Why can’t we have nice things – a transaction economy model of information system usability in firms

Abstract

Poor usabilty of B2B applications is nothing new, every scientific database is full of articles on how to improve them, but why does it happen in the first place? Turns out the answer might lie in transaction economics, once we view the purchase and use as different transactions. But buying a bad used car (a “lemon”) in the market is also nothing new – what new is that getting rid of IT is hard, because usage itself increases costs of switching to a new supplier. Most papers either deal with the internal workinsg of a software development company, or treat technology as something developed internally – yet this is rarely the case anymore, and buyer-seller relationships of technology, along with caveats in the SaaS licensing scheme might give us the answers on the sorry state we might find ourselves in.