Value of Information Systems and Products: Understanding the Users’ Perspective and Values

ABSTRACT Developers aim at providing value through their systems and products. However, value is not financial only, but depends on usage and users' perceptions of value. In this paper, we clarify the concept of value from the users' perspective and the role of user involvement in providing value. First, theories and approaches of psychology, marketing and human-computer interaction are reviewed. Secondly, the concept of 'user values' is suggested to clarify the concept of value from the user's point of view and a category framework of user values is presented to make them more concrete and easier to identify. Thirdly, the activities and methods for adopting user values in development work are discussed. The analysis of the literature shows that value has been considered in multiple ways in development. However, users' perspectives have received less attention. As a conclusion, we draw future research directions for value-centered design and propose that user involvement is essential in identifying user values, interpreting the practical meaning of the values and implementing them in development work. INTRODUCTION As Hirschheim and Klein (1989) point out, all system developers approach the development task with a number of explicit and implicit assumptions about the nature of human organizations, the nature of design task, and what is expected of the developers. One of the most critical assumptions relates to what is seen as valuable in information systems. Companies are most often interested in measuring the business value of the investments, but also other perspectives on value have become popular. For example, Cronk and Fitzgerald (1999) describe how the research focusing on business value has proceeded from using only a financial perspective towards organizational performance and other perspectives. This has happened after the recognition of the difficulty of isolating IS.s contribution from other organizational and external confounding factors. Thus, Cronk and Fitzgerald (1999) propose the three dimensions of IS business value to be: 1) system-dependent dimension, 2) user-dependent dimension, and 3) business-dependent dimension. The user-dependent dimension describes the value that is added to the organization as a result of user characteristics. User characteristics include skills and attitudes that may result in effective or ineffective use of the system. Thus, users are recognized as an essential dimension in value creation. In addition, the value of the information system can be evaluated from different stakeholders. point of views. Usually, the manager.s and system provider.s points of views are the most influential. For example, Bannister (2001) observes that the perspectives of the provider and the consumer or citizen are different in the evaluation of the public sector information systems, but that the consumers. perspective is easily overlooked and replaced with the provider.s perspective of the value. Value-based software engineering strives towards making value considerations explicit throughout software engineering and optimizing decisions to meet explicit objectives of the involved stakeholders, from marketing staff and business analysts to developers, architects, and quality experts, and from process and measurements experts to project managers and executives (Biffl, Aurum, Boehm, Erdogmus, and Grunbacher 2006, p. IX). Users are seen as one stakeholder group and user involvement and negotiations are seen as approaches for identifying their win conditions. There is also a clear and growing focus on value-centered design in a fairly recent development in human-computer interaction. Cockton (2004ab, 2005) introduces a development framework for value-centered design where the focus is on the value of the product for users. Later, Cockton (2006) selects ? worth. as being a less loaded term than ? value. and starts to refer to ? value-centred design. as ? worth-centred development. …