Factors affecting accountants’ adoption of accounting systems

What is it about?

Digitization affects the accounting profession as it engages with pervasive technologically-enabled systems that support business processes and financial management. As mandating compliance is challenging, understanding the attitudes of prospective users is important, because their negativity may generate system outcomes such as ambivalence, frustration and under-use. Our study of Libyan accountants shows that in adopting accounting information systems (AIS), they were influenced by a range of factors, namely: the degree of ease associated with using the system (a perceptional factor); their judgment about their professional capability to engage with AIS (a dispositional factor); the influence of regulatory bodies, professional bodies, banks and government (coercive pressures); and the influence of accountants who have successfully adopted AIS (mimetic pressures). Unexpectedly, we found the following as uninfluential: performance expectations regarding job benefit from system use; industry type; their particular role (e.g., as financial, management or cost accountants); and experience with accounting or technology.

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