Information system development: From user participation to contingent interaction among involved parties
van Marjolein Offenbeek, Paul L. Koopman · European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology · 1996
Over the last few decades many social scientists have pointed to the importance of user participation in information system development (SD). In study A the opinions of 314 Dutch system developers on this issue were examined. The conclusion is that the majority rate the value of user participation highly. However, these data confront us with three important problems. First, we cannot be sure that the stated preferences of system developers are reflected in their actual behaviour. Second, system developers may give a different meaning to the concept “user participation” than social scientists. Third, “user participation” does not necessarily imply “user influence” on SD. Moreover, the empirical relationship between user participation and the effectiveness of SD remains unclear. In our opinion this can be attributed both to the multidimensional nature of the former concept and to the contingency of this relationship to the context of SD. Therefore, in study B, we developed a multidimensional contingency model to study the interaction among parties in SD instead of the study of user participation. In this explorative study no linear relationship between the effectiveness of SD and the interaction between users and system developers was found. Instead, effective SD seemed to require a fit between the context of SD and the interactions with and among users.