Promise and problems: CASE usage in the US

A mailing to 2740 information system departments (ISDs) in the United States revealed that Computer Aided Software Engineering (CASE) technology has been very widely purchased but has not yet been placed into everyday use except in rare instances. Four distinctive categories of organizational usage of CASE are proposed, and the count of responding companies in each of these categories is given. Diagramming aids were found to be the most used CASE tools, with reverse engineering tools least used. The authors model innovation as a two-phase process and present factors from the study that are most often found in systems departments that are successful in each of these innovation phases. CASE implementation advice is offered.