Project Collaboration, not just User Participation

Markus and Mao (2004) provide a thorough and insightful review of the user participation literature. They identify confusions and other issues related to situational factors that affect the importance and feasibility of user participation. They propose a new user participation framework and nine related propositions. This paper proposes a more radical approach of focusing on business/IT collaboration in projects related to IT-reliant work systems. It argues that “project collaboration” should replace “user participation” as the core of the discourse because it better expresses major challenges and clarifies the nature of project success. The concept of project collaboration applies to the larger project of improving an IT-reliant work system, rather than the more limited project of developing and implementing software/ hardware configurations. In conjunction with other Figures presented here, this paper’s project collaboration framework can be used in research, teaching, and guiding projects in practice.