Jordan Journal of Business Administration, Volume 3, No. 2, 2007
- 233 -
Investigating IT Use and Satisfaction among Jordanian Commercial Banks:
A Management Challenge
Loay M. Salhieh and Jamal D. Abu-Doleh*
ABSTRACT
This study focuses on the psychometric stability of the IT use instrument by Doll’s and Torkzadeh’s (1998), and
the psychometric stability of the IT satisfaction instrument by Palivia’s and Palivia’s (1999) when applied to
Jordanian end-users. Furthermore, the study uses canonical analysis to investigate a causal link proposed by the
success model of Delone and McLean (1992). The results of the study give evidence that the two instruments are
valid and reliable measure; which contributes to the generalizability of the two instruments. The results of the
canonical analysis give evidence of the causal link between IT use and IT satisfaction, and identify useful and
not useful variables in the two instruments.
KEYWORDS: IT Use, IT Satisfaction, IT Success, Canonical Analysis.
1. INTRODUCTION
The availability of Information Technology (IT)
within organizations, over the last two decades, has
increased tremendously. The rapid growth of the personal
computer industry, substantial decreases in computer unit
costs, and simultaneous increases in computer power and
speed have made vast amounts of information readily
available to individuals in organizations. This
proliferation of IT products (hardware, software and
communication technology) and applications has been
experienced by most organizations and has been
increasingly researched in the past. The availability and
use of information systems and technologies has grown
almost to the point of being commodity like in nature,
becoming nearly as ubiquitous as labor, and U.S.
companies spent more on information technology than on
any other form of investment (Dewett and Jones, 2001).
Given the increasing complexity and uncertainty in the
financial industry, banks are presently investing more and
more in Information Technology (IT), hoping to obtain
more and more productivity and greater effectiveness by
this mean (Osei and Ko, 2004), and IT is seen as a
vehicle to gain a competitive advantage (Earl, 1993).
However, it is important to note that the mere
introduction of IT, in and of itself, does not create a
competitive advantage (Huff and Beattie, 1985), but the
use of the right type of IT applications and consequently
the satisfaction of the introduced IT for a given
organization may lend a competitive edge (Kathuria et
al., 1999). Also, investments in Information Systems (IS)
does not automatically lead to success as implied by some
earlier studies, but the benefits of IS come from the
varying ways of its use and satisfaction with the
investment (Byrd et al., 2005). So, in order to measure
the success of the IT investments or the information
system, usage and satisfaction has been proposed as a
management information science (MIS) success in
several frameworks for research (Doll and Torkzadeh,
1998). IT usage and satisfaction are a central concept in
taxonomies of IT success (Doll and Torkzadeh, 1998,
Received on 9/10/2006 and Accepted for Publication on
19/3/2007.
© 2007 DAR Publishers/University of Jordan. All Rights Reserved.