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User participation in the development of a system is universally prescribed as an effective strategy to ensure the success of the resultant system. However, the existing literature on the merits of user participation only provides equivocal evidence. Various analyses of this literature point out that this equivocal evidence may be due to inconsistent operational measures of the user participation and system success constructs. Planned organizational change and participative decision making, the underlying paradigms of user participation construct, suggest that the development of some information systems may require blending of users' system-related functional expertise and developers' technical expertise to ensure system success. These paradigms also maintain that in case of well-defined, structured information systems user participation should enhance the likelihood of system success through better user understanding of the need for the system and system content and objectives, user trust, and a sense of system ownership. This research also described a case study involving the development and implementation of a medical records system for a neonatal intensive care unit in a large hospital in Texas. The case study provides evidence that in systems that require incorporation of user functional expertise user participation will enhance the likelihood of system success. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The demand for on-line courses continues to rise in academia because (1) on-line courses remove time barriers that would otherwise restrict a student from pursuing academic endeavors, (2) they remove the distance barriers for academia in reaching potential students and (3) they can to some extent alleviate budgetary and physical constraints on the academia in imparting education to students. The on-line instruction mode rather easily accommodates courses in some disciplines such as history, sociology, and political science. However, it posits significant adoption challenges for courses that require hands-on computing experimentation such as computer networking, system administration, web application development and database administration. Nevertheless, given the demand for on-line courses, there is a need to devise strategies that would allow students to conduct computing experiments through remote access. This paper presents an approach to transform traditional computer labs into a virtual lab environment. Such transformation allows students to remotely conduct experiments that involve software and hardware interaction. The methodology presented here can be applied to a large number of computing courses encountered in Management Information Systems and Computer Sciences disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]