A survey of information technology in the U.K. service sector

Abstract Relationships between the use of information technology and organizational variables have been analysed using a sample of 638 business organizations in the service sector in the U.K. Data for the study were collected through a mail survey. Among the results presented here are the variation of the proportions of managers and information workers with size of organization, and the relationship between the use of computers and profitability. Discriminant analysis was used to distinguish between organizations using computers and those not using them. The study shows that organizations using computers tend to have more formality in communications, a higher growth rate and a higher proportion of information workers than organizations not using computers. The variation of computer capacity with size of organization is also examined.