Developing An Instrument To Measure Enterprise System Users' Perceptions Of System-User Collaboration

This paper reports on the development of a survey instrument for measuring enterprise system users’ perceptions of collaboration between the system and the user. Based on philosophical and computational models of collaboration, the instrument was designed to assess three features of system-user collaboration: Commitment to Joint Activity (CJA), Mutual Responsiveness (MR), and Commitment to Mutual Support (CMS). The development process included a series of deliberate steps to ensure content validity: reviewing related literature, creating the initial item set, iteratively adding, deleting, and revising the items, three rounds of item sorting with experts and users, and two pilot tests. The result was a 34-item set measuring six constructs regarding enterprise system users’ perceptions regarding the levels of collaborativeness exhibited by the system (CJA-S, MR-S, CMS-S) and the user (CJA-U, MR-U, CMS-U). Statistical analyses showed that the instrument achieved satisfactory levels of construct validity and high levels of reliability. This instrument will make theoretical contributions by helping explore the relationship between users’ perceptions regarding an enterprise system’s collaborativeness and usability and enhance the scholarly understanding of the relationships between the collaborativeness constructs and other key constructs related to information systems use, such as ease of use and usefulness. Practically, this instrument will contribute to the development of design principles and guidelines for next-generation enterprise systems and other large-scale information systems.