Blockchain adoption: Technological, organisational and environmental considerations

Abstract

Information technology (IT) innovation is rapidly reshaping organisations, affecting fundamental aspects of their everyday business activities and processes. This development is accompanied by benefits as well as challenges. In this article, we focus on a specific distributed ledger IT called blockchain which has been heralded as possessing the capability to radically transform a multitude of industries. However, there is a dearth of research which has coalesced the important considerations that organisations should consider prior to adopting blockchain technologies. Consequently, using innovation theory, which has been extensively used to examine the adoption of IT in organisations, we identify salient technological, organisational and environmental (TOE) considerations which influence the adoption of blockchain by organisations. We anchor our discussion using the top three organisational considerations which emerged from our research: top management support, organisational readiness, and organisational support. We also provide an overview of the blockchain concept and outline the advantages and potential use cases that organisations contemplating adopting the technology can leverage.