness of DM and the intention to adopt these technologies. Hypothesis Four:
There is a significant relationship between awareness of data mining and the intention to adopt data mining tools.
The last question on the questionnaire aimed to explore company’s intention to adopt DM technology no matter if the company has implemented DM or not. Out of 180 respondents, the majority (39.4%) did not know whether their companies intent to adopt DM technology or not, only 18.3% were certain that DM technology will be adopted in their companies, thirty three respondents (18.3%) indicated that DM technology will not be adopted in their companies. The results show both promise and concern, promise in that many departments plan to adopt DM but concern that many managers do not know what the department currently adoptes in this regard nor what the intent of the department is.
Furthermore, out of the 147 respondents -180 respondents minus the 33 respondents who indicated that DM will not be adopted in their companies-, seventy six respondents (51.7%) indicated that there is no plan to adopt DM in near future. Only 18.4% of respondents said that DM technology will be adopted in less than one year. Table (7.12) and Table (7.13) summarise these results.
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Table 7.12: company’s intention to adopt data mining technology
180 Responses
No Little Neutral Sure Do not
know Does your company intend to adopt data
mining? 33 (18.3%) 18 (10%) 25 (13.9%) 33 (18.3%) 71 (39.4%)
Table 7.13: Data mining adoption expected time
147 Responses Less than 12 months 12-18 months 18-24 months More than 24 months No plan to adopt
How soon DM will be operationally implemented? 27 (18.4%) 11 (7.5%) 17 (11.6%) 16 (10.9%) 76 (51.7%)
Respondents, particularly at the interview suggest that the use of DM technology within Jordanian publicly listed companies will increase in the near future. Interviewees had a positive attitude and were ready to learn, accept and use such technology in their workplace. Across interviewees there was strong indication that their department will employ DM technologies in the future. For example, one interviewee said that "I do not have any problem in adopting data mining technology at my work place, in fact I think that we will need such technology in near future, the data we have is increasing rapidly, we need to take important decision in a short period of time, we have strong competitors and we need to take the lead, and to do that we need a filter technology such as data mining that can help us in extracting the data we need in a short period of time"[interviewee2].
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The concerns identified reflected to the level of awareness and knowledge of DM technologies within working environment. It appears that the majorities of respondents were not aware of DM, or even of the analytical software used in their current system. In seeking to test the hypothesis, two variables - awareness and the intention- were used in the analysis. Correlation and cross tabulation were adopted to investigate the hypothesis. Table 7.14 summarised the strength of association between awareness about DM and intention to adopt DM tools.
Table 7.14: Correlation between awareness about data mining and intention to adopt data mining tools
Intention to adopt DM
Awareness of DM Pearson Correlation .082
Sig. (2-tailed) .277
N 180
As shown in Table 7.14, awareness about DM has no statistical significant relationships with the intention to adopt DM tools. Therefore, null hypothesis is not rejected and Hypothesis Four is not supported.
7.6 Conclusion
In this chapter, statistical results supported by the interview results for testing the hypotheses for the study were presented. The descriptive statistics have shown that there is a readiness by personnel of the Jordanian publicly listed companies to adopt DM technology. Respondents identified influencing factors for utilising DM and reasons for not utilising it. In the case of influence factors in the decision to adopt DM, organisational, technological, and human resources issues were important and affect the decision to adopt DM technology. While for those who not adopt the technology, issues relating to technological, organisational and human resources were the reasons identified for their decision not to adopt such technology. The majority of respondents agreed that top management support and lack of knowledge about DM technology are the major
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factors influencing company’s decision in adopting or not adopting DM technology. The intention to adopt DM tools was found to have no relationship with the knowledge respondent had about it. Hypothesis one, two and three were supported, hypothesis four was not supported.
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8 Conclusions, limitations and future work
8.1 Introduction
The major research problem addressed within this study was an investigation of the lack of knowledge of the status of both the awareness and the adoption of DM technology within the accounting information systems in the Jordanian publicly listed companies. The study sought to increase the understanding of the extent DM technology is being utilised, and adopted and whether, where DM technology is not adopted, there are plans to adopt it within the Jordanian publicly listed companies. Areas of interest for this study have been the managers’ awareness and readiness toward accepting DM technology, the factors influencing and the reasons for adopting or not adopting this technology.
This Chapter puts forward the conclusion of this research investigation assessing the adoption of DM technology within the Jordanian publicly listed companies. The implications and contributions of this study for practical, research and theory are presented, limitations of this research work are outlined, further research opportunities arising from this research investigation are shared and, finally, a concluding statement is given.