The sixth international conference on IT (CIT 2003), Bhubaneswar, 22-25 December A User-Centric IT-Acquisition Model Harekrishna Misra Manoranjan Satpathy Brajaraj Mohanty Institute of Rural Management Department of Computer Science Faculty of Business Administration P.Box-60, Anand-388001 University of Reading, Reading RG6 6AY Utkal University, Vani Vihar, Bhubaneswar Gujarat, India UK Orissa, India hkmishra@irma.ac.in m.satpathy@reading.ac.uk Brajaraj_m@yahoo.com Abstract- It is natural that public sector organizations in India automated their information management so that they would be efficient and competitive in the current market scenario. It has been observed that in many cases, the process of automation starts without adequate planning and with only short-term goals in mind. Long-term goals like scalability or maintainability are hardly addressed while initiating the IT acquisition process. This leads to the implemented systems becoming unmanageable over time and as a result the organizations suffer in terms of cost and effort. In this paper, we consider two such cases and analyse the problems faced by both the organizations. We then propose a user-centric model for IT acquisition, which could alleviate the problems mentioned. Key words: IT Acquisition; Process Models; Enterprise Application Integration, User. I. INTRODUCTION Any business organization these days has to depend on Information Technology (IT); this is because of the complex nature of business, and the requirement of managing the massive amount of information associated with the organization. Emergence and convergence of different IT related technologies, miniaturisation of firmware products coupled with user-friendly tools have paved the way for pervasive use of IT in any kind of organization, ranging from a government department to an automobile factory. Emergence of internet and web applications have resulted in viewing the geographically separated sub-organizations of a bigger organization, especially the information content of the individual subdivisions and the flow of information between them, as a single entity. An ordinary user can use the web-based products in a transparent way without worrying about the complexity of technology. Various technologies in the form of products or components precisely suitable for any IT related requirement of an organisation are now available for direct use and any user aware of the IT process can conveniently procure and use these components / products. In other words, IT acquisition no longer is a process involving only the privileged IT professionals but is gradually becoming user-centric. IT acquisition involves many issues concerning identification of these products and/or components and their effective integration to develop a system so as to satisfy the needs of an organization. Due to increased IT related demands, aggressive marketing strategies of the technology/service providers, acquisition of IT components in an organisation starts spontaneously rather than through a systematic analysis on its requirements. Probably, the catalytic factor behind such a decision is the immediate benefits that the top management of the organisation often wrongly perceives or vendors’ (vendors could be IT / domain experts or professionals having knowledge on process and/or product) marketing strategies, which hide more than what they reveal. Benefits come handy when iterative and voluminous reporting structure is an incidence to the business logic. In order to assure a qualitative process for acquisition there are many process models, which prescribe the logical steps of the acquisition process. There is also product quality models like ISO 9126 (ISO, 1991a) [10] to evaluate components. Models like the CMM (Jalote, 2002) [13] or ISO 9001(ISO, 1995) [12] say something about a component developer’s credibility. In addition there are issues like process assessment and process improvement. However, in practice, they are not properly followed, and it is often the case that the management thinks about them after a decision has been taken to adopt IT to automate a business process. Users initially become enthusiastic, since they only see the immediate benefits of automation and not realising the associated problems (like scalability, reliability, etc.) in advance. But when the system is operational such problems do appear one by one and then the gap between imagination and reality gradually becomes wider. Probably at this point in time the user dissatisfaction might compel the top management to either reverse/alter the set of