• Posted Sept. 3, 2018

Study: Information quality, user satisfaction, and the manifestation of workarounds: a qualitative and quantitative study of enterprise content management system users

Problem:

Companies increasingly use enterprise content management (ECM) systems to manage unstructured information assets, but employees often avoid using the new ECM systems in favor of other means of managing unstructured information, such as local file systems. However, such workarounds can lead to problems at the individual and organizational levels (e.g., poor collaboration). Against this background, the study explores how low levels of user satisfaction may result from poor information quality, and how such low-quality information may lead to the emergence of workarounds.

How it was studied:

The study uses the Information Systems (IS) success model and is grounded in qualitative data collected from thirty-four interviews and quantitative survey data collected from 247 ECM system users.

Take away:

The study explains why and how ECM workarounds emerge and recommends how to avoid them:

• Information quality, system quality and, to a lesser degree, service quality directly influence end users’ satisfaction with ECM systems.
• Two dimensions of information quality—representational information quality and contextual information quality—have particularly strong effects on end users’ satisfaction.
• Representational information quality refers to how information is presented to the user (e.g., conciseness, presentation, understandability).
• Contextual information quality refers to the extent to which information can be used to fulfill a task (e.g., completeness, relevance, timeliness, usefulness).
• Low levels of user satisfaction lead to the emergence of workarounds, which lower individual net benefits.
• Accordingly, companies should focus on diminishing workarounds and fostering ECM system use by increasing information quality, system quality, and service quality.