IS Field Research Articles

Reflections on Replications

We are immensely pleased to see a publication dedicated to replications in the IS field (Dennis and Valacich, 2014). We believe it is long overdue and will serve a useful and path breaking function in the Information Systems discipline and, perhaps, in the larger academic community (Berthon, et al., 2002). Toward that end, we share our particular view of replication: why it is important and how various types of replications may co-exist. We also offer some thoughts about ways that researchers might go about this type of research that will add value to their own work and more effectively add value to the body of knowledge that represents the IS discipline.

Editorial Comment: A Prospectus on the IS Field

Editorial Comment: A Prospectus on the IS Field

The Effects of Psychological Contract Violation on OS User’s Betrayal Behaviors: Window XP Technical Support Ending Case

The Effects of Psychological Contract Violation on OS User’s Betrayal Behaviors: Window XP Technical Support Ending Case

Are we Building a Better World with ICTs? Empirically Examining this Question in the Domain of Public Health in India

As social scientists engaged in Information Technologies for Development (IT4D), a question we need to necessarily engage with is “are we building a better world with Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs)?” This question, first posed by Professor Geoff Walsham in the IS field, was the topic of my plenary discussion at the IFIP 9.4 meeting in Jamaica 2014, and had now been further developed to this “view from practice” paper for this journal. A first step in this paper has been the reformulation of the question which Professor Walsham raised: “What distortions and obstacles are created by the historical, material, and institutional conditions, and how these shape our efforts of ICTs creating a better world?” This reformulation is done to bring in more explicitly the political dimension into the question, and to nuance the technological deterministic argument implied in the question of technology (always) creating a better world. Taking an empirical example of an ICT intervention from the public health sector in India, deliberately chosen to emphasize distortions typically seen is similar Information and Communication Technologies for Development (ICT4D) projects, the analysis focuses on understanding the conditions of distortions, why they occur, and what can be done differently to contribute to our notion of a better world.

Editorial

Editorial

Digital Innovation as a Fundamental and Powerful Concept in the Information Systems Curriculum

The 50-year march of Moore's Law has led to the creation of a relatively cheap and increasingly easy-touse world-wide digital infrastructure of computers, mobile devices, broadband network connections, and advanced application platforms. This digital infrastructure has, in turn, accelerated the emergence of new technologies that enable transformations in how we live and work, how companies organize, and the structure of entire industries. As a result, it has become important for all business students to have a strong grounding in IT and digital innovation in order to manage, lead, and transform organizations that are increasingly dependent on digital innovation. Yet, at many schools, students do not get such grounding because the required information systems core class is stuck in the past. We present a vision for a redesigned IS core class that adopts digital innovation as a fundamental and powerful concept (FPC). A good FPC serves as both a foundational concept and an organizing principle for a course. We espouse a particularly broad conceptualization of digital innovation that allows for a variety of teaching styles and topical emphases for the IS core class. This conceptualization includes three types of innovation (i.e., process, product, and business model innovation), and four stages for the overall innovation process (i.e., discovery, development, diffusion, and impact). Based on this conceptualization, we examine the implications of adopting digital innovation as an FPC. We also briefly discuss broader implications relating to (1) the IS curriculum beyond the core class, (2) the research agenda for the IS field, and (3) the identity and legitimacy of IS in business schools.

Experimental research and multivariate statistical analyses in business information systems research - a meta-review

Experimental research has been widely used within the information systems IS field. Using a meta-review, this study examines the use of experimental research in the IS field during the period 1990 to 2013 and investigates the utilisation of statistical techniques, particularly multivariate analyses. This study provides important information regarding the pattern of experimental research in the IS field i.e., experimental designs, treatments, tasks, incentives and participants. This study finds that multivariate analysis of variance MANOVA is frequently used as the multivariate statistical technique in experimental IS research. While the use of multivariate analyses is common in recent experimental IS research, concerns remain about the potential inappropriate use of measurements and violations of statistical assumptions required by the various multivariate analyses, for example, using ordinal scales rather than interval scales and issues surrounding the normality of data. This article is intended to offer guidelines to help future researchers be aware of the statistical issues and to mitigate the shortcomings that arise due to inappropriate use of measurements and violations of the statistical assumptions in experimental IS research.

