End-User Development of Enterprise Widgets

Companies are operating in a dynamic environment, resulting in a continuous need of adapting used information systems to changing business processes and associated information needs. Viewed from a micro-perspective, business users are managing and executing business processes on a daily basis, but are not able to adapt used software to their individual needs and working practice. In this paper, we present an End-User Development (EUD) approach and prototypic environment, enabling business users to create enterprise widgets tailored to their personal information needs without the need of programming knowledge, by mashing up enterprise resources using a lightweight visual design paradigm. The approach especially considers extensibility of building blocks for widget creation even by small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) using existing knowledge. We give evidence on the applicability of the approach in real enterprise contexts, by providing first results of an evaluation in three German SMEs.