Editorial

Abstract

The Information Systems Journal (ISJ) goes from strength to strength, and this issue sees the start of Volume 19. Having moved from four to six issues annually, received the official approval of the Association for information Systems (AIS) – with papers shortly being downloadable freely by members from the AIS e-library – and being included in the AIS basket of six top research journals in our field, we have ample evidence of this excellence, along of course with our impact factor, which continues to be over 1.5. This success has necessitated a further re-examination of our editorial structure and we have incorporated five senior editors to include our managing editor, Philip Powell, with the addition of Robert Davison, Pat Finnegan, Mark Keil and Carsten Sorensen. We are likely to increase the papers rejected at the initial filtering process from around 60% to around 80%, the idea being to ensure that the majority of our editorial work is devoted to papers that have a fair to good chance of eventually being accepted. To help us guide these papers to publication, we announce new associate editors for the ISJ: Dubravka Cecez-Kecmanovic, Kathy Shen, Mike Chiasson, Magnus Mähring, Andrew Hardin, Linda Wallace and Ravi Patnayakuni. We also welcome new members to our Board of Editors, including Debra Howcroft, Emmanuel Monod, Ojelanki Ngwenyama, Nancy Russo, Duane Truex and K.K. Wei. These changes have meant the retirement of some members of the editorial team who have served us very well over many years and we thank them very much for their many contributions. Our first paper of Volume 19 is authored by Line Dubé and Dan Robey, who use qualitative methods to look at the difficulties faced by virtual teams and explain inherent contradictions of virtual teamwork in terms of five paradoxes: virtual teams require physical presence; flexibility of virtual teamwork is aided by structure; interdependent work in virtual teams is accomplished by members' independent contributions; task-oriented virtual teamwork succeeds through social interactions; and mistrust is instrumental to establishing trust among virtual team members. These paradoxes are explored through interviews with 42 people in 26 organizations. The theoretical contribution is the realization of the need to have strategies to cope with paradoxes, and the authors of the paper suggest strategies to ‘survive’ these contradictions. The paper of Leiser Silva, Lakshmi Goel and Elham Mousavidin provides insights into what factors produce successful community blogs and reports on an interpretive case study investigation into the mechanism and processes that shape community blogs. The paper's focus is concerned with the social dynamics that provide a foundation for the success of community blogs. Starting with the work of Wenger on communities of practice, the research analyses a specific case study, MataFilter, against the following four factors: identity; knowledge sharing; warrant mechanisms; and legitimate peripheral participation. Drawn from the analysis, the authors provide both a set of implications for theory and a set of implications for practitioners. Much computer science literature addresses the mechanics of UML and requirements modelling but, as Tor Larsen, Fred Niederman, Moez Limayem and Joyce Chan point out in their paper, little research has addressed the role of UML in the broader organizational and project development context. Their study uses a socio-technical approach to consider UML as a technology embedded in a social environment, and the paper discusses an exploratory qualitative study into the effects of UML on the ability of a development organization to successfully develop information systems (IS). It utilizes interviews of 11 participants in development projects using UML to provide information that was utilized in a causal mapping exercise to identify the relationships between UML use and project success. It develops a unique description of success as a formative construct. The authors identify four types of IS success: project management success; project success; application success; and documentation success. The authors find that there are several categories observed in the variables that they see: environmental factors; organizational factors; staffing issues; coordination methods/processes; object-oriented tool use; CASE tool use; and mixed direction factors. Our final paper in this issue by Mike Chiasson, Matt Germonprez and Lars Mathiassen looks again at a research approach that has been pioneered by the ISJ over the years in their paper on pluralist action research. Through a review of the literature, the authors explore how IS researchers practice action research. Their review suggests that action research lends itself towards pluralist approaches, which facilitate the production of both theoretical and practical knowledge. A particular contribution that the authors make therefore concerns the risks involved in action research, and they suggest ways to ensure that action research contributes to the literature as well as to practical problem solving.