Positivism in information systems: investigating paradox between theory and practice in IS researches

Beliefs and assumptions of IS researchers significantly affect research manner. Any research project is based on philosophical assumptions about world nature and how to gather knowledge about world. Often, these assumptions have been considered implicit and incontestable. By considering many researches conducted in IS field, little researches has done to discuss about research foundations and philosophical grounds. Paradigm gives solidarity to IS domain and distinguishes it from other field. The main objective of this paper is to examine effect of positivism in IS and identified strength aspects and challenges of applying positivism in this domain. Finally, the paper seeks to answer the paradox between theory and practice in philosophical assumptions in IS field. To gain this goal, the meta-analysis of articles related to IS paradigm is conducted. The results show while many IS philosophical papers criticised applying positivism in IS, yet this paradigm remain prevailing approach.

Getting Boundary Conditions Right: Towards a Classification of the Information Economy Sectors

Just as most people are not WEIRD (Henrich et al. 2010), the assumption of industry uniformity may not be true in all cases. Several reviews showed that IS research does not take industry seriously enough. Neglecting industry context can have a severe effect on research results by underspecifying theory or by leading to general explanations that do not hold in other contexts. This paper examines the so called “Information Economy”, an industrial context comprising of the ICT, Content and Media, and Internet sectors. We analyze a unique, very large data set that contains employee mobility data of 27,387 organizations. We derive some interesting descriptive statistics that help to differentiate the Information Economy sectors. In addition, with the application of a clustering algorithm, we derive industrial clusters on our data. Our analysis reveals that the OECD’s conceptualization of the Information Economy reaches its limits when it comes to more granular sub-sectors within the industry, at which point it no longer seems appropriate from a social/cultural industry perspective. Our study contributes to ongoing discussions around generalizability and boundaries of research results, as well as to the still small body of industry research in the IS field. These findings have importantimplications for future research and practice.

Disregarding History: Contemporary IS Contexts and Participatory Design

User participation has long been seen as a core topic of study within the IS field, yet its relevance to contemporary development environments and contexts has recently been brought into question. ...

The Current State of Business Intelligence in Academia: The Arrival of Big Data

In December 2012, the AIS Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems (SIGDSS) and the Teradata University Network (TUN) cosponsored the Business Intelligence Congress 3 and conducted surveys to assess academia’s response to the growing market need for students with Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) skill sets. This panel report describes the key findings and best practices that were identified, with an emphasis on what has changed since the BI Congress efforts in 2009 and 2010. The article also serves as a “call to action” for universities regarding the need to respond to emerging market needs in BI/BA, including “Big Data.” The IS field continues to be well positioned to be the leader in creating the next generation BI/BA workforce. To do so, we believe that IS leaders need to continuously refine BI/BA curriculum to keep pace with the turbulent BI/BA marketplace.

C2-4: Harmonizing Measures for Implementation Science Using Crowd-Sourcing

Background/Aims Implementation science (IS) is a priority topic in the renewal funding of the Cancer Research Network and encompasses a broad range of constructs and uses measures from a variety of disciplines. However, there has been little standardization of measures or agreement on definitions of constructs across different studies, fields, authors, or research groups. Moreover, many measures developed are not practical in real-world settings such as healthcare delivery systems. To further the field of IS, there is a need to both identify and evaluate IS measures on both their validity and practical relevance.

Einstein half lightlike submanifolds of a Lorentzian space form with a semi-symmetric non-metric connection

We study screen conformal Einstein half lightlike submanifolds M of a Lorentzian space form �(c) of constant curvature c admitting a semi-symmetric non-metric connection subject to the conditions; (1) the structure vector field ofis tangent to M, and (2) the canonical normal vector field of M is conformal Killing. The main result is a characterization theorem for such a half lightlike submanifold. MSC: 53C25; 53C40; 53C50

