Rethinking User Participation in Information Systems Development: A Knowledge Perspective

Participation of users in the information systems development (ISD) process has been widely advocated by both academicians and practitioners. Most researchers utilize user participation as a behavioral construct when studying various ISD outcomes. However, both the ISD literature and the Participative Decision-Making (PDM) literature imply the insufficiency of the behavioral approach to participation, especially when studying productivity-related ISD outcomes. This research adopts an efficacy approach to participation, and proposes knowledge participation as a new construct to assess the effectiveness of participative activities performed by users in an ISD process. The construct of knowledge participation is studied to ascertain whether it has more predicative power than user participation when predicting productivity-related ISD outcomes. In addition, team cognition, specified here by its two elements - shared awareness of expertise location and shared task understanding, are proposed as a mediating mechanism that transforms the effect of knowledge participation on ISD productivity outcomes such as team performance and system quality. Some ISD environmental factors, such as business context complexity, system complexity, management support, and project size are studied as control variables. An experimental study and a field study are designed to test the proposed research model