Super Users and Local Developers

Abstract

The article presents a case study following the activities of super users and local developers during the adoption of a new business application by an accounting firm in Scandinavia (referred to as the Company). The Company launched a program to train super users to help with this process because of the complexity of the new system, a generic multipurpose application system replacing several older nonintegrated systems. The system, Visma Business (VB), is a comprehensive financial and accounting application delivered as a set of components that need to be configured for domain-specific tasks, depending on the clients the accountants will interact with. The super users and the local end user developer (also called the application coordinator) were asked to take part in this study. We documented their activities empirically and analytically, using interviews to gather data and draw on aspects of Activity Theory for the conceptual framework for analysis. Our findings provide insight into end-user development (EUD) activities with VB: what roles were created by the Company, what roles emerged spontaneously during the process, what the various user groups (regular users, super users, and the application coordinator) did, and how EUD was coordinated between super users and the application coordinator. Our findings show that super users fill an important niche as mediators between regular users and local developers and can make a significant contribution to the success of EUD efforts in a nontechnical application domain.

Towards Super User-Centred Continuous Delivery: A Case Study

“…Whether it is super user, power user, or champion user, the role goes by many names. Hansen and Anders [27] define super users as 'regular employees with in-depth knowledge of one or more of the organization's computer applications without being programmers'. Hence, skilled workers in their own field that also play a significant role as user representatives in system development, implementation, training, and support.…”

“…To be successful in this role, the super user should be positive towards adopting new technology, good communicators and be patient teachers, as reported by McNeive [28]. The use of super users has also been studied within end-user development, where users are empowered to make own configurations to a system or through the close collaboration with developers and IT-professionals [27,29,30]. End-user development or design-in-use has been suggested as an alternative to traditional system implementation, which takes place once the design is finished.…”

Mutual Development

“…From a software engineering perspective, EUD is supportive of the trend of producing generic applications (Bansler & Havn, 1994;Mørch, 1996). By "generic" is meant multifunctional, domain independent, or application generators, that is, specialized functionality that can be configured to different user needs (Åsand & Mørch, 2006), or domain independent tools like groupware and generic drawing programs, or "under designed" design environments that support users in creating new applications (Fischer et al 2004;Fischer & Scharff, 2000). For example, a groupware system can provide different users with different access rights to shared objects (Stevens & Wulf, 2002).…”

“…Users have different cultural, educational, training, and employment backgrounds. They are novice and experienced computer users (e.g., super user), ranging from the young to the mature, and they have many different abilities and disabilities (Åsand & Mørch, 2006;Costabile et al 2003;Mehandjiev, Sutcliffe, & Lee, 2006).…”

“…In a case study in an accounting company in Norway, the activities of end user developers were followed and analyzed using Activity Theory (Åsand & Mørch, 2006). The authors show how the company successfully initiated a program to train super users (Kaasbøll & Øgrim, 1994) in conjunction with introducing a new software application, Visma Business (VB).…”