Research The evolution of CASE usage in Finland between 1993 and 1996 Jari Maansaari * , Juhani Iivari 1 Department of Information Processing Science, University of Oulu, P.O. Box 333, Linnanmaa, FIN-90571 Oulu, Finland Accepted 23 December 1998 Abstract The purpose of this paper is to report the evolution of CASE adoption in Finland based on two comparable surveys, the ®rst conducted in spring 1993 and the second in winter 1996/1997. The study uses a process model for innovation adoption, consisting of three stages: conditions for adopting and using CASE tools; adoption and using CASE tools; and consequences of adopting and using CASE tools. At each stage, the paper points out key aspects related to CASE adoption and studies their changes from 1993 to 1996. The analysis of key aspects reveals that not so much has changed in CASE adoption during the time between the two surveys, although the expectations concerning improvements to be brought about by the CASE technology have increased signi®cantly. There is also increased emphasis on tool interfaces and the coverage of the development process both, in the criteria for selecting CASE tools and in performance evaluations. CASE usage has progressed very slowly, if at all. CASE tools are increasingly perceived to lead to intensi®ed project and product standardization and higher end-user participation, but the two surveys did not ®nd any signi®cant change in the perceived impact of CASE technology on the productivity of development or in the quality of software products, and still less in other dimensions of work unit effectiveness. # 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. Keywords: CASE evolution; Adoption; Usage; Impacts 1. Introduction CASE (Computer Aided Systems/Software Engi- neering) tools have a history of almost 30 years. The ®rst wave of CASE technology consisted of academic projects, such as CADIS [6], CASCADE [2], DIFO [13] and ISDOS [31]. It took almost 20 years before CASE technology really started to enter into practice, when the second generation CASE tools emerged in the late 1980s. Even though this second wave had more realistic goals in the sense of technical imple- mentability and closer industrial focus, it was intro- duced with totally unrealistic expectations (see, e.g. [17]). This has led to a clear disappointment with CASE technology during the 1990s [26]. Yet, even though CASE has generated a great deal of hype, one of the tenets of the present paper is that CASE technology still forms a signi®cant technology in IS development, because it is dif®cult to imagine exten- sive systems development without any computer tools to support documentation, con®guration/version man- agement, etc. CASE adoption, in practice, has been the focus of a number of empirical studies in different countries since the late 1980s [1, 4, 7, 9, 11, 15, 19, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 28, 29, 32, 35]. Most of the above are Information & Management 36 (1999) 37±53 *Corresponding author. Fax: +358-8-5531890; e-mail: jarse@rieska.oulu.fi 1 E-mail: iivari@rieska.oulu.fi 0378-7206/99/$ ± see front matter # 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII:S-0378-7206(99)00004-X