Affiliations: Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Turku, Finland
Correspondence:
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Correspondence to: R. Suomi, Turku School of Economics and Business Administration, Rehtorinpellonkatu 3, 20500 Turku, Finland.
Abstract: Experiences on new generation case-tools are scarce. Despite the publicity devoted to these new tools both in practice and in academia, there are very few reports on the experiences gained from these tools. Most of the published experiences, in fact, are enthusiastic statements by MIS managers of the organizations using case-tools, with little or no data to support the statements. This report summarizes the experiences of a Finnish organization—an insurance company—taking its first steps in the world of new system development tools. The study is based on data from two sources: in November 1990 a formal questionnaire was sent to all users of case-tools in the organization. The writer of this article has been responsible for the introduction of case-tools to the organization in 1987–1990, and so the quantitative results are interpreted in the light of his own experience. This second source of data too adds the flavour of action-research into this study. Since 1987 the organization has adopted three main case-tools into wide use. First, Autumn 1987, it adopted a back-end tool (Telon) for code generation. This mainframe-based tool was from the very beginning accessible for all interested parties. The process was continued with the selection of Case2000 to be a front-end tool for the company in Autumn 1988. These two tools were formally selected by the IT-department to be universal tools for the company. Simultaneously, there developed a spontaneous culture of system development around the front-end tool Information Engineering Workbench (IEW). Both front-end tools, being microcomputer-based, were of course not available to all interested parties because of practical and financial restrictions. At the time of distributing the questionnaire, Telon was used by 12 users with an average of 11 months of experience on the tool. lEW had 9 users with an average of 11 months of experience, too, and Case2000 was used by 8 users with 5 months of experience on the average. The study reveals that in addition to the differences caused by the practical characteristics of the tools, the way they are introduced to the organization (Telon and Case2000 by IT-department, IEW by user initiative) too has an effect on the reception of the tools. It should be noted that the names of the products are quite irrelevant for the results of this study, and that similar results would most likely have been acquired with other tools, too. However, no reason to hide the real names of the products could be seen.
