M-services Adoption in Oman Using Technology Acceptance Modeling Approach

M-services (Mobile services) and commerce are growing rapidly with the explosive growth of mobile devices, technologies and networks. Hence, many enterprises use them to grow revenue, reduce costs, maintain their competitive edge and achieve high performance. This advancement in mobile technologies has also influenced many government organizations to go mobile with their services and Oman is not an exception. Oman has just started to utilize mobile channels to offer Mservices to its citizens and clients. Although there were many services introduced, but it was hard to find evidence of any study conducted to determine their successes or failures. This study is an attempt to explore adoption issues of these services. This study used a survey questionnaire to collect data on users accessing the M-services, users’ attitudes and the users’ preferences to use these services. The results indicated that little over 50% of the users had positive attitudes towards the M-services and similar number of users indicated their preference to use them. This finding is in accordance to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), which states that the attitudes determine the intention to use which lead to the actual usage of the system. There were many users having negative attitudes toward these services. This study also explored some possible reasons which might be contributing towards the users’ negative attitudes are the lack of users’ awareness of these services; their usefulness; mobile technology literacy, publicity and marketing, which are needed to be addressed by the service providers for a greater success of the M-service adoption in Oman.