Nathan Lakew

Extending a Systems Analysis Method for Business Professionals

Despite having been explored, described, theorized, and measured in hundreds of IS research articles, frequent difficulties related to user participation and business/IT communication persist in relation to project management, specification of requirements, implementation in organizations, business/IT alignment, and IS failures. We report on an extension of a long term design science research project that previously demonstrated a possible path toward addressing these longstanding problems by empowering business professionals to analyze systems in business terms rather than in formalisms for IT specialists. Previous research demonstrated that most of 75 working business professionals with extensive business experience were able to use the then current iteration of a work system analysis template to analyze IT-reliant work systems in their own organizations, and to recommend improvements. The current research extends the previous efforts by evaluating natural field studies by managers taking coursework for advanced degrees in MBA and MSIS. We analyze 84 examples collected over 7 consecutive academic terms to evaluate the success of several successive versions of the design artifact, concluding that business and IS professionals are able to use the design artifact effectively and that a revised template generated better results.

Sustaining IT Usefulness – Re-defining End Users’ Role as Contextual Designers

A framework for understanding and interpreting IT usefulness and fitness attributes is presented. This framework is grounded on a relationship that exists between organisms and their landscape. The concept draws on the notion that sustainable relationship between two systems (such as IT and end-users) can be achieved through structural coupling results from mutual perpetuations. In this setting, while contextual usefulness is established in the end-users’ environment, IT designers perpetuate fitness into the conceptual environment. Their relationship suggests that usefulness feeds essential input that enables to create a sustainable fitness attribute. Based on the empirical evidence, the paper demonstrates that end-users are better equipped with defining contextual usefulness of IT systems while IT designers’ role to create fitness attribute enables a long-term use of IT artifacts.