System quality represents the quality of the information system processing itself, which includes software and data components,and it is a measure of the extent to which the system is technically sound. Seddon (1997) notes that ‘‘system quality is concerned with whether there are bugs in the system, the consistency of user interface, ease of use, quality of documentation, and sometimes, quality and maintainability of program code” (p. 246). System quality is measured by attributes such as ease of use, functionality, reliability, data quality, flexibility, and integration (DeLone and McLean, 2003). A comprehensive instrument for system quality was developed and validated by Sedera and Gable (2004), which resulted in nine attributes – ease of use, ease of learning, user requirements, system features, system accuracy, flexibility, sophistication, integration, integration, and customization.
Drawing from previous research, we group the attributes for system quality into two broad categories – system features from the system designer perspective (called system flexibility) and system features from the end user perspective (called system sophistication). The system flexibility dimension reflects the fact that the system is designed with useful/required features (and without unnecessary features) and the fact that software modifications can be performed by the system designer with ease (Wang and Strong, 1996). The system sophistication dimension denotes a user-friendly system (Miller and Doyle, 1987) that is easy-to-use, well documented, has a quick turnaround time (Bailey and Pearson, 1983), and uses modern technology enabling user-friendliness of systems. The items used in this research are similar to those used by Nelson et al. (2005). The scale items for System Flexibility and System Sophistication are listed in Appendix B.2.