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Much like the technology we manage, the Information Systems department is also changing. A great deal of this change has to do with changes in the interactions among IS professionals and IS end-users within the organization. Encouraged in the 1980s by the explosive growth of enduser computing (EUC) and the widespread realization that information assets must be managed strategically, IS professionals and end-users are much more familiar with each other today than they were a decade ago. Today's IS professional knows a great deal more about the business of the organization, and today's end-user knows a great deal more about the business of the IS department.
Given this "convergence" of organizational and EUC, some suggest that it is less appropriate to define EUC in terms of hardware platform or applications, and more appropriate to define it in terms of who controls the resource. And today, end-users control the majority of the organization's information assets. The problem we face as IS professionals is that we are charged with managing these information resources that we do not control, and to do so in a cost-effective, integrated, and flexible manner that supports the overall goals of the organization. This requires a partnership between end-users and the IS department.
One of the ways to facilitate the development of such a partnership is user empowerment. Much like other popular organizational innovations of the 1990s such as total quality management (TQM), self-managed work teams, and continuous quality improvement, some of the greatest benefits of EUC and client/server architectures result from worker (i.e., user) empowerment. Empowerment is about control. But sometimes small steps are needed since too much control, too quickly, can have negative consequences. We examine how one organization utilized training to provide an early opportunity for user empowerment and how that small empowerment paid off in large benefits to the organization as a whole, and in improvements to the relationship between end-users and IS professionals. We close with some suggestions for applying these principles in other organizations.
Training, Empowerment & Motivation
User participation is generally embraced as critical to the successful development and implementation of information systems because it helps ensure accurate requirements specifications, facilitates relevant input/output designs, and fosters a sense of empowerment and ownership among users by...