Investigating User Intention to Adopt a new Information System in a Multinational Company's Business Unit

In the Information Age, organisations have to keep abreast of competition, in terms of technological development. Technology is at the core of modern business; hence, Strategic Information Systems Planning is increasingly becoming one the investigated concepts. In keeping up with competitors, organisations commit to Information Technology investment. On the other hand, an organisation would not realise a return on investment if technology has not been applied adequately and efficiently - and that is dependent on the users of the system. The purpose of this paper, is to investigate factors that influence users' decisions to adopt a new Information System (IS) in L+GSA. They will also propose a diffusion strategy that can be used by management, or system owners, in the implementation stage of the system's acquisition, where user buy-in is critical to ensure that the L+GSA achieves its strategic objective. A survey study will be conducted at L+GSA-the only unit of this multinational organisation situated in Africa. Most of the L+GSA units are situated in developed countries, where adoption of a new IS could be different in many ways. A questionnaire will be distributed randomly to all employees who are affected by the adoption of a new IS within the South African unit of the organisation. The authors will perform correlation to determine association between all variables, and then perform a regression analysis to evaluate predictability of the user intention against dependent variables. The results reveal a strong relationship between user intention and both perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness. However, evaluation of predictability reveals that under the current circumstances, perceived ease of use is not a significant predictor of user intention to adopt the new IS.