The Q-method has been utilized over time in various areas, including information systems. In this study, we used a systematic mapping to illustrate how the Q-method was applied within Information Systems (IS) community and proposing towards the integration of Q-method into the Design Sciences Research (DSR) process as a tool for future research DSR-based IS studies. In this mapping study, we collected peer-reviewed journals from Basket-of-Eight journals and the digital library of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). Then we grouped the publications according to the process of DSR, and different variables for preparing Q-method from IS publications. We found that the potential of the Q-methodology can be used to support each main research stage of DSR processes and can serve as the useful tool to evaluate a system in the IS topic of system analysis and design
E-government evolves towards large-scale software platforms that integrate access to and information exchange among public services. Governance of large-scale e-government platforms is challenging ...
Innovation is increasingly expected in today’s ongoing outsourcing relationships. While prior studies made considerable strides to examine innovation through outsourcing, the research landscape remains highly fragmented. In this review, we bring together and analyse prior research examining this emerging phenomenon in the contexts of IT outsourcing (ITO) and business process outsourcing (BPO). We focus on articles published between 1997 and 2018 in the top outlets across information systems (IS), management, and related disciplines. Our contribution is threefold: First, we present an overview of the key literature on this topic. Second, we identify and document three different scopes of achievable innovation through outsourcing, associated firm-specific intentions and capabilities, and relationship governance structures conducive to such value creating activities. Third, we put forward propositions for future research on innovation through outsourcing.
Welfare technologies (WT) such as telecare and service robots are expected to improve and even radically transform service delivery in healthand eldercare. Yet despite political awareness and financial investments, many studies report promising inventions that fail to become implemented on a larger scale. Current research draws a fragmented and heterogeneous picture of this problem, with divergent implications for practice. In this article, I review and discuss the extant literature and identify eight competing concerns that are central to how WT can become implemented on a large scale. By highlighting and contrasting practical and theoretical positions in this emerging and interdisciplinary research topic, I contribute conceptually to the understanding of the competing concerns in WT innovation that managers and policy-makers must balance in order to support the critical transition from smallscale invention to large-scale implementation.
Digital innovations evolve unpredictable as the characteristics of digital technology provide diverse opportunities for entrepreneurs. The flexible, malleable, and unbounded nature of digital technologies makes the evolution process unpredictable as entrepreneurs can rarely estimate beforehand how new digital technologies might impact the evolution process. It is also hard to predict how customers will react to the changes enabled by digital technologies. In this longitudinal case study, we were interested in different competitive moves that entrepreneurs apply to effectuate changes in the evolutionary pathway of digital innovations. Further, we were fascinated by how the evolution of digital innovations is shaped by the characteristics of digital technologies. Based on the longitudinal case study, we recognized five different moves taken by entrepreneurs to bring to the market and further evolve their digital platform–based innovation. These moves were related either to the creation of new, unexpected opportunities that digital technologies enabled or to more planned decisions to expand market opportunities. This study contributes to digital entrepreneurship literature by providing a detailed method for analyzing the evolution of digital innovations through competitive moves.
Police authorities in a number of countries have recently introduced body-worn cameras (BWC). With the use of body-worn cameras, the police have gained access to new forms of wearable and powerful ...
This paper demonstrates the role of pre-product user experience (UX) in product design. For automotive companies, questions concerning how users will experience not yet available products is pressing - due to an increase in UX design for products, combined with a decrease in time-to-market for new products. Conventional UX research provides insights through investigating specific situated moments during use, or users’ reflections after use, yet cannot provide knowledge about how users will engage with not yet existing products. To understand pre-product UX we undertook a netnographic study of three people’s experiences of expecting and owning a Tesla car. We identified how modes of anticipation evolve before using the actual car, through online social interaction, creating a pre-product experience. The study offers a foundation for theorizing pre-product UX as socially generated anticipated UX, as well as insights for UX design in industry.
It is increasingly common for firms to engage in both external and internal crowdsourcing to access ideas and solutions coming from external customers and internal employees. These IT platforms can be seen as forms of open and closed innovation search, where the first aims to perform distant search beyond the organizational boundaries, while the second is used to conduct local search within the firm. Nevertheless, limited attention has been placed on investigating which tensions emerge when firms combine these conflicting innovation search strategies and related management approaches to address them. By drawing on a qualitative, inductive case study of a large organization headquartered in France, our study identifies and discusses three key paradoxes emerging from pursuing both innovation forms: (1) paradox of identity; (2) paradox of organizing the innovation process; and (3) paradox of boundary management. Moreover, we discuss different management approaches implemented by managers to address the identified paradoxes.
