Flensburg P: Personlig databehandling - Per Flensburgs hemsida

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Per Flensburg: Personlig databehandling changes is thus very important. The capacity for changing data systems must be increased. This can be done in three ways: • By increasing the productivity of the system designers • By increasing the number of system designers • By both increasing the productivity and number of system designers. The first one is possible since we today have powerful tools for speeding up the development. We have different types of structured design that might increase productivity by 10 to 20 % (Martin 1982). We also now have application generators or 4th generation languages that will typically reduce coding time 50 to 80 % (Ibid). Even nondata experts can use these tools, after a short introduction, to develop their data systems and thus achieve the third possibility. Today there exists a variety of such tools and since they have been in use for a number of years it would be an interesting research task to investigate the effects when using such a tool. This is my main problem. When people in an organization use application generators as support in their work I call this personal data processing. 7.2 Scientific approach A traditional approach to such an investigation should be the verification of a set of hypotheses. This set must however be based on an understanding of the factors that are important. You do not get answers to questions that are not asked! Important issues in Perso- nal data processing Theories of Perso- nal data processing 188 Personal data processing Case studies Action oriented research Fig 7.1 Relationships between the different parts of the research project. The factors are parts of a theory, so we thus need a theory of user developed support systems in order to undertake a traditional scientific approach. The whole research process can be described in fig 7.1, which is a modification of a similar figure in Checkland (1981, p 8). I suggest here two approaches in the study of personal data processing. The first one is based on collecting experiences from such
Per Flensburg: Personlig databehandling work and documenting them in case studies, the other one is based on taking an active part in such developments. In the first approach I used a data collection technique called semistructured interviews that will be described later and in the active part of the investigation I used an action research oriented approach. 7.3 Case studies Collecting experiences means in practice asking a lot of people about their experiences. I must have some ideas about what might be interesting but it is also important to allow people to talk about other things. Interviews with a few rather broad questions and possibilities of asking more detailed questions seemed to be an acceptable approach. Questionnaires would probably not be a valid technique here, since the purpose was to let the people concerned talk about their specific experiences. I thought case studies were a better way of reporting this type of research. Perhaps some common patterns might emerge and then, but not until then, the specific pattern could be investigated using harder data gathering techniques. The problem was to find the broad questions. I could of course ask only one question:"Please tell me about your work with the computer." In fact I have started my interviews with exactly that question. Often people then talk about how it all began. However, I thought my interviews should reflect my understanding so far about the area of investigation. Therefore I put forward some areas I thought to be of interest, such as: • The tools that are used • The organization that uses the tool • The historical background • A description of present applications • The effects on job satisfaction • The organizational effects These were the main areas I tried to cover in semistructured interviews with individual people. In order to make the so far very vague theory explicit, to both myself and other researchers helping me in the investigation, I developed a set of questions covering all six areas above. I had in total more than 80 questions that could be asked. However, and this is very important: It was by no means my intention all these questions should be asked as a mechanical questionnaire! When I made the interviews myself, I found that it is usually sufficient to ask the main question in each area, while the details concerning the other questions were answered without me having to ask them directly. I tried to maintain a conversation, rather than make an interview. 189
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