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the division of labor between him and the others
users in his office:
lustrated with the following comment from the
application coordinator:
Regular users do not make changes in VB, I do it.
Users notify me about needs for making changes
or modifying modules in VB.
As application coordinator, I have access to make
and save changes to VB. These possibilities are
not available to the regular users; it is only a few
selected super users and me. This difference is
made visible in VB in that the tailoring tools are
“grayed out” in the regular users' interface.
Modifications to VB are performed by the
local developer and by some of the super users.
When making modifications, there is an explicit
organization in the community of users regarding
the transformation of the object into outcome. The
object is here to make VB work in interactions
with their clients, and to achieve this they need
to cooperate within their community in the lo-
cal offices to make the changes in VB. A similar
division of labor can be found between the ap-
plication coordinator and the software house, in
situations where he has to consult the developers
to solve a EUD problem that involves application
programming. The following comment from the
application coordinator illustrates the situation:
Technologically, two levels of access rights
to the system's tailoring features manifest the
division of labor between local developers and
regular users:
use mode
and
design mode
(see
Figure 3). In this way, division of labor enables
boundary objects, in this case, tailoring tools to
serve as a link between the community of users
and the community of developers.
The Company
experimented for a while before they decided to
modify the access rights to these tools. This may
be a result of the size of the company (close to
1,000 accountants) and the multitude of special-
ized solutions that were created with VB. To make
the system manageable, it became necessary to
restrict full tailoring rights to only a handful of
super users. Finally, the technique of “graying
out” is a feature of software components to make
the tools that do not apply to certain users or in
certain situations unavailable. It is associated
with the over-design strategy to end-user devel-
opment that was presented in the beginning of
this chapter.
I don't do any programming within VB (Visma
Business). For that I need the professional devel-
opers. I report possible improvements, and maybe
we see a result of it in the next version.
The EUD activities performed by the applica-
tion coordinator include selecting modules to be
part of a new business solution and modifying
the menus and fields within new and existing
solutions. The local developers cannot modify
the program behind the menus and fields because
this is written in a proprietary language. Program-
ming of this kind is judged to be too complex
for someone not trained as a programmer and is
therefore left to professional developers in the
software house. It is more complex than writing
macros in Excel, which is a task most super users
and even some regular users are quite familiar
with, and sometimes workarounds are made by
integrating VB with Excel functionality. It is il-
summary and ConClusion
We have presented a case study of the organiza-
tional implementation of a complex (multipurpose)
business application in an accounting Company.
During this process, the Company chose to use
super users and a local developer, referred to as
application coordinator, to support the adoption
and use of the system, including tailoring it to the
needs of local offices. We observed the EUD ac-
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