The Importance Of End-User Analysis In New Information System Adapters: Lessons Learned From Practice

The implementation of Information System (IS) in new-IS adapters can remain unused even when they developed properly. The previous research shows that the unsuccessful IS utilization problem primarily related to behavioral issues rather than technical issues. The behavioral issues should be addressed in the stakeholder analysis, an activity in the inception phase of requirement engineering. End-users of an IS are one of the focuses in stakeholder analysis. We studied the correlation of the end-user analysis in new-IS adapters with the successfulness of IS utilization. We conducted a qualitative studied on 20 IS development projects. The findings show strong correlation of the end-user behavior and the IS adoption. We suggest the end-user analysis is necessary for the IS development project in new-IS adapters. We concluded that it is recommended to formally get the end-user commitment before starting the IS development process. Keyword : Information System, end-user analysis, new-IS adapters, end-user commitment The implementation of Information System (IS) has been closely related to developments in computer hardware and software. It is now common to talk about "computer generations" with respect to hardware development. The Information System generation has already been distinguished as well. In today's society, the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has been integrated in the business environment of various organizations or institutions, and hence enable the implementation of IS. The aim of implementing IS to increase business productivity and efficiency and ultimately increase profitability has attempted many new ICT users to implement IS in their business process. However the implementation of IS can remain neglected or misused even when they are developed technically successful (7). Markus and Keil pointed out that in 1994 the unused or underused systems cost U.S. business millions of dollars each year even though they are technically successful (8). Yogesh and Dennis (7) findings suggest that this problem primarily related to behavioral issues rather than technical issues. They suggested that the user motivation and commitment are essential for IS sustainability. The users' perceptions of an IS determine the successful adoption of that IS (7). The phenomenon of unused IS has been also found in many IS that have been developed in new adapters. It is based on our survey on the IS development projects that undertaken in new IT users (which is also new IS-adapters) in an underdeveloped country, that is Indonesia. The adoption of ICT in Indonesia has been increasing recently. The report of Minges (9) shows that the growth of Internet awareness has lead to the development of application that utilized ICT. ICT enabled IS are increasingly used in many organizations in Indonesia. This paper will presented the facts from practices related to the IS successfulness with the user's behavioral issue. Those facts are gathered from software development practitioners that had developed an IS for a new ICT adapters (which is also new IS-adapters). We than used those facts to find the correlation between the behavioral issue with the successfulness of IS adoption in new users. This finding will give better guidance for IS developers and managers, and hence will increase the successfulness of IS in that particular environment. Furthermore, this research can be very useful to reduce the ICT gap between developed and developing countries like Indonesia. The rest of the paper will be organized as follow: Section 2 will address the literature review on end-user analysis. Section 3 describes the IS development projects that are used as the object of the study. In Section 4 we will present the facts finding from the studied project. Section 5 discussed the findings and concludes the result of the study.