End User Development of Information Artefacts: A Design Challenge for Enterprise Systems

Delivering the right information at the right time to the right persons is one of the most important requirements of today’s business world. Business users have to deal with changing information needs, but suffer from their inability of adapting the used information systems to support their changing needs. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems, which act as the main source of information in many enterprises, are still too complex to be adapted to current information needs and working practises by business users themselves. Business users face considerable challenges when trying to use tools to create individual information artefacts to support and facilitate their working tasks. Targeted at improving the design of such tools, we started our design process with a qualitative empirical study, presented in this paper. The study discloses main problem areas business users face and identifies design challenges from an End User Development (EUD) point of view. The study was conducted as a combination of semi-structured interviews and a participatory design workshop, which were analysed to derive design constraints for EUD tools.