Eureka! Institutional Repository

Traditional challenges in the relationships between IT departments and business units are no longer accepted by users. It also seems that the IT professionals lack commercial skills to deliver and maintain IT solutions for customer satisfaction and added business value. This paper summarizes the debate on the relationship of IT departments and users engaged in application development. A survey including open-ended questions investigated opinions and current practices. The study showed that end-users need appropriate user interfaces for their business needs. Software applications need seamless paths for delivering results to the next step in the business workflow. When the IT department is not able to satisfy user requirements regarding speed, responsiveness, flexibility and adaptability it is likely that today’s users may start creating their own applications. The proposed solution in this paper is to increase a controlled collaboration between the IT department (technical experts) and innovative pioneering end users (application domain experts) for overall added value co-creation.