A Review of User Involvement in Information System Projects

Abstract

In this study the authors provide a comprehensive literature survey of user involvement in information system projects. Specifically, the authors document and summarize user involvement by identifying studies that investigate user roles and activities, selection of users, type of communications used, and timing and level of their involvement. The authors review papers that employed various research methods and empirical studies whose models incorporated moderating and mediating factors, longitudinal studies, focus groups and case studies. The authors document the conditions favoring selected topics, models and metrics as well as highlight the contradicting results not supporting user involvement. This study constitutes an initial and systematic documentation of user involvement in information system projects and presents the opportunity to further improve the research in this subject area by leveraging findings and limitations of the current literature.

Business user impact on information system projects

“…We conducted a comprehensive literature study that guided us to identify the constructs (Eichhorn and Tukel, 2015) in the model; Tables AI and AII summarize the studies. In Table AI, we present 42 studies that develop theory related to UP, and in Table AII, we summarize 67 empirical studies and meta-analyses providing 89 findings that are incorporated in our research along with a description of contribution of each.…”

“…Early IS methodologies were plan driven in that they focused on generating detailed plans of tasks to be performed and then monitored the execution of that plan; they typically involved users only at the beginning and end of project lifecycles. There are, however, research findings indicating that some aspects of UP should exist in all phases of the development life cycle (Eichhorn and Tukel, 2015).…”

“…Ariyachandra and Frolick (2008) note the need for specific assignments and responsibilities in their study of critical success factors in business performance management projects (which typically have a broader scope than IS projects, p. 114). The literature suggests three broad user activities for successful IS projects: activities that relate to identification of business requirements, quality assurance activities, and project management activities (Eichhorn, 2014). Thamhain (2013) finds that changing project requirements is both the most frequently cited risk and the risk with the potential for greatest impact to the project’s performance.…”

“…User satisfaction is a multidimensional construct that includes process measures (predominantly related to objective measures such as budget, time and scope) and product measures. The product measures can be further divided into those that convey the degree to which the system meets the business objective that motivated the IS and those that convey the technical implementation and support of the system (Eichhorn, 2014).…”

A Participatory Model for Multi-Document Health Information Summarisation

“…Zowghi et al (2015) conducted a systematic review of the relationship between user involvement and system success to reveal a positive correlation between the two, alongside factors for effective management of user involvement. Eichhorn & Tukel (2015) present a further review of user involvement, taking into account multiple factors such as user roles and activities, selection of users, type of communications used, and timing and level of their involvement. Both these reviews emphasise on the importance of user participation to effectuate relevance in design, development and implementation success.…”