Study of the town office workers' using free software

• Main Authors: KO Ping Shih, 柯炳式
• Other Authors: Naiyi Hsiao
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/65518252999417218634

碩士 === 東海大學 === 公共事務碩士學程在職進修專班 === 93 === Due to the wave of open source software over the world, governments and enterprises in recent years are more inclined than ever to adopt free software considering software cost reduction. Relevant policies have been discussed and schemed in many countries. Nowadays, most public agencies in Taiwan utilize MS Windows as the operating system of personal computers. To explore the issues which the civil service workers may confront for employing free software, the Research, Development and Evaluation Commission of Executive Yuan selected three town offices from the northern, central and southern divisions in a test program, which also attempted to propagate the application of free software to all aspects of public affairs in the town offices. This research, based on the Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior, modeled the relevant factors which influence the utilization decisions of free software in the public agencies. Data collection was conducted by a questionnaire and individual interviews with the civil servants in the three town offices that take part in the test program. It was intended to understand their attitude, willingness and behavior for adopting free software. This study also attempted to discover their comments and suggestions about the utilizations of the free software in public agencies. The research results may be summarized below: 1.The experience of the town office workers taking use of the free software is not all the same as that of the usual user of information technology behaviors. 2.The town office workers that have received the training program are seldom using free software now. 3.The important factors that influence the civil servants’ intention for using free software include “system stability and security,” “government policy influence,” “superior and peer influence,” and “training.” 4.The trained town office workers share the opinions that the distinction between free software and MS windows system is not significant. 5.The practical suggestions for promoting the utilization of free software include simultaneous installation of both MS IE and Mozilla Firefox (the free software browser similar to the MS IE) on the Windows system. The study also provides following suggestions: 1.The potential users may be recommended to get acquainted with free software incrementally. 2.The web-based application system is worth investing for promoting free software. 3.Free software will benefit from integration of the various technical support resources. 4.Various training programs are essential for promoting free software. 5.The supervisors in public agencies should be targeted as key players.