Abstract As the discourse regarding digital transformation has developed, we see an opportunity to extend the concept of becoming digital into an as‐of‐yet unrealized future. By examining the ...foundational assumptions of digital transformation, we reveal two frontiers that expand the current transformation discourse into futures where their implications and outcomes will reside. A conceptual frontier suggests that we begin to conceptualise the worlds in which future organisations and people observe digital technologies and their enactments as an unexceptional and quite mundane aspect of their daily lives. We initiate conceptualising being digital as an outcome of the transformations our current research studies. A second analytic frontier embraces world‐making in current theorizations and the development of future‐leaning conceptualization of alternative worlds. Speculative foresight is an approach for staging new concepts and relationships, critiquing current research practice and theory boundaries, and creating novel and generative theorizations. An example speculative foresight scenario illustrates onto‐epistemic assumptions and ambiguities in current theories of digital transformation regarding how future ethics will be conceived. The implications and limitations of this approach are discussed in the context of the need for IS research to develop orientations that can contribute to understanding digital transformation processes and both positive and negative transformation outcomes that will constitute yet unrealized futures.
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BFBNIB, FZAB, GIS, IJS, KILJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, SBCE, SBMB, UL, UM, UPUK
The Information Systems field is structured by the research topics emphasized by communities of journals. The Latent Categorization Method categorized and automatically named IS research topics in ...14,510 abstracts from 65 Information Systems journals. These topics were clustered into seven intellectual communities based on publication patterns. The technique develops categories from the data itself, it is replicable, is relatively insensitive to the size of the text units, and it avoids many of the problems that frequently accompany human categorization. As such LCM provides a new approach to analyzing a wide array of textual data.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPCLJ, UPUK
In this research essay we contend that “emergence,” or the formation of complex wholes from parts, is a fundamental concept for comprehending the dynamic relationships between people, technology, and ...organizations during the ongoing cycles of design, appropriation, and use of information systems. Past research on emergent phenomena use the concept with varying degrees of attention to the structural and functional changes that have occurred to components in the emergent whole or to the implications of the processes by which emergence occurs. Refining our perspectives of emergence will guide researchers in clarifying how the socio-technical whole is greater than the constituent parts and how the whole comes into existence over time. In this article, we define three forms of emergence and provide both research exemplars and a framework for categorizing emergent phenomena to better articulate and refine how we understand emergent phenomena in Information Systems.
As distributed organizations increasingly rely on technological innovations to enhance organizational efficiency and competitiveness, interest in agile practices that enable adoption of information ...technology (IT) based innovations has grown. This study examines the influence of a network organization environment on the ability to develop agile adoption practices. An exploratory case study design was used to investigate the interactions between network structure, social information processing, organizational similarity (homophily), and absorptive capacity during the adoption of a large-scale IT system in two network organization environments within New York State. The data suggest that network organization characteristics and communication processes that reinforced social influence and supported knowledge transfer positively influenced adoption agility. We propose a model of agile adoption practices and discuss implications for the development of theory about network organization characteristics and capabilities to adopt IT-based innovations.
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15.
Explanation in Information Systems Hovorka, Dirk S; Germonprez, Matt; Larsen, Kai R
Information systems journal (Oxford, England),
01/2008, Volume:
18, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
. Explanation of observed phenomena is a major objective of both those who conduct and those who apply research in information systems (IS). Whereas explanation based on the statistical relationship ...between independent and dependent variables is a common outcome of explanatory IS research, philosophers of science disagree about whether statistical relationships are the sole basis for the explanation of phenomena. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an expanded concept of explanation into the realm of IS research. We present a framework based on the four principle explanation types defined in modern philosophy: covering‐law explanation, statistical‐relevance explanation, contrast‐class explanation and functional explanation. A well‐established research stream, media richness, is used to illustrate how the different explanation types complement each other in increasing comprehension of the phenomenon. This framework underlies our argument that explanatory pluralism can be used to broaden research perspectives and increase scientific comprehension of IS phenomena above and beyond the methodological and ontological pluralism currently in use in IS research.
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As user interactions have become more central to specific classes of information systems, design theorizing must expand to support the processes of interaction and the evolution of information ...systems. This theorizing goes beyond user-aided, participatory design to consider users as designers in their own right during the ongoing creation and recreation of information systems. Recent theorizing about an emerging class of tailorable systems proposes that such systems undergo an initial, primary design process where features are built in prior to general release. Following implementation, people engage in a secondary design process where functions and content emerge during interaction, modification, and embodiment of the system in use. This case study reveals that people are engaged designers, framed by dualities in behaviors including planned and emergent behaviors, and participatory and reifying behaviors. We contribute to design science research by extending work on tailorable systems, investigating processes of secondary design in a highly interactive system suited to support user engagement. We also contribute more broadly to design science research by explicitly extending behavioral aspects associated with the use of information system artifacts. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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A Theory of Tailorable Technology Design Germonprez, Matt; Hovorka, Dirk; Collopy, Fred
Journal of the Association for Information Systems,
06/2007, Volume:
8, Issue:
6
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Tailorable technologies are a class of information systems designed with the intention that users modify and redesign the technology in the context of use. Tailorable technologies support user goals, ...intentions, metaphor, and use patterns in the selection and integration of technology functions in the creation of new and unique information systems. We propose a theory of tailorable technology design and identify principles necessary for the initial design. Following a Kantian style of inquiry, we identified four definitional characteristics of tailorable technology: a dual design perspective, user engagement, recognizable environments, and component architectures. From these characteristics, we propose nine design principles that will support the phenomenon of tailoring. Through a year-long case study, we refined and evidenced the principles, finding found that designers of tailorable technologies build environments in which users can both interact and engage with the technology, supporting the proposed design principles. The findings highlight a distinction between a reflective environment, where users recognize and imagine uses for the technology, and an active environment in which users tailor the technology in accordance with the imagined uses. This research contributes to the clarification of the role of theory in design science, expands the concept of "possibilities for action" to IS design, and proposes a design theory of a class of information systems for testing and refinement. PUBLICATION ABSTRACT
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This study investigates the process of information services development based on a case study of the experience of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). In this study, we ...develop theoretical constructs that can inform researchers and practitioners on (1) what the critical domains and interactions associated with the emerging process of information service development at these organizations were, and (2) how information services at NOAA evolved over time? Adopting a coevolutionary view, we identified distinct yet interdependent domains that affected, and were affected by, the information services development process; these were: (1) services choreography, through which service interactions and collaborations are managed; (2) services orchestration, through which service processes are selected and interact; and (3) services instrumentation, by which services are developed and architected. Using the coevolutionary view, we uncovered three adaptive principles that explain the interplay among domains and interactions over time: adaptive tensions, requisite variety, and modular design. We discuss our findings' implications for research and practice and offer propositions for future research.
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Just as Lee, Briggs, and Dennis 8 showed that positivism's conception of "explanation" leads to requirements for positivist theory to satisfy, we show that a hermeneutical conception of ..."interpretation" leads to requirements for interpretive theory to satisfy. We refer to the hermeneutical philosopher Ricoeur's model of the text, by which "the methodology of text-interpretation serves as a paradigm for interpretation in general" 12, p. 91. Much as the meaning of a text is interpreted, the meaning of a person's action is interpreted, where in both cases, the object of interpretation is an existing understanding. It exists in the form of not only the understanding originating with the author of a text or the person engaging in an action, but also the understanding that the observing interpretive researcher comes to hold -- the interpretation. Explicit recognition of understanding in such forms leads to requirements that can strengthen interpretive theorizing.
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