Design Principles for Collaborative Enterprise Systems

Field User Studies + Collaboration Theory = Design Principles

Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems have become essential in industry, yet the potential value created through system use can be illusive due to poor usability. We have conducted a field study of ERP usage in 3 different organizations, and analyzed the collected data from the standpoint of human-computer collaboration. The collaboration stance changes the approach to analysis from the user being the only one with responsibilities and knowledge about the process to one in which the system is called upon to do its part. The result of this analysis is a set of four Design Principles for creating an ERP system that collaborates with its user.

In our DESRIST-2010 paper, we

• link the collaborative properties of a system to usability using empirical data and theory of collaboration,
• demonstrate the use of theory of collaboration to derive design principles for improving the usability of ERP systems,
• compare and contrast the existing usability methods with our collaboration-based approach

Implementing Design Principles for ERP system-partner

We have developed design sketches and proof-of-concept prototypes implementing the design principles proposed in our DESRIST-2010 paper. They include:

• a Playback Agent, creating an on-demand demonstration of a system interface, based on a recorded history of interaction, and
• system process visualization guides.

These prototypes all utilize the TIL model, providing the ERP system with run-time information on its own task, interface and usage history, which is embedded within the system as a core data component.

• Lucas,W. and Babaian,T. Implementing Design Principles for Collaborative ERP Systems. In Proceedings of the 7th international conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems: advances in theory and practice (DESRIST'12), Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp. 423-438, Springer-Verlag, 2012.
• Babaian, T., Lucas, W., Xu, J., and Topi, H. Usability through System-User Collaboration: Deriving Design Principles for Greater ERP Usability. In the 5th International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 2010) , Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 394-409. Springer, 2010.
• Babaian, T. and Lucas,W. Leveraging Usage History To Support Enterprise System Users. In Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS'12), SciTePress, 2012.