A Study Of The Implementation And Use Of Information Systems In The Government Of Lesotho

Sustainable social and economic development in today’s Information Age is contingent upon each citizen’s ability to access, process and create information. Information management is a particularly powerful driver of business or organizational performance in an international market where globalization is changing the rules of the game every day. With the rapid development of information technology(IT), the use of information systems(IS) to improve employee performance in organizations is evolving and organizations thus intensively investin g in IS in response. Underst anding and measuring the success of IS has become an important task for managers. T he success of IS has been well documented in research and one way to measure IS success is to determine t he impact of IS on individual and organizational performance. T he T echnology Acceptance Model is one of the most used and empirically proven theories in the IS research field. T he main aim of this research is to study the acceptance and thus use of Information Systems within the Government of Lesotho. In order to achieve this objective, the study attempts to answer the following research questions:(1) What are the factors, specific to the Government of Lesotho, that contribute to the acceptance and use of their IS?(2) What are the degrees of influence of the factors on the use of the IS?(3) What are the mechanisms that can be employed on these factor s or variables to improve IS acceptance and usage in the Government of Lesotho?Based on the T echnology Acceptance Model(T AM), the research model, the hypotheses made upon the model and measurement scales of the variables were developed. A survey study wa s undertaken on the end users of i nformation systems used in various ministries of the Government of Lesotho and data was obtained through self-administered questionnaires. T he Structural Equation Modelling methodology was employed to estimate the research model fit with the obtained data where upon an adequate fit was achieved and several hypotheses were supported. A path model was developed to analyze the relationships between the factors that contribute to the users’ acceptance and use of the information systems in the Government of Lesotho. While most of the findings of this study support existing literature about IS use in the context of the public sector domain, the study also made some interesting fi ndings that are specific to the Government of Lesoth o. Some of which are; 1) perceived ease of use significantly impacts on the intention to use the governmental information systems. 2) Perceived usefulness has a very low impact on intention to use 3) information quality significantly impacts both perceived ease of use as well as perceived usefulness. The findings of this study are discussed in detail and recommendations have been made upon the findings.