Growth stages of end user computing

Reviewer: Geoffry Stanton Howard

This major theoretical piece may in time stand as a near-breakthrough advance in our conceptual understanding of end user computing (EUC) in organizations. Huff, Munro, and Martin's EUC stage theory will provide guidance to practitioners seeking to understand and manage EUC in their organizations, as well as testable hypotheses for those academics who wish to empirically validate important EUC propositions and theories. Central to the theory is the idea that an organization's EUC activity can be classified by stages of “application maturity.” Application maturity is defined as the extent of usage of applied end user computing skills and is measured in terms of the interconnectedness among end user and other applications. There are five stages: isolation, stand-alone, manual integration, automated integration, and distributed integration. In the isolation stage there is little or no exchange of data or programs among applications. The interconnectedness increases stage by stage until, in the final stage (distributed integration), full interconnectedness is achieved in a distributed environment where the location of data and the distinction between EUC and non-EUC applications are transparent to users. The application maturity stage for an organization overall is defined as the stage at which the greatest proportion of application development resources are being expended. Having defined and characterized these five EUC stages, the authors then list five factors posited to influence an organization's EUC growth as it migrates through the stages of application maturity. The relationships between each of the five factors (organization of information center (IC) operations, planning and control, support, end user training, and user/IC staff attitudes) and the five stages of application maturity are compactly summarized in matrix form. Finally, the authors discuss how managers can navigate an organization's passage through the stages of EUC application maturity, noting the two main dimensions of EUC activity that they can control: the pace of EUC development (expansion) and the direction of that development (control). Management's decisions about how to influence these expansion and control dimensions give rise to four distinct EUC development strategies: laissez faire (low expansion, low control), acceleration (high expansion, low control), containment (low expansion, high control), and controlled growth (high expansion, high control). Given the authors' framework, managers should now be able to select the EUC development strategy most appropriate to their organization and then execute that strategy with consistency and focus. Huff, Munro, and Martin's major conceptual contributions—the EUC stage theory, the identification of factors related to EUC growth, and the EUC development strategies—provide the foundation for major advances in the understanding and management of end user computing. Empirical researchers should now be encouraged to take up the challenge of empirically exploring the validity of these propositions.