An Empirical Test of the Contingency Approach to User Participation in Information Systems Development

Abstract

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.