User competence in information technology: a critical incident analysis

With the increasing proliferation and use of information technology (IT) in the workplace, the effective use of IT is becoming a more critical ingredient in boosting worker productivity and sustaining competitive advantage of organizations. End-user competence is vital as it reduces many of the problems in information requirements determination which plague the interaction and communication in traditional IS-user relationships. The study reports on the use of the critical incident technique to appropriate the contextualization of IT use by knowledge workers. The technique surfaced a number of organizational, technological, and individual factors which affected user competence and user experience with IT. These issues must be dealt with directly by management to prevent further erosion of user competence and experience with IT which ultimately affects users' ability to convert IT use into productive performance.<>