When talking about the Scandinavian approach people often think about cooperation between trade unions and researchers. This approach, called the collective approach, is for sure the most well-known and the researchers belonging to this approach has produced a huge amount of research articles. But there are at least three other approaches: The system theoretical approach, introduced by Langefors, the socio-technical approach, influenced by Enid Mumford and the Work Informatics approach introduced by Markku Nurminen. In this paper I give a short description of them all and conclude that most workers today apply the Work Informatics approach without being aware of it.

Even though the practice of integrating evaluative features into software has long been applied in commercially available software, it is still underrepresented in the Information Systems (IS) community. This paper presents a framework for embedded evaluation support. We are aware of the challenges of evaluation of socio-technical systems and take this issue into consideration in our framework. Our framework is the result of conceptualizations drawing from the evaluation discourse discussion on the topics of artifact evaluation in DSR. We also demonstrate our ideas through two examples of embedded evaluation support mechanisms designed and used in a DSR project in the Swedish healthcare sector.

I consider my career as rather exceptional. I think I am the only living person in Sweden who achieved a professor chair with only one international journal publication; a publication I u ...

In order to learn, presence is necessary. If we experience a genuinely rich presence, exams, tests and other forms of evaluating knowledge are not crucial for learning. In distance learning, the co ...

The notions of immigration and social integration have increasingly become central themes in public discourse,particularly in the European Union. Besides opportunities, this phenomenon also poses challenges to the host nations of promoting social integration of immigrants. Continuing an earlier Design Science Research project that developed an open learning platform for Civic Orientation in Sweden, this paper attempts to extend this platform using Jurgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as an inspiration. We aim at designing a more inclusive open learning platform for social integration that supports instrumental, strategic, normatively-regulated, dramaturgical, and communicative action. We expect to further the relevance of philosophy in IS research by not only making sense of phenomena through philosophical lens, butalso attaining inspirations from philosophy in designing sociotechnical information systems.

The notions of immigration and social integration have increasingly become central themes in public discourse, particularly in the European Union. Besides opportunities, this phenomenon also poses challenges to the host nations of promoting social integration of immigrants. Continuing an earlier Design Science Research project that developed an open learning platform for Civic Orientation in Sweden, this paper attempts to extend this platform using Jürgen Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action as an inspiration. We aim at designing a more inclusive open learning platform for social integration that supports instrumental, strategic, normatively-regulated, dramaturgical, and communicative action. We expect to further the relevance of philosophy in IS research by not only making sense of phenomena through philosophical lens, but also attaining inspirations from philosophy in designing sociotechnical information systems.

In order to achieve learning, presence is necessary. If we have good presence, no tests are necessary. In distance learning, the concept of presence is not obvious. Presence in distance and network contexts usually means being active on social media. However, in distance and network learning, something more is needed. It is the face-to-face interaction that needs to be “digitalized”. In order to investigate this, we have turned to Heidegger (1927) and the concept of Dasein. The need for an artifact mediating Dasein has been identified. The concept of Dasein is not easy, not even in philosophical terms. It means being somewhere else, and not on the place you are present. We have extended the The Community of Inquiry Model originating from Garrisson & Andersson (2003) by introducing the concept of digital Dasein.

A case study is analyzed and lessons learned from the emergence of the Sambruk Academia for Swedish municipalities are discussed. The case study of an e-learning project was part of the Innoveta pr ...

Establishing contact centres in municipalities is a contemporary issue. Manymunicipalities started establishing contact centres as the municipalities face towards theenvironment. A problem often neglected is the integration of the contact centre with the otheradministrations of the municipality. Our focus lies on designing common processes in themunicipality for ensuring an information flow between the contact centre and the administrations.Derived from the empirical data, the authors present a model with the purpose to establishprocesses, which might reduce conflicts between the contact centre and the administrations. Afocus is on the use of naming and tagging matters. The model is based upon the use of ontologiesof the clerks working with a matter in a workflow. One characteristic of this model is that theontologies are developed in close cooperation with the clerks.

Handbook of Research on E-Government Readiness for Information and Service Exchange: Utilizing Progressive Information Communication Technologies

A contact service in a municipality is a place where the citizens can apply for processing of their claims concerning municipal jurisdiction. Examples could be application for a place at pre-school, planning permission or change of dustbin etc. The clerks at the contact centre should be able to provide immediate service in most of the matters. This requires the work-process for each matter to be known. Before starting of a contact service this knowledge existed in the administration for the actual claim. In many cases it was tacit and not described. This paper discusses the problem of making this knowledge explicit and described in order to be used at the contact service. Issues concerning work organisation, personnel and job satisfaction are recognised, but not in focus. Instead our focus lies on the work content, processing of the claims, which the clerks are dealing with. It is a qualitative study, based upon three existing contact services and one, which is in the design phase. We start with a brief discussion of different types of knowledge, related to classical epistemologies within the organisation area (Nonaka & Takeuchi, Brown & Duguid, Cook & Brown, Polyani, etc). Based upon empirical material from the cases we identify some typical knowledge categories. It might be general knowledge about rules, procedures and such things; it might be experience-based knowledge from previous claims, typical claims and work praxis developed over time. It might also be knowledge about the specific citizen and about the specific application. But it can also be totally new categories. Two categories we are pretty sure to identify are matter-oriented knowledge, concerning the actual matter and procedural knowledge, concerning the processing of the matter-oriented knowledge. In our previous research about work-flow four levels have been identified and we suspect the same basic reasoning might apply here.

Systems development seems to be taught in a very traditional way in the Swedish unversities. It is supposed that an inhouse development starting from scratch will be at hand. This is shown using an investigation of current books in the area, of contemporary educations in systems deveopment. But the needs from the business word are different and this is shown in an investigation of job advertisments in Sweden. The conclusion is that informatics as subject is at a deep crise: We educate students for a work that was at hand in the 80ʼs and not for the 21 st century!