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The purpose of this study is to evaluate critical success factors (CSFs) for the implementation of an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system from a user perspective.

The research was conducted in two successive steps. First, a literature review was conducted to derive CSFs for ERP system implementation. Second, a survey was conducted to evaluate the importance of these CSFs from a user perspective. Data were collected through a questionnaire that was distributed within a German manufacturer and was developed based on the CSFs found in the literature. Gray relational analysis (GRA) was used to rank the CSFs in order of importance from a user perspective.

The findings reveal that users regard 11 of the 13 CSFs found in the literature as important for ERP system implementation. Seven of the CFSs were classified as the most important from a user perspective, namely, project team, technical possibilities, strategic decision-making, training and education, minimum customization, software testing and performance measurement. Users regarded 2 of the 13 CSFs as not important when implementing an ERP system, including organizational change management and top management involvement.

One limitation of this study is that the respondents originate from one organization, industry and country. The findings may differ in other contexts, and thus, future research should be expanded to include more organizations, industries and countries. Another limitation is that this study only evaluates existing CSFs from a user perspective rather than identifying new ones and/or the underlying reasons using more qualitative research.

A better understanding of the user perspective toward CSFs for ERP system implementation promises to contribute to the design of more effective ERP systems, a more successful implementation and a more effective operation. When trying to successfully implement an ERP system, the project team may use the insights from the user perspective.

Even though researchers highlight the important role users play during ERP system implementation, their perspective toward the widely discussed CSFs for ERP system implementation has not been investigated comprehensively. This study aims to fill this gap by evaluating CSFs derived from the literature from a user perspective.

People with complex health conditions must often navigate landscapes of uncoordinated public, private and voluntary health-care providers to obtain the care they need. Complex health conditions frequently transcend the scope of typical health-care service systems. The purpose of this paper is to explore and characterize such unique assemblages of actors and services as “user-defined ecosystems”.

Building on literature on customer ecosystems, this paper introduces the concept of the user-defined ecosystem (UDE). Using an abductive approach, the authors apply the concept in an interpretive, qualitative study of ten families with special needs children.

This study uncovers complex UDEs, where families actively combine a broad range of services. These ecosystems are unique for each family and extend beyond the scope of designed service ecosystems. Thus, the families are forced to assume an active, coordinating role.

This paper shows how to identify ecosystems from the user’s point of view, based on the selected user unit (such as a family) and the focal value-creating function of the ecosystem for the user.

This paper highlights how service providers can support and adapt to UDEs and, thus, contribute to user value and well-being. This can be used to understand users’ perspectives on service and systems in health and social care.

This study develops the concept of the UDE, which represents a customer-focused perspective on actor ecosystems and contrasts it with a provider-focused and a distributed perspective on ecosystems. This study demonstrates the practical usefulness of the conceptualization and provides a foundation for further research on the user’s perspective on ecosystems.

This paper aims to provide a holistic view of the current practice of chat reference evaluation and to suggest a framework that could help reference practitioners evaluate chat reference services in multiple contexts.

A thorough review of the literature on chat reference evaluation is conducted and the evaluation studies are grouped by their evaluative perspective and measures. Based on the literature review, a framework of perspectives and measures for chat reference evaluation is proposed.

Chat reference evaluation has incorporated a number of new elements that do not exist in desk reference evaluation. All the evaluation perspectives and measures reported in chat reference literature are incorporated into a final framework except for one variable – “cost‐effectiveness” – which lacks the support of empirical studies in the literature.

The analytical review of the literature provides a holistic view of how chat reference is being measured for its value to both libraries and users, thus furthering the professional understanding of chat reference performance in the library environs. The framework of evaluation perspectives and measures resulting from the literature review is applicable in multiple chat reference contexts and can be customized to serve different evaluation purposes. In turn, this framework gives chat reference evaluators a clear idea of what to look at and how.

