User Satisfaction & System Acceptance of Windows 7/Office 2007 System at DOC

Abstract

Department of Conservation (DOC) is a public service organization which was set up to manage, for conservation purposes, land and natural and historic resources. Conservation land comprises about one third of New Zealand’s total land mass (OAG, 2012). DOC consists of about 1700 staff located in 99 separate locations around New Zealand (DOC, 2013). It manages 8.5 million hectares of land and 3.7 million hectares of marine areas (DOC, 2013).

The IT team have an amazing and quite varied job of managing DOC’s IT infrastructure nationally. DOC's desktop Infrastructure has been running on Windows XP for 12 years and with the end of support for XP in April 2014, it was critical for DOC to upgrade to Windows 7. Windows 7 Operating System has been available to the general public since October 2009 (Sanak, 2012). The decision was made to pursue and standardize on the 64 bit version of Windows 7 Enterprise. To provide an indication of the size of the task, there are approximately 2250 PC’s, across approximately 70 sites with offices from Kaitaia to Stewart Island and everything in between, with the most remote being the Chatham Island.

For a large Enterprise like DOC, desktop migration is a huge Business transformation and IT investment (Mortimer & McNeela, 2013). Mission critical operating system (OS) migrations and software deployments are amongst the riskiest IT initiatives. In order to keep abreast of these changes and to improve customer service to system users, technological changes will have to be continually implemented (Umble, Haft & Umble, 2003). An implementation effort involves many people with technical expertise and business knowledge (Umble et. al., 2003). These people expend an incredible amount of time and energy to ensure that the technological innovations will meet the clients' needs. DOC business drivers to deploy Windows 7 Enterprise and Office 2007 Professional to the business were; 1. The development of documents and spread sheets on the latest version of software allowing free exchange of documents with other entities. 2. Alignment with Governmental / departmental strategies. 3. The impending end of life status for the Microsoft XP operating system and Microsoft Office 2003 on 8 April 2014 presents a significant risk to the on-going operations of DOC’s computing environment.

Windows 7/Office 2007 was deployed across DOC between August 2013 to December 2013. From the project manager’s point of view, the project has been highly successful, met the time frame and budget, as agreed in the contract. Gaining system acceptance and satisfaction with a recently implemented system is important for several reasons. Because, lack of client satisfaction and system acceptance can result in a waste of resources, sabotage, absenteeism, employee turnover, grievances, non-use of the new technology, and ultimate implementation failure (Woods, 2002).

User acceptance and satisfaction of technologies can have a strong impact on an organization’s success at achieving the standards of performance and return on investments through new technological investments (Al Gahtani & King, 1999). Hence it is important to measure the perceptions of end users and their experience in using the recently implemented windows 7/ Office 2007 system. TAM posits that intention to use new technology is shaped by its perceived usefulness and the perceived ease of use of the technology (Davis, 1989). The intention of this study was to assess the constructs of perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use as predictors of usage acceptance and satisfaction of Windows 7/ Office 2007 system.