Information technology in Nigerian federal agencies: problems, impact and strategies

The paper assesses the perceptions of personnel of Nigerian federal public agencies about obstacles to information technology (IT) use, the impact of computers on agency departments and tasks and about approaches to IT human resource development. The analyses are based on data from a questionnaire survey of the personnel of ministries, parastatals and Government-controlled banks who participated in various training programmes of the (Nigerian) National Centre for Economic Management and Administration (NCEMA) during 1997. The survey revealed that due to either lack of computing technologies in most of the agencies or of their ineffective exploitation, the majority of the personnel were, as recently as 1997, still unaware of, or unimpressed by, the productivity potentials of using computers in their agencies. However, they were eager for exposure to computer applications in their work. They also preferred informal and work-related training formats which, in their view, should most appropriately begin with middle-level personnel in the agencies. These and other perceptions suggest that most Nigerian public agencies are in the pre-computing, or very early, stages of the computing culture, hence their focus was more on understanding how to use computers to perform traditional and internal data processing chores than on providing strategic and client-targeted services.