Early User Involvement and Participation in Employee Self- Service Application Deployment: Theory and Evidence from Four Dutch Governmental Cases

This chapter theoretically and empirically addresses the notion that user participation and involvement is one of the important factors for IS success. Different models and studies are reviewed to define and classify types of early end-user involvement and participation. Next, five case studies are presented of Dutch governmental organizations (Ministries) that have recently deployed an employee self-service application. Based on interviews with developers, project managers and users it can be showed that the deployment success of such systems is positively related to the extent of early user involvement and participation. In addition, it was found that expectancy management is important to keep users informed about certain deployment decisions. In this way, employees can truly use the self-service applications without much support from the HRdepartments.