The Organization of End User Development in an Accounting Company - End User Computing Challenges and Technologies: Emerging Tools and Applications - page 114

Figure 3. Tailoring VB provides access to an expanded command set. A field “Sum” has been created
and added to a business solution for a real estate agent.

formed by telephone. Each interview started with
an e-mail introduction from the management of
the Company, followed by a more detailed e-mail
about the procedure, sent out by the LAP-project
researchers that would conduct the interviews
(one Ph.D. student and two master students). Each
interview took approximately 15 to 20 minutes.
Confidentiality was of great importance, and all
interviews were carried out by researchers and
not by the Company. By focusing on the research
as the agenda, we hoped to capture the variety in
experiences related to being a super user or be-
ing a regular user interacting with a super user.
In addition to these interviews, we conducted
interviews with the director of competence, and
the application coordinator. All interviews were
taped and transcribed. These transcripts together
with the contract the super users signed constitute
the basis for the analysis we present next.

empiriCal analysis

Activity theory provides a set of concepts that
is helpful to analyze our case. The emphasis on
activity brings certain features of a developmen-
tal process to the forefront that might otherwise
be overlooked when studying interaction with
technology. For example, there are different ac-
tors involved in EUD (regular users, super users,
and application coordinator) with different goals
and different artifacts to accomplish their work,
regulated by different work procedures (rules). To
explain how these phenomena are inter-related,
we have chosen to use the concepts of subjects,
community, objects, artifacts, and division of
labor in our analysis. For example, the relation-
ship between the artifact (VB or the professional
domain) and the object (the reason for EUD or
goal of tailoring) is reciprocal, creating a kind of
task-artifact-task dependency relation (Carroll,