The Ongoing Quest for the it Artifact: Looking Back, Moving Forward

More than 10 years ago, Orlikowski and Iacono (2001) examined the conceptualization of Information Technology (IT) in Information Systems Research (ISR) articles published in the 1990s. Their main conclusion was that the majority of these articles did not properly conceptualize the IT artifact. They recommended that IS researchers start to theorize about the IT artifact and employ rich conceptualizations of IT. The Orlikowski and Iacono paper provides a strong anchor point from which to analyze the evolution of the IS discipline. In order to obtain an up-to-date image of contemporary IS research, and to assess how the IS field has evolved since the 1990s, we carried out a similar analysis on a more recent and broader set of articles, that is, the full set (N = 644) of papers published between 2006 and 2009 by six top North American (ISR, MISQ, JAIS) and European (JIT, ISJ, EJIS) journals. The statistics in our results reveal no drastic advance in terms of deeper engagement with the IT artifact; more than 39% of the articles in our set are virtually mute about the artifact, and less than 16% employ an ensemble view of IT. Moreover, we note differences among the North American and European journals. Implications of the findings for two perspectives central to the IS research legitimacy debate are discussed.

Framework for the Delivery of Information System Due Diligence

The IS field lacks a scientifically based analytical tool for delivering IS due diligence. Due Diligence is the activity of identifying and measuring the risks and increasing the likelihood of productive investment. In this article, we propose a framework for IS due diligence development based on our generalized experiences conducting IS due diligence in more than 60 banks and financial organizations in Europe.

M-health infusion by healthcare practitioners in the national health services (NHS)

Despite substantial research on IT implementation in the IS field, the healthcare industry has historically been considered a technological laggard and lacks direction on how to successfully infuse new technological innovations within individuals work practices. Theoretically, m-health technologies, if infused in work practices can potentially enhance the quality of healthcare delivery. The question remains as to whether practitioners' performance significantly improves and individual knowledge is enhanced through the infusion of these technologies. While a significant amount of extant literature focuses on initial technology adoption and acceptance, there remains a dearth of literature which focuses on the long term utilisation and associated benefits. This paper addresses this gap in extant literature through the development and testing of a conceptual model, exploring determinants of individual infusion of m-health technologies and their subsequent outcomes. This study has several implications for both theory and practice.

Expeditionary Learning in Information Systems: Definition, Implementation, and Assessment

ABSTRACTIn the natural sciences, collecting, cataloguing, and comparing living specimens have long been a popular, collaborative mode of discovery and learning. New species are discovered, and the relationships between species are theorized. From Aristotle's “History of Animals” to Darwin's “On the Origin of Species”, and beyond, this process of learning through expedition has yielded bountiful knowledge and insights to students of science. In this paper, we propose that expeditionary learning can be applied to a softer science: the field of information systems. In the field of information systems, specimens (information systems) are created by humans, evolving with great speed. Expeditionary learning—where students collaboratively discover, catalog, and compare rapidly evolving information system specimens—is an innovative approach for learners in the IS field, and is effective in increasing IS program visibility and delivering significant, measurable community impact. Our results indicate that learning by expedition has a strong, positive community impact through educating external learners (such as high school and community college students, and the general public), and compares favorably to conventional experiential and service learning styles. Though expeditionary learning does not yield improved course evaluations, we demonstrate that learners’ perceived self‐knowledge and intentions to pursue the subject area are improved.

Acculturation to the global culture and internet adoption

Globalization is felt in most parts of the world and its effects on culture are becoming a topic of interest to society and in particular to the IS academic community. Our research addresses calls for research on the issue of globalization and its cultural effects in the IS field. We present the survey results of 136 members of the general public in a developing country, namely Jordan, which has felt the effects of globalization in the last decade. Our findings show that there is a significant and positive relationship between an individual's acculturation to the global culture and his or her intention to adopt the Internet. This behavioral intention is also significantly related to the individual's perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use of the Internet. Results indicate that the survey's respondents who were exposed to other cultures through travel and media and have learned other languages were more likely to adopt the Internet for communication, education and entertainment, but were less ready to conduct commercial exchanges through the Internet. This initial validation of a new construct, namely acculturation to the global culture as an antecedent to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), is an important contribution to the area of IS research on cultural effects.

Editorial

Editorial

Sustainability as a Topic of IS Research – Reviewing a Decade of Literature

Sustainability becomes more and more important for business and research alike. Whilst the trend might be in full swing, we would like to reflect on the published research results in the IS field’s top research outlets. We do so in form of a structured literature review on the AIS Senior Scholar’s Basket of Six (B6) plus the primarily German-language journal Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI). We chose those 7 outlets to reflect on the different research streams and traditions within the global IS discipline as well. In this paper we present the first results from our analysis and outline some preliminary implications.