While the worldwide market expansion of Uber has raised controversy, Uber has also received praise for its mobile phone app. Its many features – taxi ordering, pricing, real-time location information, paying, and service evaluation – have provided significant customer value. When Uber entered Finland in November 2014, few other taxi apps were available. Between 2014 and 2018, this shortage of taxi apps turned into an abundance, with many companies introducing their own taxi apps. By leaning on institutional theory, and more specifically by applying coercive, mimetic and normative pressures as a lens, we provide an explanation for why three Finnish taxi apps now resemble Uber in some features, whereas they differ in others. Based on our interviews, we can explain the present-day differences between these apps by coercive and normative pressures in the institutional environment of the Finnish taxi industry. We contribute to the IT and institutionalization research stream by illustrating how mobile applications as IT artefacts can be seen as carriers of institutional pressures materializing in the features they provide.
Although information systems and technology have brought many benefits into people’s everyday lives, not to mention society as a whole, they are also accompanied by negative consequences. For example, technostress, anxiety, and even different kinds of addictions are among the side effects of information technology use. Clearly, such negative consequences cannot be fully avoided, but at least some of them may be mitigated via good system design. In this study, we addressed the dark side of information technology use in everyday life and in a leisure context, reviewing contributions from the basket of eight information systems journals published between 2004 and early 2018. In our analysis, we utilized the Persuasive Systems Design model in order to recognize and analyze information system characteristics that may mitigate the negative consequences of information technology use.
Business Process Management (BPM) is fundamental in IT/IS systems requirement specifications and is also well positioned in Enterprise Architecture (EA) frameworks and practices. Continuous Improvement (CI) relates to agendas of lean, six sigma, and incessant push for increased effectiveness of the organization. This paper is developing a position of EA-driven BPM as being long-term, strategic and “slow”, whereas CI is short-term, operational and “fast”. A case study is presented, where CI is furthermore locally based and BPM is centrally based in a larger organization. This leads to conflicts between BPM and CI where the corporate value of both is eroded as IS initiatives on ERP implementation are prolonged and CI initiatives fail to match to-be scenarios. This paper discuss EA as a mediator, where EA is communicating business opportunities to “positive” CI initiatives and aiming at stopping “negative” CI initiatives. An EA-based process tracing mechanism is suggested and demonstrated connecting business processes, ERP, and silo-based elements for CI initiatives. Furthermore, a CI project management tool is discussed to outline screening opportunities for EA-based CI reviews. An agenda is developed to ensure that CI projects are developed according to the Enterprise Architecture and developed along the organizational architecture and not as silo projects. Furthermore Enterprise Architecture is in such case not alone to induce changes and EA must develop methods to synchronise and coordinate with other change processes.
Digital transformation can be seen as the mutual reinforcement of process redesign and innovative use of IT. The literature on digital transformation focuses on digital business strategy and the transformational CIO. Stakeholder engagement in combination with leadership style is seldom discussed. Our research questions are (i) what characterises leadership in the digital transformation, and (ii) what does the Scandinavian workplace model add to the knowledge of digital transformation? Our empirical evidence is the digital transformation in a large airline, the SAS, during the years 2013–2016. The process was very turbulent but eventually quite successful. We identify two Scandinavian contributions to transformation research: firstly, the deep engagement with employees, including trade unions, supports a structured process with a focus on finding solutions, not conflicts. Second, a coaching leadership style, allowing space for autonomy, leverages the competence of highly-skilled employees.
The concept of "living lab" is a rather new phenomenon that facilitates user involvement in open innovation activities. The users' motivations to contribute to the living lab activities at the beginning of the project are usually higher than once the activities are underway. However, the literature still lacks an understanding of what actions are necessary to reduce the likelihood of user drop-out throughout the user engagement process. This study aims to explore key factors that are influential on user drop-out in a living lab setting by engaging users to test an innovation during the pilot phase of the application's development. The stability of the prototype, ease of use, privacy protection, flexibility of the prototype, effects of reminders, and timing issues are the key influential factors on user drop-out behavior. This paper summarizes the key lessons learned from the case study and points to avenues for future research.
User-based redesign after implementation has been studied in many contexts gone by many different names, such as appropriation of technology, malleable design and secondary design. The phenomenon of redesigning content has mainly revolved around technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, or Wikipedia or portal-based technology with configuration abilities, with very little focus on technologies where users can change both functionality, content and the level of technology complexity. We coin this type of secondary design deep secondary design. In this paper, we investigate how to enable deep secondary design by analyzing two cases where secondary designers fundamentally change functionality, content and technology complexity level. The first case redesigns a decision model for agile development in an insurance company; the second creates a contingency model for choosing project management tools and techniques in a hospital. Our analysis of the two cases leads to the identification of four principles of design implementation that primary designers can apply to enable secondary design and four corresponding design implementation principles that secondary designers themselves need to apply.