This paper fills the need to provide reference practitioners with both a critical view of current chat reference practice, and a tool that could help them design and develop a chat reference evaluation project.

This study aims to investigate the process of developing loyalty in the Chinese mobile health community from the information seeking perspective.

A covariance-based structural equation model was developed to explore the mobile health community loyalty development process from information seeking perspective and tested with LISREL 9.30 for the 191 mobile health platform user samples.

The empirical results demonstrate that the information seeking perspective offers an interesting explanation for the mobile health community loyalty development process. All hypotheses in the proposed research model are supported except the relationship between privacy and trust. The two types of mobile health community loyalty—attitudal loyalty and behavioral loyalty are explained with 58 and 37% variance.

This paper has brought out the information seeking perspective in the loyalty formation process in mobile health community and identified several important constructs for this perspective for the loyalty formation process including information quality, communication with doctors and communication with patients.

This conceptual piece presents a framework to aid libraries in gaining a more thorough and holistic understanding of their users and services. Through a presentation of the history of library evaluation, a multidimensional matrix of measures is developed that demonstrates the relationship between the topics and perspectives of measurement. These measurements are then combined through evaluation criteria, and then different participants in the library system view those criteria for decision making. By implementing this framework for holistic measurement and cumulative evaluation, library evaluators can gain a more holistic knowledge of the library system and library administrators can be better informed for their decision‐making processes.

This chapter explores the role of libraries and librarians from the perspective of the information seeker in general and from business school students in particular. In a recent article in First Monday, Keller et al. (2003) pose the question: “What is a library anymore, anyway?” The answer to this question would be “That depends.” It depends upon who you are asking and the perspective from which you are answering the question. The notion of perspective has been raised before in the library and information science literature. Zweizig (1976) noted that users were the focus of studies, they were examined from the perspective of “the user in the life of the library” rather than from the perspective of “the library in the life of the user.” More recently, Lipow (1999) noted that librarians discuss how to serve “remote users” when in fact it is the library that is remote to the user.

In commercial web search engine results rankings, four stakeholder groups are involved: search engine providers, users, content providers and search engine optimizers. Search engine optimization (SEO) is a multi-billion-dollar industry and responsible for making content visible through search engines. Despite this importance, little is known about its role in the interaction of the stakeholder groups.

We conducted expert interviews with 15 German search engine optimizers and content providers, the latter represented by content managers and online journalists. The interviewees were asked about their perspectives on SEO and how they assess the views of users about SEO.

SEO was considered necessary for content providers to ensure visibility, which is why dependencies between both stakeholder groups have evolved. Despite its importance, SEO was seen as largely unknown to users. Therefore, it is assumed that users cannot realistically assess the impact SEO has and that user opinions about SEO depend heavily on their knowledge of the topic.

This study investigated search engine optimization from the perspective of those involved in the optimization business: content providers, online journalists and search engine optimization professionals. The study therefore contributes to a more nuanced view on and a deeper understanding of the SEO domain.

Medical device users are one of the principal medical device technology stakeholders. The involvement of users in medical device technology development and assessment is central to meet their needs. This study aims to examine this issue.

A structured review of the literature published from 1980 to 2005 in peer‐reviewed journals was carried out from a social science perspective to investigate user involvement practice in the development and assessment of medical device technologies. This was followed by a qualitative thematic analysis.

Medical device users include clinicians, patients, carers and others. Different kinds of medical devices are developed and assessed by user involvement. The user involvement occurs at different stages of the medical device technology lifecycle and the degree of user involvement is in the order of: design>testing and trials>deployment>concept stages. The methods most commonly used for capturing users' perspectives are usability tests, interviews and questionnaire surveys.

The relevant engineering, medical and nursing literature, which might have been useful, was not reviewed. However, useful findings emerge that apply to health care generally.

This study shows that medical device users are not homogeneous but heterogeneous in several aspects, such as needs, skills and working environments. This is an important consideration for incorporating users' perspectives in medical device technologies.

