In an environment of increased demand and competition, organisations are under pressure to provide better and more efficient services. With cuts to funding, public organisations specifically need to redevelop and innovate business processes and Information Technology plays an important part in the process. In order to understand an IT system’s role in an organisation, it has been indicated that it is key for new system developments to consider individuals and human factors, organisational factors and society. Based on studies on the success and acceptance of innovative IT systems, it has now been widely accepted that active participation and involvement of users is essential during system development and deployment. The means of participation that lead to success in a large system development process are however not well understood.In the first paper, we present a theoretical outline of a participatory and socio-technical system development process and describe how we empirically investigated the emergent processes of user participation during a case study that puts this development process in practice. An analytical framework has been deployed to gain a greater understanding of how exactly user participation is embedded in project conditions and participants’ relational structure, and what their consequences are for the project. For the investigated project, genuine participation in different forms was identified to be an important factor for project success with socio-technical design methods strongly supporting user participation during initial and later project stages. We further show how the limited options in facilitating user participation during the more technical phases and the sensitivity of the participants’ relational structure shows the need for more research of how, when and where socio-technical design can be integrated with system development processes in order to guarantee project success.In a second paper, we present outcomes of the case study’s design project phase for the intelligence analyst user group and a vision of a criminal network analysis system. This vision is the result of successful user participation and involvement and is seen as a contribution to further research in law enforcement and criminal network analysis.