تاثیر عوامل سازمانی بر موفقیت سیستم اطلاعاتی مدیریت:یک تحقیق در تامین کنندگان ترویج کشاورزی ایران

Information system success has been widely discussed in the past two decades. As systems and technologies are being improved and developed, discussions on their effectiveness and evaluation on their success have been continuously debated by researchers, scholars and practitioners throughout the years. Besides the major concern of IS effectiveness, factors influencing IS effectiveness are also important. One of these factors is the organizational factor. Using perceptual measures, this study aims to investigate the influence of organizational factors on MIS success. Survey questionnaires were gathered from 132 Extension Managers from Iran's Agricultural Extension Providers. Seven items were identified to influence MIS success. They are IS department structure, top management support, management style, managerial IT knowledge, goal alignment, resources allocation and IS infrastructure. The study also identified five MIS success dimensions; systems quality, information quality, perceived Ease of use, organizational impact and individual impact. The study found that the MIS success variables are significantly and highly correlated. The study also found all the organizational factors are significantly correlated to the five IS success factors investigated; the system quality, information quality, perceived ease of use, organizational impact and individual impact. Multiple regression analyses also found goal alignment as the highest predictor of IS success, followed by IS department structure, IS infrastructure and management style.

As we progress in the new millennium and information age, numerous organizations around the world are undergoing massive transformation in an effort to keep up with changing business environments. Increased domestic and global competition, economic downturns, rapidly changing market trends, and volatile financial markets have all increased the pressure on organizations to come up with effective responses to survive and succeed. Further, easing of international trade barriers, economic liberalization, globalization and deregulation have thrown several challenges to organizations in developing countries like Iran. To effectively respond to rapid changes in the external environment, several organizations have turned to information technology (IT) to improve their productivity and competitiveness. However, beginning in the nineties, the public sector's conservative approach to using management information system began to change. The traditional information systems were being replaced by modern systems with improved and sophisticated software and hardware applications. Furthermore, the advent of communication technologies such as the Internet, intranet and extranet in the public sector environment had resulted in better collaboration among the intra and inter providers. Apparently, the above developments have forced the government to re-evaluate and re-assess their systems effectiveness. DeLone and McLean (1992) conducted a study which resulted in a proposed model of IS success. This study was considered very significant in contributing towards a universal model, which many employed when looking at IS performance. Several attempts have also been made to validate their proposed model (Hussein, Selamat, Mamat, & Abdul, 2005; Seddon & Kiew, 1994). The model is comprised of five dimensions, namely, perceived ease of use, system quality, information quality, individual impact and organizational impact. The authors also pointed that there was a huge gap in the IS studies in which many researchers seems to overlook. These studies had given small focus on the antecedent factors of the IS success. One of the important antecedent factors of IS success is the organizational factor. Therefore the objective of this study is to investigate the impact of organizational factors on MIS success in the agricultural extension providers.

This study is based on IS success theories applied to MIS success. In short, it was clear that the significant relationships between the seven organizational factors investigated and MIS success dimensions evidently indicate the importance of the factors in ensuring successful management information systems. The empirical evidence also supports the impact of organizational factors that act as the antecedent factors in influencing MIS success. Apparently, the study adds to the literature on organizational factors influencing MIS success that needs more emphasis such as that of DeLone and McLean (2003) and Hussein et al. (2005). The alignment of IS/MIS strategies and agricultural extension providers' objectives (goal alignment) was the most influential organizational factor of MIS success. This shows that IS's strategic role has gained much interest among the agricultural extension providers' managers. Studies on this issue provide a strong indication to managers about the importance of the strategic role of MIS. The key area needing emphasis in today's organizations, is knowledge of MIS's strategic role. Another possible justification for this could be due to the competitiveness that exists among the agricultural extension providers, which may contribute to the importance of the factor of goal alignment. This paper proposes a model for MIS success in view of agricultural extension providers and then empirically confirms the causal relationships in proposed model. Our model suggests MIS success should be assessed by the use of multidimensional and closely related measures. The dimensions for measuring IS success include: system quality, information quality, and perceived ease of use, organizational impact and individual impact. Our analysis is able to help agricultural extension providers realize the benefits from MIS by coordinating key IT strategy management dimensions. For researchers, it would be meaningful to suggest other dimensions of application success in organizations and to show their relationships to organizational context as the use of MIS becomes more sophisticated. Compatibility, relative advantage, top management support, IS infrastructure, IS department structure, goal alignment, managerial IT knowledge, management style and resource allocation all have positive associations within the dimension of MIS success, and this may be because the different facets of MIS success can be affected by the factors in different ways. The measurement strategies of implementation success need to suggest a comprehensive scheme by which to direct an organization's MIS initiative and to indicate how a particular organization will benefit from MIS by pursuing each facet of a proper utilization. The measures for some variables should be refined and verified by various respondents. Although the results of reliability and validity tests were satisfactory, the measures of MIS success should be verified by accommodating the perceptions of various groups of MIS users. Various applications need to be considered if respondents suppose they are closely related to MIS, in order to measure the success of MIS at the organizational level. A more elaborate operation may have better captured the real aspects of the success of MIS. It is still important to understand the longer-term effects of MIS on the determinants of their MIS success in view of the rapid evolution of technology. This will provide MIS users with guidelines for the formation of a favorable environment in which to integrate and use MIS, to obtain the full benefits from this technology.