Abstract
User-oriented approaches to designing IT are consistently promoted by academic and practitioner literature. These orients the design process around the specific practices and needs of end-users to build usable and relevant systems. However, an increasingly relevant but little explored context for the design of IT is that of implementing generic enterprise software solutions. In this paper, we explore conditions for user-oriented design during the implementation of generic enterprise software. Our empirical data is based on an ongoing engaged research project, where we work with the vendor of a global generic software solution and a set of implementation specialist groups (ISGs). Together, we explore how user-oriented design during implementation of the software solution can be supported and promoted. The paper contributes to the body of knowledge on the design and implementation of generic enterprise software by identifying several challenges and three conditions for user-oriented design in this context. The conditions are: the project configuration, the implementation practices of the ISGs, and the features and adaption capabilities of the generic software solution. We further contribute by discussing their implications for vendors who want to support and promote user-oriented design during implementation of their software solutions.
Recommended Citation
Li, Magnus, "Generic Enterprise Software Implementation as Context for User-Oriented Design: Three Conditions and their Implications for Vendors" (2021). 12th Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems. 4.
https://aisel.aisnet.org/scis2021/4