Associate Professor, College of Business Administration, Bowling Green State University.; Coordinator of MIS programs, College of Business Administration, Bowling Green State University.
This paper examines determinants of information center (IC) success, defined as user satisfaction. The determinants are tested for their relationships to IC success and one another in order to evaluate which have a direct impact on success and which operate indirectly. Prior studies have not looked for relationships among factors, omitting potentially helpful information. Data were gathered from 151 users representing three organizations and were used to develop a model of IC success. The model is consistent with Anthony's levels of management activity in that the determinants correspond to specific levels of planning and control. The determinants and their corresponding management activity levels are as follows: IC role definition is associated with strategic planning, while management control encompasses a variety of services, staff infrastructure, and organizational commitment. Operational control, in the IC environment, is concerned with quality of user-developed applications, quality of individual staff, quality of services, facilitation of end-user computing, and user self-sufficiency. This model of IC success can guide researchers studying information centers and, especially, managers charged with establishing and operating information centers.
With the growing amount of resources consumed by end-user computing (EUC), its support organization, the information center (IC), is under increasing pressure to justify its existence. This study proposes an instrument and a model for evaluating IC success, based on the user satisfaction construct. Three dimensions of satisfaction are identified: Quality of IC Services, Quality of User-developed Applications (UDA), and User Self-sufficiency. Five hypotheses concerning the relationship among these dimensions and IC success are proposed. The instrument and the model are empirically tested. There is strong evidence of the validity of the instrument. Results indicate that the three dimensions are good predictors of IC success. All of the hypotheses were supported to varying degrees.
A stage hypothesis for information centers (ICs) is proposed and 26 critical success factors (CSFs) for IC managers are investigated. Based on 311 responses from IC managers, support is found for the proposed stages and information is provided about the importance of the CSFs. A principal components analysis is performed on the 26 CSFs which identifies five composite CSFs: (1) commitment to the IC concept; (2) quality of IC support services; (3) facilitation of end-user computing; (4) role clarity; and (5) coordination of end-user computing. Statistical tests show that the importance of these composite CSFs tend to vary among themselves but is relatively constant individually across the IC stages.