An examination of the IT satisfaction of small-business users

Although there are many articles in the NIS literature which address small-business computing, in effect the organizations represented in these studies are, in many ways, similar to mediumand large-sized organizations. In this article, we focus on businesses that are truly small: they have very few employees and there is no formal NIS department. In this environment, the small business owner/manager is the principal user and has to perform most of the IT functions. For such an environment, an IT satisfaction construct and measurement instrument are presented. A survey, using the measurement instrument, of a representative sample of small businesses was conducted to identify user satisfaction patterns. Key areas of IT dissatisfactions are: training and education (the most important), software maintenance, documentation, and vendor support. These deficiency areas can be appropriately addressed by software vendors and consultants. Finally, a contingency analysis of IT satisfaction based on business-related factors and owner characteristics was performed. A general observation was that the owner attributes have a greater impact on IT satisfaction than any of the business factors. The ones that stood out the most were the gender and the age of the owner.