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TopInnovation methods that involve customers and enable companies to deduce their needs are therefore widely discussed. Some customers are more appropriate to co-develop new products and services than others. Therefore, the IT suppliers and end users have created opportunities to be integrated and to exchange their knowledge and competencies needed for joint information system development. Collaborative engineering is an emerging approach to designing collaborative work practices for high-value recurring tasks. To implement a collaborative work practice, groups need to be trained or require facilitation support. A key requirement is the users' willingness to change. In the information system life cycle, the designers analyse the system and basing on design patterns derived from their expertise, they propose changes that are evaluated by the user community and then implemented. Involving end users in the development process requires that end users and developers can communicate in a common language to identify and specify requirements as well as solutions.
Participatory Design
The participatory design has focused on the design of user application or the co-realization of a more holistic composition of new and existing technologies and practices. Infrastructural design issues like programming languages, security and resource models do not seem to be in need of partnership and participatory design. According to Torpel et al. participatory design (PD) is about the direct participation of those whose working lives will change as a consequence of the introduction of a computer application (Torpel et al., 2009). PD assumes that users are the best to determine how to improve their work, and the designers should only be consultants.
User Centered Design
The User Centered Design (UCD) is a philosophy that is based on the needs and interests of users, emphasizing the creation of usable and understandable products. Not only the profile, the activities and environments of users are being investigated, but also their goals. UCD is a process focusing on usability throughout the entire development process and further throughout the system life cycle. The key principles of UCD are as follows: user focus, active user involvement, evolutionary system development, simple design representations, prototyping, evaluation of use in a context, holistic design, process customization (Gulliksen et al., 2005).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Information: Technology (IT): Hardware and software that people use to support the information-processing needs of an organization.
Context: Any information that can be used to characterize the situation of an entity. An entity is a person, place or object that is considered relevant to the interaction between a user and an application, including the user and applications themselves.
End-User: A person, who is working on work stations, PCs, laptops, notebooks or any other computerized mobile devices. The goal of that activity is information processing for business or for private purposes.
Cognition: Information collecting, analyzing, and concluding process that is required to better know human and natural environment. Process realized by humans as well as by machine and software agents.
IT Prosumption: End-User Development, i.e., development of information systems by end users rather than information system specialists.
Business Information Systems: A computer-based system helps employees deal with the planning for, development, management, and use of business information.