Antecedents of ITS Adoption in Intermodal Freight transportation Industry

Despite the rapid growth of Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and their benefits for business processes, intermodal freight transport companies still face challenges in ICT adoption including low compatibility, low level of management support and insufficient awareness of the expected advantages. This may prevent companies from thoroughly deploying ICT, although the benefits of being proactive in Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITS) adoption are largely documented. This study investigates the antecedents of ITS adoption in intermodal freight transport companies at both the levels of company and managers. This is important because the uptake of recent ICT advantages in the intermodal freight transport arena seems slow and the evidence on the determinants of such posteriori acceptability of ITS is limited in current applied ITS studies. We present a framework that identifies four broad categories of environmental, organisational, technological and individual characteristics, and show how these categories influence the decision-making process of both companies and managers to adopt ICT in intermodal freight industry. This adoption framework draws on theoretical perspectives in Technologic, Organization and Environmental (TOE) theory and Unified theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UATUA). We further discuss the implications of this research for academicians and practitioners.