User acceptance of legacy systems integration

Integrating and processing data that reside in different legacy systems remains an often laborious process, requiring either manual steps or complicated programming yet legacy systems when used in silos make the sharing of information, security and management controls a nightmare. Such fragmentation of data leads to challenges of system processing inefficiencies, poor synchronization of reports, delayed decision making and hinders quick response to business demands. This calls for the integration of legacy systems into a single repository system to enable a central processing of data and improve decision making. However, such integration is always resisted by user. The objective of this paper was to identify factors influencing user acceptance of Legacy system integration. Data for the study was collected by using a close-ended questionnaire from a government department in South Africa. The collected data was analysed quantitatively and results indicated that culture, trust, social influence, information quality, and system quality are core antecedents of the acceptance of Legacy systems integration. This paper examines the factors that contribute positively or negatively to the user acceptance of legacy systems integration as well as those factors that could be considered by system developers when modernizing legacy systems. Management within organizations could leverage the findings of this study when dealing with issues of technology acceptance. This paper further provides a model for a relatively influential factors that could be considered by managers, developers and researchers that need a way to integrate standard data sets that are distributed across legacy systems.