The Impact of Operational User Participation on Perceived System Implementation Success: An Empirical Investigation

Researchers have found that some system design activities for users are effective in terms of satisfaction and commitment (13), user involvement and user attitude (12) and performance (12, 13). As Markus and Mao (19) suggest, activities in different stages of the life cycle and participants should be clearly defined and studied. Many researchers (7, 16, 20, 30) suggest that user participation in the analysis stage should be more important to system success than user participation in the design stage. Most of these studies have focused only on those project team members who have been assigned formal responsibility within the project scope instead of on the operational users who have no formal responsibility within the project scope but their work life will be affected by the system. The relative contribution of operational end user participation, in the different stages has, to date, not been empirically investigated. This study reports the results of a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of operational end user participation in two important stages of the system development life cycle: analysis and design on perceived participation, intention to use, process satisfaction and perceived ownership. There were 210 students from 3 universities in the United States who voluntarily participated in this experiment. The General Linear Model and a Structural Equation Modeling technique were used to analyze the data collected to test the hypotheses. The major findings indicate that when users are not assigned any formal project development responsibility, user participation and desire to participate still has a significant influence on perceived participation and perceived participation has a significant influence on intention to use, process satisfaction and perceived ownership. In both stages, users perceiving higher participation perceived higher process satisfaction, ownership, and intention to use than users who perceived lower participation. Further, user participation in the analysis activities led to higher, but not significant, perceived participation than user participation in the design activities. This study showed preliminary evidence that after meaningful participation in one stage of analysis or design activities, further material participation in other stages may not be necessary to promote user satisfaction with the process. The results of this study suggest a basis for resource allocation with regard to end user participation in systems development projects.