The Evolution of an Information System for Managerial Use: a longitudinal study

Abstract

The failure of many Information Systems (IS) designed for use by managers may be due to the fact that traditional IS methodologies were used in their development. In this paper we describe an organisation's efforts, over a period of four years, to develop an IS for use by senior management and show how traditional methodologies have impeded the involvement of the intended users of the system from the development process resulting in poor specification of user requirements and inflexible systems. From this experience we verify the superiority of an evolutionary prototyping methodology for the development of these types of systems.