The Relationship of Some Personal and Situational Factors to IS Effectiveness

Most, if not all, of the empirical evidence on information systems effectiveness and its associated factors is confined to the use of data from developed countries in particular from the USA. The findings of such research cannot necessarily be generalized to other environments where the social, economic and cultural characteristics are different. Such evidence needs to be first validated using cross-cultural research before it can be used to manage global information systems effectively. This chapter reports on the results of research aimed at testing the relationship of user’s age, tenure in the job, organizational level, education, training, duration of system use, and involvement in system development to information systems effectiveness, as measured by user satisfaction and systems usage. Data were collected from 120 managers in 22 Egyptian banks. Age, tenure in the job, and user involvement in systems development were found to be positively correlated with user satisfaction. However, age, organizational level and education were found to be negatively associated with system usage. While beneficial to the Egyptian IS managers, such evidence from developing countries should contribute to the building of a general theory of transnational global information systems.