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Top1. Introduction
Mobile technologies have invaded the business world with promising benefits. These technologies can help organizations make faster and informed decisions as well as allow them to capture unlimited business opportunities (Charlton 2014). Hence, many organizations have embraced the trend of mobility and real-time data sharing (Kumar 2018) by adopting different mobile innovations, with the purpose of generating more profit and staying competitive. One of those emerging mobile technologies is mobile ERP, which refers to the use of a mobile device (e.g. a smartphone or tablet) to perform different functions across industries like sales, customer relationship management (CRM), university class enrollment, hospital patients admission, etc. through a single integrated system. In other words, it is a tool used to carry out various functions on-the-go. Mobile ERP promotes the concept of BYOD or “bring your own device” in today’s enterprise domain; and thus, has been regarded as an emerging core requirement in the contemporary business world (All 2014; Klie 2019). This technology shows an increasing utilization curve due to the several benefits it provides, for example, convenience, improved quality of service, more accurate data capture, greater productivity, and deeper business relationships (Quirk 2018). This evolving phenomenon makes a close examination of the influential factors to its wide adoption in a traditional ERP organization a timely and relevant research topic.
Although mobile ERP has the capability to help organizations streamlining workflow processes, increase operational efficiency, deepen customer engagements and accelerate time-to-decision by top management (Charlton 2014; Sprague 2019), it might be still in the early adoption stage of product life cycle. This stage provides an explanation of the current status of mobile ERP among traditional ERP organizations that have implemented desktop ERP on their system platform. However, organizations have become more technically savvy and their capability of handling information in different IT contexts has been augmented in the recent years. The increase in employees’ computer self-efficacy may increase the demand to adopt mobile ERP (Charlton 2014; Hasan 2018). On the other hand, with the increase of the usage of mobile devices across industries, security threats to target these devices have proliferated. Shen et al. (2010) emphasize how security concerns may influence adoption decisions, especially for mobile technological products, like mobile banking. Thus, system security may be considered a major cost to adopting mobile ERP. Our discussion can help us to understand this emerging market by studying the role of computer self-efficacy and system security on an individual’s behavioral intention towards using mobile ERP.