This paper aims to quantify, for the first time, the performance expectations gap in community roadworks projects by proposing a performance expectations gap index (PEGI) that can answer a vital question of how wide/how narrow the gap is from a stakeholder perspective. Previous scholars have offered qualitative descriptions of the expectations gap from an auditing point of view using a constructivist approach. This study uses a positivistic approach in addressing the procurement performance expectations gap.

The index is computed by combining data from actual and perceived performance of public roadworks from two categories of respondents: “Technical personnel” and “Road users” in selected District Local Governments (DLGS) of Uganda using paired mean differences. The authors created grand means from these two groups for us to make a meaningful comparison. Data were collected from community access roads projects opened, maintained and completed and the satisfaction levels from 69 DLGS. The community leaders and political representatives formed a group of road-users, whereas DLG Engineering staff represented the technical staff. Data was collected on the extent to which the DLG had achieved performance efficiency, performance effectiveness and performance reasonableness. The measurements items was anchored along the continuum of: (5) Outstanding = Performance is consistently superior to (1) Unsatisfactory = Performance is consistently unacceptable.

Study findings show the level of performance of roadworks attained by technical staff is only 65%, with 15.9% gap is attributed to performance efficiency, the 29.1% gap is attributed to performance effectiveness issues and 20% gap is the perceived performance unreasonableness gap in the stakeholder’s perspective, creating an overall performance gap of 35%, in the perspective of road users. From the computations carried out, the authors determined the size of the expectation gaps by the technical DLG stakeholders and road-users of 0.3493. The gap index (0.3493) falls within the range between 0.2 and 0.39, which is a small performance expectations gap, calling for top management’s attention to identify and work on the parameters causing operational inefficiency within implementing units of DLGs. Study findings show the level of performance of roadworks attained by technical staff is 65%, creating a performance gap of 35%, in the perspective of road users.

The implications of these results can ignite a meaningful debate on whether financing of road projects should be based on how narrow the performance gap should be and having sustained evidence that the gap is progressively being narrowed for improved sustainability of roadworks financing by donor agencies. Whereas this quantification of the performance gap is a new positivistic direction towards minimizing the performance expectation gap, it can easily be adopted by roadworks implementing units in assessing road-user performance needs at the point of project completion and once these are not achieved, such minor loopholes would be worked on, on a regular basis as and when need warrants.

The authors have introduced and empirically verified the performance expectation gap index, which further understands the performance expectations gap from a positivistic approach. The paper provides a problem-solving tool to analyse stakeholder engagement linkages with performance expectations variations on the practical side.

The paper has started on a change perception campaign of shaping road-user critical perspectives about the outcome of community roadworks procurements. By introducing and creating a mindset of quantitative assessments in understanding the expectation gaps that can be caused by a number of factors, the responsible people for creating, maintaining and widening PEGs will eventually wake up and improve personal behaviours that lead to the widening of the procurement performance gap in roadworks, from a stakeholders’ perspective.

Unlike previous scholars who used a constructivist approach, the paper is the first of its kind to use a positivistic approach to quantify the procurement performance expectations gap using a PEGI. The use of the index gives new insights to managing procurement performance expectations to the satisfaction of stakeholders from a quantitative perspective.

The trend towards ever‐larger WWW sites with hundreds of thousands of pages maintained by teams of developers has made apparent the need for tools to manage such large‐scale efforts. In this paper we present a mechanism for organising and manipulating groups of nodes and links in WWW sites. These constructs are used to create dynamic views of the data in a given site according to various organisational and presentational criteria. Moreover, proven techniques for the management of hypertext networks (e.g. versioning, variants, etc.) can be readily implemented through the use of this model. Additionally, the model allows the creation of user views through the combination of these constructs via a number of operations. After the description of our model we present a prototype system developed at the University of Geneva that demonstrates how the mechanisms included in our model can be integrated into an existing http server. We then examine how the same mechanisms can be employed in the management of large WWW sites.