Editorial

Abstract

This is the last issue of volume 13, a lucky number for us. As you can see in the table of contents for the complete volume there have already been some excellent papers and we are pleased to tell you that this issue is no exception! In our first paper, Kalle Lyytinen and Gregory Rose suggest that IS innovation is not linear nor evolutionary, but exhibits radical breaks. They argue that these disruptive IS innovations depart in significant ways from existing alternatives and lead to deviation from expected use and diffusion trajectory. They illustrate their theory through Internet computing, which they see as pervasive and radical, transforming the application portfolio, development practices and IS services. In doing so, they refer to their previous paper published in ISJ. They call on us IS researchers and teachers to ‘grasp such disruptive moments’. This implies expanding IS innovation studies from studying instances of IS innovation to the study of innovation types and their interactions. From a practitioner's perspective, it implies managers and IS development specialists using this disruptive innovation model to evaluate their planning strategies. Michael Heng and Aldo de Moor suggest that Habermas's ideal speech situation, whereby communication is not distorted by unequal opportunities, is finally being at least partially realized because of the Internet. They describe how Habermas's critical social theory was used as a guiding principal to develop a collaborative authoring tool available on the Internet. They suggest that the tool is effectively a comprehensive socio-technical information system for resolving conflicts in groups and they discuss a prototype application used by an environmental group (the issue being that of genetically modified food). They also discuss some limitations, for example, it is difficult for entrenched power structures to disappear, and its present suitability to an intranet environment rather than the Internet. However, both these limitations might be short-term ones only. The Internet still is not inclusive, more people do not have access than do have access, nevertheless, it is refreshing to see research aimed at attempting to improve people's situation! The paper by Adam Vrechopoulos, Katherine Pramataris, Georgios Doukidis and George Lekakos also refers to an Internet application. It describes an action research project (partially funded by the European Community's ESPRIT programme) providing a framework to help support the business processes, consumers and product suppliers to a virtual retail store. Over the years, ISJ has championed action research in information systems, amongst other qualitative research approaches, and we believe this paper provides further solid evidence of the benefits of such action research. The evaluation of IT products forms the subject of our final paper by Björn Lundell and Brian Lings. Their research uses another qualitative method, grounded theory. They have developed an evaluation method and illustrate its use in three studies concerning the choice of a CASE tool prior to usage. In one of these organizations, where the method was developed, data collection and analysis was performed in six half-day sessions over a six-month period. An idea of the work involved in such grounded studies is that in another of the organizations the authors developed an evaluation framework consisting of 400 concepts reported in 100 pages of text (23 000 words). Like many papers that we publish, the paper provides an interesting use of qualitative research methods, carried out empirically in one or more organizations, and offering results that are of practical value. Why should IS papers not be both rigorous and relevant?