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be classified as a combination of under-design
and over-design.
experts who have comprehensive knowledge of
organizational processes and product experts who
determine how the software operates. Boundary
spanners serve as “brokers” between the two
groups by employing various means to explain the
practices of one community to the other (Volkoff
et al., 2002). Mackay (1990) has used the term
“translation” to explain a related phenomenon
whereby a “gatekeeper” translates a user's prob-
lem into a technical solution. Local developers,
gardeners, boundary spanners, and gate keepers
are all roles assumed by super users.
The super users we studied in the Company
engaged in the type of EUD activities just de-
scribed, but they differ from the users described
above. The main difference is that the super
users we studied took on a contract-based role
assigned to them by the company for which they
work, whereas in the cases reported above, the
EUD actors emerged out of the group of regular
users as people who demonstrated proficiency
in using a system and who showed an interest in
helping other users learning to use it efficiently
as well. In the study reported by Volkoff et al
(2002), boundary spanners ended up taking on
two roles even though there were few rewards
for the extra role. The authors suggested the need
for “system sponsors” to provide special incen-
tives for boundary spanners in order to motivate
them and help them maintain credibility in both
communities, but in the companies reported on,
this was not achieved.
previous studies of organization of
eud
In a study at MIT in the late 1980s, Mackay (1990)
studied expert users of a UNIX windowing system
(X-Windows). Many of the users in that study
performed activities that went beyond regular use
of the system. For example, they would engage in
metalevel activities such as setting parameters for
the position of the screen's user interface objects
and storing them in a start-up file. Gantt and
Nardi (1992) studied users of a CAD application
(AutoCAD) and a spreadsheet application (Excel)
to find how well users employed built-in tailoring
tools. The authors found that users who tailored
their applications very often worked in groups,
and in those groups the authors identified one
or more users described as “local developers.”
These particular users were sometimes referred
to as “gardeners” to emphasize their ability to
“nurture” a user organization and assist regular
users to use the system more effectively. Other
authors have used these terms to describe similar
activities in other contexts (e.g., Christiansen,
1997; Kanstrup, 2004). A local developer, or
gardener, is an expert in the professional domain
who also has enough computer knowledge to
tailor an application to domain-specific needs. In
the context of AutoCAD, this meant adding new
templates (e.g., domain-specific drawing symbols)
and integrating them into the application. In the
context of Excel, it meant adding computational
depth to spreadsheet operations such as “sum” and
“average” by creating small scripts and macros
to operate across spreadsheet cells.
EUD goes beyond methods and techniques for
human-computer interface design and software
engineering and extends into user organizations as
well. Volkoff, Strong, and Elmes (2002) introduced
the term “boundary spanner” to designate indi-
viduals who can bridge the gap between domain
user-developer Continuum
Some organizations in Scandinavia use the term
“super user” in conjunction with the above activi-
ties and have started to train super users to address
the information overload problem associated
with the introduction of advanced information
systems. The term was first used, to the best of
our knowledge, to name IT staff asked to provide
technical assistance to other employees when a
new system was introduced in the organization
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