Implementation and use of finance information system: Results of a field study in Ugandan Universities

Sammanfattning: Benefits arising from the use of finance information systems that include among others capability to offer improved timely and reliable accounts reports have been mentioned by many different scholars. The issue of successfully implementing and using the systems is however still a challenging problem especially in developing countries. A lot of critical success factors for implementation have been suggested, by different scholars but various organizations still fail to attain successful usage of their systems. This study therefore aimed at determining the factors that influence implementation of the finance information systems in the context of a developing country and how these factors impact usage of the systems. The study focused on Ugandan universities because at the time of the study, Ugandan government was in the process of embarking on a project of implementing a common finance information systems platform for all public universities in the country. This was after government’s realization of a problem of non presentation of budgets to parliament for appropriation by various public universities, insufficient disclosure of internally generated funds, poor book keeping, and lack of standardisation in accounting policies, financial reporting and the classification of accounts.The study was conducted in three phases using a mixed methods approach. The first phase was exploratory in its setting and it was done to purposely find out factors that probably influence the implementation of finance information systems in a university setup. The study was carried out on a finance information system implementation that was done in Makerere University in Uganda between 2004 and 2007. Data was collected through interviews from people identified as key informants in relation to the implementation. Abreast with results from this study, the investigation was extended to a wider population that included seven universities in order to first of all establish whether the findings in the exploratory study could be galvanized, and secondly to find out the impact of the found factors on usage of the systems. Data was collected through a quantitative survey and the respondents comprised of accountants in the seven universities investigated.Finally, a third phase of the study was conducted to essentially find out circumstances in which the identified factors impact FIS usage. Nine factors were found to have influence on the finance information systems implementation in the Ugandan universities. These nine factors were merged into four broad factors and out of these four, three were found to have significant impact on usage of the systems.