The impact of non-leader user participation on perceived system success in stages of the system development life cycle

Many information systems researchers and practitioners believe user participation is beneficial to successful information system development. However, the benefit of user participation has not been consistently demonstrated in prior empirical research. Ives and Olson (1984) and Barki and Hartwick (1994) suggest that one of the problems for this is that user participation activities are not clearly defined.; Barki and Hartwick (1994) developed and validated measures of user participation and proposed dimensions of user participation. Hartwick and Barki (1994) found that the critical dimension of user participation is overall responsibility . They suggest that overall responsibility should be assigned to as many users as possible. This suggestion is problematic for many reasons. It is, therefore, important to investigate the impact of user participation when users are not assigned any overall responsibility.; Activities in other stages, such as analysis, have not been clearly defined and studied. Many researchers (Edstrom, 1977; Zmud & Cox, 1979; McKeen, 1983; Kim & Lee, 1986) suggest that user participation in the analysis stage should be more important to system success than user participation in the design stage. However, the relative contribution of user participation in the different stages has not been empirically investigated.; This study conducted a laboratory experiment to investigate the impact of the degree of user participation and the relative contribution of user participation in two important stages of the system development life cycle: analysis and design.; The major findings indicated that users in high participation conditions perceived significantly higher perceived participation than those who were in the low participation conditions. Perceived participation was positively and significantly related to intention to use, perceived ownership, and process satisfaction.; Although user participation is beneficial to information system development, user participation is a very costly activity in terms of taking users' resources and delaying project schedules. This study showed preliminary evidence that after meaningful participation in analysis activities, further material participation in design activities may not be necessary. The results of this study suggest a basis for resource allocation with regard to end user participation in systems development projects.