End-User Development for Individualized Information Management: Analysis of Problem Domains and Solution Approaches

Abstract

Delivering the right information at the right time to the right persons is one of the most important requirements of today’s business world. Nevertheless, enterprise systems do not always provide the information in a way suitable for the individual information needs and working practices of business users. Due to the complexity of enterprise systems, business users are not able to adapt these systems to their needs by themselves. The adoption of End-User Development (EUD) approaches, supporting end-users to create individual software artifacts for information access and retrieval, could enable better utilization of existing information and better support of the long tail of end-users’ needs. In this paper, we assess possibilities for improving information management through EUD, by analyzing relevant problem domains and solution approaches considering fundamental aspects of technology acceptance theories. The analysis is based on a questionnaire survey, conducted in three midsized German companies. We investigate the domains of information access and the flexible post-processing of enterprise data. Therefore we assess the importance of the respective domain for the work of end-users, perceived pain points, the willingness to engage in related EUD activities and the perceived usefulness of concrete EUD approaches we developed to address the respective domains.