An IS Success Evaluation of a DSS in a Police Organization

• Authors: Sven A. Carlsson;Linda-Marie Skog;Olgerta Tona
• Venue: Proceedings of the 2010 conference on Bridging the Socio-technical Gap in Decision Support Systems: Challenges for the Next Decade
• Year: 2010

Decision Support Systems (DSS) are used in the public and private sectors. Most DSS research has focused the private sector and few DSS evaluation studies have been conducted in public organizations. Police organizations are in need of functional DSS to support the employees in their work. Given this, we did an evaluation study of the success of a DSS in the context of a police organization. The DSS is used for a variety of tasks and decisions, for example, operational resource management as well as long-range planning. The question for this study is: How successful is the DSS in the police organization. The evaluation study is based on DeLone and McLean's Information System (IS) success model. For each of the model's six dimensions, we based on a literature review generated questions for the questionnaire distributed to the users and potential users of the DSS. The questionnaire was made available to the employees using the police organization's intranet. We got 367 useable questionnaires back; 103 of these were from users and these questionnaires were used in the evaluation study. We also conducted a group interview. The study shows that system quality, information quality, user satisfaction, individual impact and organizational impact are at satisfying levels. The use of the system in general is low and primarily depending on external factors rather than system quality, information quality and user satisfaction. The overall conclusion is that the DSS can be considered quite successful, but that there is room for improvements.