Where does technology readiness collide?

An individual's overall propensity to embrace and use new technologies, treated as a stable, personality-like disposition rather than a reaction to any one device: it is a gestalt of beliefs and feelings a person carries into every encounter with technology. Parasuraman's 2000 Technology Readiness Index (TRI) proposed the construct and built a multiple-item scale from four facets, optimism and innovativeness that draw a person toward technology and discomfort and insecurity that hold them back, and Parasuraman and Colby's 2015 An updated and streamlined Technology Readiness Index refined it into the shorter TRI 2.0. The referent is a trait of a consumer's mind, scored across people, not the IT capability of an organisation or the developmental maturity of a piece of hardware.[1][2]

Unit

A consumer's disposition toward technology, as a multiple-item TRI score

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Assessed by self-report on the TRI, originally 36 items and streamlined to 16 in TRI 2.0, across its optimism, innovativeness, discomfort, and insecurity facets

A firm's standing level of technology infrastructure and skilled IT human resources, the organisational capability that conditions whether a company can take on a new digital innovation: in the technology-organisation-environment framework this technological readiness is a structural property of the firm, not a mood of any single employee. Zhu, Kraemer, and Xu's 2006 The process of innovation assimilation by firms in different countries modelled how technology readiness, alongside firm size, competition, and regulation, drives the initiation, adoption, and routinisation of e-business across 1,857 firms in ten countries. The referent is an organisational asset, measured across companies, not an individual's personality trait or the maturity of a technology considered in itself.[3]

Unit

A firm's IT infrastructure and human-resource capability, rated across organisations

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Operationalised in firm surveys as the extent of technology infrastructure and IT expertise, then entered as an antecedent in models of e-business assimilation

The maturity of a technology itself, placed on an ordinal 1-to-9 scale that runs from basic principles first observed at level 1, through a validated prototype in a relevant environment, up to an actual system flight-proven through successful operations at level 9: the level says how far a technology has been developed and demonstrated, independent of who might adopt it or how ready they are. Mankins's 2009 Technology readiness assessments: A retrospective reviewed the NASA scale he had helped formalise and the practice of judging where a technology sits along it. The referent is a developmental stage of an engineered artefact, assessed against defined milestones, not the disposition of a person or the capability of a firm.[4]

Unit

A technology's maturity, as an ordinal level from 1 to 9

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

Judged by a technology readiness assessment against the defined milestone for each level, from basic principles at TRL 1 to flight-proven operation at TRL 9