User involvement is a widely accepted principle in development of usable systems. However, it is a vague concept covering many approaches. This study first clarifies the nature of user involvement and its expected benefits, and secondly reviews three streams of research, to evaluate the benefits and problems of varied user involvement approaches in practice. The particular focus of this study is on the early activities in the development process. An analysis of the literature suggests that user involvement has generally positive effects, especially on user satisfaction, and some evidence exists to suggest that taking users as a primary information source is an effective means of requirements capture. However, the role of users must be carefully considered and more cost-efficient practices are needed for gathering users' implicit needs and requirements in real product development contexts.

User involvement: A review of the benefits and challenges

One result of the increasing sophistication and complexity of MIS theory and research is the number of studies hypothesizing and testing for moderation effects. A review of the MIS and broader management literatures suggests researchers investigating moderated relationships often commit one or more errors falling into three broad categories: inappropriate use or interpretation of statistics, misalignment of research design with phenomena of interest, and measurement or scaling issues. Examples of nine common errors are presented. Commission of these errors is expected to yield literatures characterized by mixed results at best, and thoroughly erroneous results at worse. Procedures representing examples of best practice and reporting guidelines are provided to help MIS investigators avoid or minimize these errors.

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In pursuit of moderation: nine common errors and teir solutions

The level of end-user satisfaction with information technology (IT) has widely been accepted as an indicator of IT success. The present research synthesizes and validates the construct of IT end-user satisfaction using a meta-analysis. It accomplishes this by analysing the empirical results of 45 end-user satisfaction studies published between 1986 and 1998 and by focusing on relationships between end-user satisfaction and nine variables: perceived usefulness, ease of use, user expectations, user experience, user skills, user involvement in system development, organizational support, perceived attitude of top management toward the project and user attitude toward information systems (IS) in widely divergent settings. The present analysis found positive support for the influence of all nine variables on end-user IT satisfaction but to varying degrees. The most significant relationships were found to be user involvement in systems development, perceived usefulness, user experience, organizational support and user attitude toward the IS. This has implications for IS analysis and design as well as user training and the development of training support packages.

Variables affecting information technology end-user satisfaction

The participation of users in system development and its role in IS success have been core topics of IS research since the 1960s, yet critical analysis and recent changes in IS practice suggest the need to revisit the topic. The purpose of this paper is to revitalize participation as an important area of IS theorizing and research and to build the foundations for an updated theory that is robust enough to accommodate changing IS practice. In this paper, we critically analyze traditional IS participation theory and show that it contains partial and conflicting explanations for participation’s effects on system success. These explanations leave important conceptual issues unresolved, particularly when viewed in light of developments such as ERP system installations, outsourcing, and new software development approaches such as contextual design. To address these gaps, we outline the key elements of a new theoretical framework, including a redefined concept of system success, an elaborated conceptualization of participants and other actors, a fine-grained characterization of participation activities, and a restatement of hypothesized causal links among the concepts. We conclude with a brief discussion of research strategies for investigating the framework.

Participation in Development and Implementation —Updating An Old, Tired Concept for Today's IS Contexts ∗

https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/5050.pdf

The relationship between user participation and system success: a simultaneous contingency approach

User participation in information systems development is considered the key to system success in organizations. The empirical evidence, however, does not support this. A review of the literature suggests that one critical weakness in empirical investigations is inadequacy of operational measures of participation to gauge user influence on system design. Furthermore, there is also a growing consensus that the contradictory evidence may be due to a contingent, rather than a direct, relationship between participation and system success. This conception asserts that the outcome of user participation may depend on various contextual variables.One variable in particular--users' system-related functional expertise--is believed to moderate the outcome of participation. This paper derives the contingent effect of user expertise and reports the results of a controlled laboratory experiment and a field survey conducted to test it. The data suggest that users who perceive themselves as functional experts, relative to others, are unlikely to accept a system unless they exerted a substantive influence on its design. On the other hand, users who perceive themselves as functional nonexperts, relative to others, are likely to accept a system regardless of the extent of their influence on its design. This finding suggests user expertise as a useful criterion for selecting participants to serve on design teams and for determining the appropriate extent of a participant user's influence on system design.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/40398207

Naveed Saleem

Papers

An empirical test of the contingency approach to user participation in information systems development