The importance of building relationships with customers and trust in the services provider is well documented in the marketing literature. Conceptually, we extend this logic to the context of internal information technology (IT) services operations through the notion of the service delivery chain. The purpose of the study is to examine how key service mechanisms in operational IT implementation are related to employee perceptions of actual system benefits and trust in the IT services provider. We report on a study with 380 employees of 14 bank affiliates that were recently acquired by a bank holding company. The focus of the study is on postimplementation trust rather than preimplementation or initial trust, and the service provider is viewed as the object of trust rather than the technology. Our findings suggest that training, trial, and social influence are key service mechanisms an IT services provider can use to stimulate trust in the IT services provider and the realization of system benefits.
Although information systems (IS) problem solving involves knowledge of both the IS and application domains, little attention has been paid to the role of application domain knowledge. In this study, which is set in the context of conceptual modeling, we examine the effects of both IS and application domain knowledge on different types of schema understanding tasks: syntactic and semantic comprehension tasks and schema-based problem-solving tasks. Our thesis was that while IS domain knowledge is important in solving all such tasks, the role of application domain knowledge is contingent upon the type of understanding task under investigation.We use the theory of cognitive fit to establish theoretical differences in the role of application domain knowledge among the different types of schema understanding tasks. We hypothesize that application domain knowledge does not influence the solution of syntactic and semantic comprehension tasks for which cognitive fit exists, but does influence the solution of schema-based problem-solving tasks for which cognitive fit does not exist.To assess performance on different types of conceptual schema understanding tasks, we conducted a laboratory experiment in which participants with high- and low-IS domain knowledge responded to two equivalent conceptual schemas that represented high and low levels of application knowledge (familiar and unfamiliarapplication domains). As expected, we found that IS domain knowledge is important in the solution of all types of conceptual schema understanding tasks in both familiar and unfamiliar applications domains, and that the effect of application domain knowledge is contingent on task type. Our findings for the EER model were similar to those for the ER model. Given the differential effects of application domain knowledge on different types of tasks, this study highlights the importance of considering more than one application domain in designing future studies on conceptual modeling.