User-Technology-Acceptance Among Doctors : A Case Study Examining the Effects of Pre-Implementation Efforts MadeDuring a System-Implementation In Jönköping County Council

Sammanfattning:   This thesis is based on a case-study of an IT-system implementation within Jönköping County Council. This new IT-system will cover, and support, all health-care related activi-ties within the County Council. The thesis is concerned with aspects that happened within the pre-implementation phase, and the thesis is furthermore only concerned with so-called „soft‟ aspects- meaning aspects that are not of a technical nature. Instead, attitudes relating to the use of the system and various qualities of the system have been measured; and sub-sequently fit into the categories of the extended Technology Acceptance Model, or TAM2, proposed by Venkatesh & Davis (2000). We have limited our research to only look at the attitudes of doctors. The doctors are also divided into two distinct user-groups: where one group has received more training than the other, and have been assigned as „super-users‟, meant to support the regular users in their use of the system, and also to help train these other, „regular-users‟. The attitudes of the various users of the system have been measured by using a qualitative method, and more specifically interviews based on the elements of the TAM2 model. The results of the interviews were analysed using a number of models and theories relevant to the subject matter. The analysis of the results, and the subsequent conclusions which are drawn as answers to the research questions will be of use in future IT-system implementations, especially within the coming rounds of implementing the spe-cific IT-system which has been studied, in the rest of the Jönköping County Council. The main conclusions which have been drawn can be summarised as the following: The overall user-technology-acceptance of the doctors towards this system is neutral, but has a strong tendency towards a negative attitude. This conclusion is drawn through combining the perceived usefulness, and its sub-elements, with the perceived ease of use, of the doc-tors- as described in the analysis section. One of the key causes for this is the low subjec-tive norm (or outside opinion affecting attitudes) which is spread about the system. One of the key proposals to avoid these low levels of user-technology-acceptance is to meet the negative subjective norm attitudes being spread, with positive responses; and to optimise the training of all users- but to specifically improve the attitudes and knowledge of the su-per-users, which has been proven to be critical for a successful implementation. This thesis shows the importance of managing the subjective norms of the participants in the imple-mentation project, negative press in the media should in our opinion be met by positive in-formation about the system and the implementation. We have also found that should the training be performed in a satisfactory way the opinions and attitudes of the users will be positively affected. The training of the super-users has been found to be of special impor-tance as the attitudes of colleagues have been shown to be the most important for users, when building early opinions about a system.