Assessing Usability of Ifms in Local Government: A Case Study of Mbale District Local Government
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Date
2024-07-05
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Uganda Christian University
Abstract
Many governments in Africa are still exploring better ways to promote accountability, transparency, efficiency, effectiveness, secure data, and a more robust means of fiscal accountability in PFM (Eilu, 2019). Uganda offers an example of a country where introduction of a government IFMS was overwhelming welcomed and adopted from the start. The Implementation of the IFMS was motivated by the Ugandan Government’s desire to improve efficiency in budget preparation, execution and financial reporting (Baguma,2020).
The implementation of the system began in March 2003 with the mapping and necessary configuration followed by user acceptance and testing operations in February 2004 (Baguma,2020). The implementation of IFMS in Mbale local government began in July 2012 and 2016 respectively (MFP&ED)
While numerous challenges are hindering the expected outcome of the Integrated Financial Management Systems (IFMS) in Uganda, one of the most notable challenges affecting IFMS is a usability challenge. Yet, little or no studies have so far examined the usability challenges of IFMS in Uganda. Hitherto, Usability challenges can be a serious detriment to the successful implementation and continuous usage of IFMS. To assess the usability level of IFMS in Uganda, Mbale City located in eastern Uganda was selected as a case study. The System Usability Scale (SUS) was used to measure the usability of the IFMS used by the Mbale City administration. Developed by John Brooke in 1986, the SUS is a simple, ten-item scale used to conduct usability assessments on a system. Open-ended questionnaires were also used as a follow-up tool. The average SUS score findings for the IFMS used in Mbale City is 67.5 representing about 40% usability, which is poor. IFMS users recommended more training, capacity building, and service desk among others, to tackle their user complaints