Should we consider user readiness a prerequisite for information system development?

Journal of the Academy of Business and Economics, March, 2005 by Myron Sheu, Haejin Kim

ABSTRACT

Information system development (ISD) increasingly becomes a means of organizational change and virtually always triggers a wide variety of feelings from all stakeholders who are impacted in various ways. Motivated by the stubborn progress on the success rate of ISD, this research, in contrast to the previous research, hypothesizes that user readiness underpin all other user factors involved in ISD and conducts systematic interviews of 45 diverse ISD projects to examine the responsiveness of user readiness to project-specific efforts. Our interview findings indicate that user readiness does correlate with the success of ISD although such correspondence varies according to the complexity of ISD, that the motivational aspect of user readiness responds project-specific efforts more slowly than the cognitive aspect of user readiness, and that user readiness also interferes with other kinds of readiness, such as process readiness, data readiness, and more intimately, cultural readiness. The implications derived from our research findings call for a holistic approach to promoting user readiness across ISD projects and should help researchers and practitioners refocus their efforts in search of winning strategies for ISD.

Keywords: Information System Development, Information Systems, Organizational Change, Organizational Readiness, Cognition, Motivation, User Factor, User Readiness, User Satisfaction

1. INTRODUCTION

Nearly every information system development (ISD) triggers a wide variety of feelings from all stakeholders who have diverse interests and concerns about the proposed information system (IS), albeit their feelings usually remain unnoticed by the management. Conflicts among stakeholders intensify as an ISD progresses seemingly as scheduled, but they suddenly escalate when the acceptance phase approaches (Cohen, Birkin, Garfield, & Webb, 2004; Davis, 1993). By then, it is usually too costly to address any serious issues that underpin the conflicts unless major concessions are reached. Historically, the failure rate of ISD has been much higher than other kinds of system development. Numerous reports commented on high failure rates of ISD. Representatively, the Standish Group's CHAOS survey (1999) found that 84 percent of projects are considered unsuccessful because of significant schedule delays, severe budget overruns, and/or failure to meet the expectations. Such a chaotic situation does not seem much improved. A recent survey, conducted by the US Department of Defense, reported that only two percent of its software could be used as delivered (DCITA, 2004).

Amid the challenges, this research has investigated the interrelationships among user factors in ISD in general and the influence of user readiness on ISD in particular. In an empirical approach, our research began with a literature review through which we could clarify our research hypotheses, and interviewed a variety of stakeholders who shared their observations of 45 different ISD projects implemented by different organizations. The rest of this paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we summarize our literature review. We then present our research hypotheses in Section 3, describe our investigation schema in Section 4, analyze our interview data in Section 5, and discuss implications in Section 6. Finally, we give conclusive remarks in Section 7.

2. PREVIOUS RESEARCH ON USER FACTORS IN ISD

In the literature, incorporating the concerns from all stakeholders of a proposed IS have been a major research sphere in recent years largely because ISD increasingly becomes a vital force for a business to gain competitiveness. Strategic uses of IT invoke more functional and managerial concerns than technical ones. The intense research on the impact from functional users who are involved in ISD is witnessed in various constructs of user factor. User participation, user involvement, user attitudes, and user satisfaction are among the representative examples of these constructs. Of the constructs proposed previously, user satisfaction was considered as the primary outcome of an ISD (Gutek, Bikson, & Mankin, 1984; Doll, Deng, Raghunathan, Torkzadeh, & Xia, 2004), whereas the rest were considered as influencing factors of the ISD.

Initially, the construct of user participation was introduced both to depict users' behavioral engagement and to measure users' personal partaking in ISD (Kappelman, 1995; Barki & Hartwick, 1989). It was reported that user participation in ISD led to a higher level of acceptance and a lower level of stress among users (Korunka, Weiss, & Karetta, 1993). Another report by McKeen, Guimaraes, and Wetherbe (1994) also showed a positive correspondence between user participation and user satisfaction.

Due to increased user participation, conflicts arising in ISD, especially between IT and functional staff, were widely observed (Cohen, Birkin, Garfield, & Webb, 2004). As suggested in the literature, the tension between the user and IT groups can be attributed mainly to their different interests while others, such as poor communications and a lack of competence on either side, could further worsen the situation. The negative effect of these conflicts remained significant even after conflict management had been emphasized (Barki & Hartwick, 2001). Wagner, Leana, Locke, and Schweiger (1997) proposed a cooperation model that measures user participation with two emphases, namely, the technical cooperation and the managerial cooperation. The former focuses on the quality of decision support and functional input from the user group whereas the latter aims at the importance of the agent role of users in ISD.