Factors Affecting Information Technology Usage: A Meta-Analysis of the Empirical Literature

Abstract

With an estimated investment of over 1 trillion dollars to date on information technology (IT) products and applications, one would hope that there exists a corresponding improvement in organizational performance and productivity. The level of IT usage has widely been accepted as an important indicator of IT success within organizations. This research synthesizes and validates the construct of IT usage using a meta-analysis. It accomplishes that by analyzing the empirical results of various studies over a period of time covering a broad scope of characteristics of both users and information systems (IS), and it examines the relation between these characteristics and the level of IT usage within organizations. In general, the results of this meta-analysis lead to the conclusion that there exists a strong and significant positive relation between the perception of ease of use and the perceived usefulness of an IT system to the actual amount of usage. Another factor that indicates a high level of IT usage is the organizational support of IT within an enterprise. Although the factors of education level, training level, and professional level were found to have a substantial effect on IT usage, the magnitude of these effects were lower than those of the perceptions of the user and organizational support. Managers and IT professionals may have a better chance of avoiding IT system ineffectiveness and even failure by paying attention to the results of this research, especially in view of the fact that it synthesized and validated the results of a significant number of empirical studies published in some of the best IS journals. Rarely do single research experiments provide definitive answers on which to base policy decisions.