UC Irvine

Using data from over 3,000 public employees in 46 U.S. cities in 1988, this article in vestigates three classes of factors commonly thought to affect computer use: training, friendliness of software, and user computer background. Computer use is analyzed as 11 specific tasks (such as programming, record searching) and is further broken down by organizational role of user, for example, manager and street-level employee. Some findings are that (1) the computer literacy or prior coursework of employees is more important to their computer use than how many years an employee has used computers; and (2) for most employees the user friendliness of programs is relevant, and weakly so, only for generic tasks such as searching a file or entering data. More generally, the data lead us to highlight training because it can be used to compensate for weaknesses in present software as well as in the computer literacy and experience of users. Keywords: computing benefits, friendly software, computer literacy, training. © 1994, Sage Publications. All rights reserved.