Integrating nominal group technique and joint application development: Impacts on the effectiveness of systems requirements determination

Improper specification of systems requirements has been the scourge of information systems delivery. It is pivotal in understanding the reasons systems fail to deliver intended benefits or are deemed "runaway projects." The correlation between ineffective systems requirements determination (SRD) and system failure has been well established. Researchers have linked the problem of ineffective SRD, among other things, with poor communication between systems designers and users.; Several techniques have been recommended and implemented to improve the effectiveness of systems requirements elicitation and analysis, but Joint Application Development (JAD) reputedly confronts the communication problems directly. JAD is a structured process that brings together problem holders and solution providers to develop jointly agreed decisions.; However, a JAD session is conducted with freely interacting groups. This makes it susceptible to all the pathologies associated with interacting groups and curtails its effectiveness. In this study we proposed the integration of JAD and the Nominal Group Technique (NGT) and hypothesized that this combined approach (NJAD) will overcome the communication problems that have typically beset SRD.; JAD reportedly cures many of the structural problems of the traditional approach to systems requirements definition but introduces some classical concerns of group interactions. NGT may neutralize these dysfunctional behaviors encountered in interacting groups and can be embedded within JAD structure.; The goal of this research project was to test the proposed solution. We accepted previous findings that JAD cured some of the problems of the traditional approach and evaluated the effects of integrating JAD and NGT to increase the odds of realizing the benefits that motivated the need for JAD.; A laboratory experiment was conducted to evaluate this theory. In this experiment communication structure (JAD, NJAD) was crossed with facilitation competence (low-skilled, highly skilled) in a 2 x 2 completely randomized design in which the facilitated group session was the unit of analysis. Twenty-four groups of six persons each were randomly assigned to one of the four treatments to specify high-level requirements for a simulated IS problem designed to demonstrate the processes and problems of systems analysis and design and to provide an appreciation for the significance of the human factors in this context. The requirements were rated by a panel of experts and the participants and facilitators reported their perceptions of the process and outcome.; The results strongly suggest that the integration of JAD and the NGT outperformed JAD by itself in all the dimensions we tested (quality, process effectiveness, and participants' satisfaction with both process and outcome) and confirmed our expectation that the integrated approach was at least as efficient. One other noteworthy indication from this study was that the integration of these structures seemed to contribute to reducing the criticality of excellent facilitation on group decision making.; Future research is required to incorporate the impact of group size, and task complexity on SRD results, to position NJAD against group support systems, to investigate similar phenomena in systems design and implementation, and to attempt to replicate these results in the field.