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a fundamental part of how work and responsibil-
ity are organized in the Company. When this can
be described in terms of community and objects
operating in an activity system, the explanation
of the organization of EUD can be put in a mean-
ingful context.
For our purposes, the activity of the super users
and local developers in the process of adapting
VB to new needs forms our unit of analysis. In
particular, we look at how EUD activities are me-
diated by artifacts such as VB, VB tailoring tools,
accounting practice, and computer knowledge.
Our analysis takes into account data sampled from
the entire EUD community in the Company, and
identifies the division of labor within the com-
munity according to what the various end user
developers do. We see EUD activities as several
activity systems (regular users, super users, local
developer, professional programmers) in their
effort of working together, and we try to relate
this to the various work procedures (rules) in the
workplace that constrain and enable EUD.
of labor when it came to implementing changes
proposed during the project. These were primar-
ily undertaken by the industry partners based on
research reports and knowledge dissemination
seminars delivered by the research units.
One of the industry partners, the Company,
figures in the case study we describe in this
chapter. The Company is an accounting consult-
ing company that is office-based, project-driven,
and geographically distributed, with a long-term
emphasis on competence development for its
employees. To that end, it has started to include
ICT in its agenda. Furthermore, the Company is
interested in research and development activi-
ties that can produce useful results not only for
its individual employees and its overall business
goals, but also for other companies that have a
similar organizational structure. The Company
had decided to implement a new computer applica-
tion, Visma Business, and this decision was made
prior to conception of the LAP project.
The Company makes its revenues by under-
taking accounting and tax consultancy services
for SMBs and large enterprises in the Nordic
region of Europe. It has around 1,000 employees
distributed in 75 offices across Scandinavia. The
Company has expanded in the last few years
through the acquisition of new offices. Until
recently, the Company had used a total of 13 dif-
ferent accounting systems to support the work of
its accountants. A decision was made in 2001 that
all offices should convert to one single applica-
tion, called Visma Business. This is a large and
complex generic computer application consisting
of several modules covering all aspects of ac-
counting. The employees in the Company work
with different clients and therefore have different
requirements regarding which functionality they
need or do not need. After the completion of the
adoption process, VB became the main tool for
all employees in the company, and for most of
them, this has had an impact on the tasks they
perform. In anticipation of this expected interac-
tion between tools and tasks, all of the employees
Case
The case we have analyzed is part of the re-
search and developmental project “Læring på
ArbeidsPlassen” (LAP, learning and knowledge
building at work). The LAP project, which started
in May 2002 and ended in December 2004, was
a consortium of six partners, with partial fund-
ing from the Research Council. The consortium
had two industrial partners (an oil company and
the accounting firm referred to as the Company),
three research units, and one national federation
of service companies. The project was classified
as “user-oriented,” a project category defined by
the Research Council, meaning that the industry
partners defined the research problems the three
research units should work on, while the methods,
techniques, and theories to address the problems
were selected or developed by the research partners
in collaboration. The effect of this was a division
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