Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter VII
The Organization of
End User Development
in an Accounting Company
Anders I.
Mørch
University of Oslo, Norway
Hege-René Hansen Åsand
University of Oslo, Norway
Sten R. Ludvigsen
University of Oslo, Norway
abstraCt
The chapter 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,
non-integrated systems. The system, Visma Business (VB), is a comprehensive financial and account-
ing 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 de-
veloper (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 drawing 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.
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