Examining technology usability and acceptance in digital government: A case study in law enforcement

Abstract

Increasingly, government agencies are facing the challenge of effective implementation of information technologies that are critical to their digital government programs and initiatives. This dissertation reports two user-centric evaluation studies of COPLINK, a criminal knowledge management system that supports and enhances law enforcement officers' crime-fighting activities. Specifically, these aforementioned evaluations concentrated on system usability and user acceptance in a law enforcement setting. The chapters of this dissertation describe the study design, highlight the analysis results, and discuss their implications for digital government research and practices. Overall, the models used in this study showed a reasonably good fit with officers' usability and acceptance assessments and exhibited satisfactory explanatory power. The analysis also showed that individuals included in the current study exhibited important characteristics common to individual professionals. Compared to end-users and knowledge workers in business settings, law enforcement officers appear to be pragmatic in their technology acceptance assessments, concentrating more on the usefulness of a technology than on its ease of use. Participating officers also attached limited weight to the suggestions or opinions of significant referents. Findings from this study should provide valuable insights to digital government systems evaluation and, at the same time, shed light on how government agencies can design management interventions to foster technology acceptance and use.