Documenting information systems for management: A key to maintaining user satisfaction

MIS Success: Why Does it Vary among Users?

Organizations have been developing and implementing computer-based management information systems (MIS) at an increasing rate for the last 35 years. However, evidence indicates that many computer-based MIS are not as successful as they should be and many may be considered failures.

There has been much research to investigate organizational factors, individual differences, user involvement and their relationship to MIS success, and in particular, one indicator of MIS success, user information satisfaction (UIS). Little attention, however, has been paid to whether UIS for any particular MIS varies for users from different organization functions and different management levels within an organization.

This paper reports the results of a field study of MIS in different organizations in Australia which investigates the relationship between type of user, user involvement and user information satisfaction. The results show that MIS success (UIS) varies between users of the same MIS based on their organizational function and that user involvement in the systems development life cycle (SDLC) has a significant positive effect on UIS. The significance of the effect of user involvement varies for users based on their organizational function. Technical users are less satisfied with MIS than administrative users. The relationship between user involvement and user control of the systems development process and UIS is significantly different for administrative and technical users.

Predicting readability of data processing written materials

Poorly written documentation adversely affects the acquisition, development, use, maintenance, management and control of application software. Readability formulas, comprised of certain linguistic variables, provide rough estimates of the potential difficulty of reading material. This paper illustrates the application of well-known readability formulas in a readability assessment of the 1985 ANSI COBOL Standard. The paper summarizes certain limitations of readability formulas and concludes with suggestions concerning the use of readability formulas in the evaluation of computer-related material.