Flensburg P: Personlig databehandling - Per Flensburgs hemsida

Per Flensburg: Personlig databehandling
The data processing department was supposed to answer questions concerning the
tools, at least the more technical ones. I thought, however, it was important to ask the
users too, because in using the tools they might have gained this kind of knowledge,
perhaps at a higher degree than people from the data processing department. It was
also possible to compare the description of the use of a certain tool, first as the vendors
described it, and second the description of its actual use.
Concerning the organization, that uses the tools, I have almost only considered fairly
large organizations, which already had a working data processing department. The
idea of user development had often come via the concept of the "information centre"
as IBM (1982) suggested it. Mostly only a few people in the data processing department
were working with user development. In small organizations it seemed to be
only the manager that used the tools, mostly for calculation purposes. But I have only
studied four such organizations.
The historical background was very important. It helped me better understand the
phenomena I come across in the investigation. However, different people gave different
interpretations of what happened and why it happened. I also came across some
integrity problems, which of course were respected. Sometimes people did not know
much about the story prior to their appointment, since they were employed to work
with the computer system and thus they had not joined the organization until the
system was in use. In this case I was forced to use second hand information.
I have used the framework of Mumford (1983a,b) concerning job satisfaction and
asked people about effects on their job skill, their social relations, their psychological
needs, their ethical dilemmas and their task structure.
An important organizational property was the possible support for decentralization in
the organization. This could be one organizational effect. Another might be conflicts
between data departments or user groups or information centre people.
The set of questions has been worked out in two steps. First two of my students made
investigations in two companies, without any question set. Their conversations with
the people in the companies were written down almost verbatim. I thus obtained a
good impression of what took place. A certain pattern emerged: Historical description,
actual application, properties of the tool and organizational effects were the
main points. However, people did not say anything about the effects on job satisfaction.
Perhaps they were unaware of them, so I supplied a set of questions relating to
this area. Then I made a test interview myself and found the total set of questions
useful. I also prepared a guide with a more detailed discussion of every question and
explained my intention with the questions and the type of answers that I expected. I
also tried to foresee the difficulties and identify possible ways of overcoming them.
The purposes of this guide was twofold:
• To act as a guide for other researchers or students that were going to help me in the
investigation.
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