User Involvement and MIS Success: A Review of Research

Blake Ives and Margrethe H. Olson
Additional contact information
Blake Ives: Tuck School of Business, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire 03755
Margrethe H. Olson: Graduate School of Business Administration, New York University, New York, New York 10006

Management Science, 1984, vol. 30, issue 5, 586-603

Abstract: User involvement in the design of computer-based information systems is enthusiastically endorsed in the prescriptive literature. However determining when and how much, or even if, user involvement is appropriate are questions that have received inadequate research attention. In this paper research that examines the link between user involvement and indicators of system success is reviewed. The authors find that much of the existing research is poorly grounded in theory and methodologically flawed; as a result, the benefits of user involvement have not been convincingly demonstrated. Until higher quality studies are completed intuition, experience, and unsubstantiated prescriptions will remain the practitioner's best guide to the determination of appropriate levels and types of user involvement; these will generally suggest that user involvement is appropriate for unstructured problems or when user acceptance is important. In order to foster higher quality integrated research and to increase understanding of the user involvement-system success relationship, the authors present the following: a conceptual framework into which previous research has been mapped that can provide direction to future efforts; a review of existing measures of user involvement and system success; a set of variables that have been proposed as potentially impacting the relationship between user involvement and system success.

Keywords: user involvement; participative decision making; information systems (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1984
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (58)

Downloads: (external link)
http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.30.5.586 (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ormnsc:v:30:y:1984:i:5:p:586-603

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Management Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().