1. Why User Involvement is Essential
User involvement is arguably one of the most important aspects of a system development
cycle. Contemporary system developers understand that meaningful user involvement coupled
with overall user orientation is vital for the success of any project development. In a study
conducted by Jonathan (2010) user involvement into software development, management
support, and clear statement of the system requirement were highlighted as three of the most
essential requirements in system development. User involvement is considered as critical in
contemporary system development because of a number of reasons. To begin with, users provide
critical information to system developers particularly during the feasibility study and design
phases. System developers need to know the existing problem and identify the system
requirements from the user’s perspective in order to develop a system that is user-oriented.
Ponniah (2010) argue that users are experts in their work and system developers should not
ignore their input particularly in the system definition processes.
Consequently, user involvement helps system developers establish easy and fast
methodologies to solving the existing system problem. Through user participation, system
developers can assess and certify data from secondary sources, assess various methodologies,
and choose the ones that best solve the identified challenges. Furthermore, Ponniah (2010)
argues that user involvement lead to adoption of simpler methods in designing and validating the
system’s functionality.
User involvement particularly in an existing system can help system developers to
organize features into menus and dialog boxes in a manner that best fits the user. Based on the
old development approaches, system developers often considered the users’ working habits
making it difficult for the users to understand and manipulate yet, such systems may be
considered to be easy to use from the developer’s perspective. With user involvement, the
conflict between the users and the developers are often reduced making it easy to understand and
define the system.
Finally, user involvement is vital to the understanding of users’ lexicons by the system
developers so that they may communicate in the same language as the user. Since most
developers are often outside the system, users provide critical information through their
experiences with the system, which informs the basis of future systems. If the same language can
be used when communicating to the users, system development efficiency is easily sped up.
Responsibilities for user participation
According to Ponniah (2010), user participation in system development includes the
behaviors, assignments, and activities that users perform during the system development
lifecycle. For proper utilization of users as a resource in system development, their
responsibilities, and behaviors should be well defined and established during project planning.
From the above scenario, I would propose for the organization of user participation into two
dimensions: actual system development phase and system application. During system
development phase, users would be required to participate in surveys that seek to help the data
warehouse developers to comprehensively understand and define the requirements of the
proposed system. At the system implementation and application level, users would be actively
involved in the testing phase of the system. At this level, users would be required to give

2. responses to survey questions designed to capture both their psychological and physical
experiences of the new system.
References
Jonathan, G. (2010). Data quality management: the most critical initiative you can
implement. New York: Intelligent Solutions, Inc.
Ponniah, P. (2010). Data warehousing fundamentals for IT professionals. New Jersey: A John
Wiley & Sons, Inc.