End user computing: how an organisation can maximise potential

Abstract

End user computing (EUC) is an activity that is attracting increasing interest from information systems (IS) researchers and business organisations. The vast increase over recent years of the use of IT as part of everyday business activities, and the growing direct involvement of business users in application development, clearly has implications for modern organisations. We discuss how an organisation might best approach the task of optimising the effectiveness of end user developed applications, and also of maximising the contribution that can be made by IT specialists. As part of this discussion we outline a modelling approach which is designed to enable the prediction of the impact of changes to identified success factors on the effectiveness of end user developed applications. We discuss the results of a questionnaire survey of 69 business users. We show how business users can be categorised by their levels of IT/business/IS knowledge and expertise, and how this can be used to identify which users are best suited to taking part in end user centred development projects.