Crisis! what crisis?

Abstract There is a crisis discussed in the discipline of Information Systems. Those who perceive such a crisis to exist are by no means agreed, as to its nature and origins. Our inquiry shows that there are a three distinct “crises” being debated. The first of these relates to the Substance and boundaries of the discipline itself and if it is even a discipline at all. Another “crisis” relates to higher education and a fall in demand for IS courses from new students. Commentators perceive this to threaten the existence of IS departments in Universities, and to have potentially serious consequences for both research strategies and career paths of academics. Thirdly, there is perception of a crisis in the wider world, characterised by fewer vacancies in IS-relevant occupations whilst, at the same time, employers complain of a shortage of suitably skilled applicants for the vacancies available. This paper examines evidence for the three “crises,” real or imagined, suggested above, in the Information Systems field

Identity in information systems

Open Process Innovation – drawing from the literature on Open Innovation and Business Process Management (BPM) – promotes the study of how to systematically make use of knowledge that lies outside of an organization’s boundaries for process innovation initiatives. Open Innovation has been heavily studied for product innovation, however, process innovation has not yet been researched from such perspective. Against this background, we seek to investigate into variables that impact on the qualities of Open Process Innovation taking the example of the public sector domain. This paper examines how personnel resource scarcity exerts influence on the involvement of i) customers (here citizens and local companies) and ii) consultants (here management and software consultants) in public sector BPM. Our multi-method analysis shows that personnel resource scarcity has consequences for BPM-related collaboration schema as it restricts the involvement of customers. Based on our findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed, including implications for studies on BPM maturity or on business process design. We call for a governance-theory perspective on process innovation as a fundamental basis for understanding and designing the institutions that shape collaboration in open process innovation

VISUALIZING SOCIAL ROLES - DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A BIRD\u27S-EYE VIEW OF SOCIAL NETWORK PRIVACY SETTINGS

The rising usage of Social Network Sites for interacting with contacts from multiple social spheres poses new privacy challenges and increasingly prompts users to manage their online identities. To convey a consistent image of the self when interacting with a group of contacts, at first awareness of previously used social roles is needed. However, existing tools on Social Network Sites to increase such awareness are often spread over different interfaces and the user is left to figure out which contacts have access to which shared items. To address these problems, we introduce the Access Policy Grid, a new visualization offering a bird\u27s-eye view on defined privacy settings that allows identifying social roles and inconsistencies therein. To evaluate our visualization, we present the results of a laboratory experiment involving 32 participants in which we compare the Access Policy Grid to the native Facebook interface. For five out of six research qustions, our results show that the APG outperforms the Facebook interface significantly in terms of at least one of the three investigated aspects (accuracy, confidence, and time-to-task completion)

WHAT ARE YOUR FAVORITE METHODS? - AN EXAMINATION ON THE FREQUENCY OF RESEARCH METHODS FOR IS CONFERENCES FROM 2006 TO 2010

The objective of this study was to analyze, which research methodologies are currently being used in the field of Information Systems (IS). To analyze research activities from different parts of the world, the proceedings of five conferences ?on Information Systems? were included over a five year period from 2006 to 2010. In addition to the ?International Conference on Information Systems? (ICIS), papers were also taken from the regional Americas (AMCIS), Australasian (ACIS), European (ECIS) and Pacific Asia (PACIS) conferences on information systems. The results of this study indicated that two methods were most popular at conferences by far: ?survey? and ?concept implementation / proof of concept?. Both at conferences and in journals in the IS field, researchers concentrated on only a few research methods, which meant that many other research methods were rarely used. Across all conferences, a trend towards methods orientation could be observed. Only few conference-specific differences in method usage could be found. Across all conferences, researchers noted a slightly increasing trend towards using combinations of methods. Some differences in preferred method combinations could be identified among regional conferences and ICIS. Compared to recent journal-based studies, the favored research methods were quite similar

AUTOMATED PLANNING OF PROCESS MODELS: THE CONSTRUCTION OF SIMPLE MERGES

Business processes evolve dynamically with changing business demands. Because of these fast changes, traditional process improvement techniques have to be adapted and extended since they often require a high degree of manual work. To reduce this degree of manual work, the automated planning of process models is proposed. In this context, we present a novel approach for an automated construction of the control flow structure simple merge (XOR join). This accounts for a necessary step towards an auto-mated planning of entire process models. Here we build upon a planning domain, which gives us a general and formal basis to apply our approach independently from a specific process modeling lan-guage. To analyze the feasibility of our method, we mathematically evaluate the approach in terms of key properties like termination and completeness. Moreover, we implement the approach in a process planning software and apply it to several real-world processes

Open Innovation and Public Sector Business Process Management – A Multi-Method Study

Open Process Innovation provides a framework for studying how to systematically make use of knowledge that lies outside of an organization’s boundaries for process innovation initiatives. Here, we seek to investigate into variables that impact on the qualities of Open Process Innovation taking the example of the public sector domain. This paper examines how a lack of resources impacts on BPM. Specifically in investigates how personnel resource scarcity exerts influence on the involvement of i) customers (here citizens and local companies) and ii) consultants (here management and software consultants) in public sector BPM. Our multi-method analysis shows that personnel resource scarcity has consequences for BPM-related collaboration schema as it restricts the involvement of customers. Based on our findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed, including implications for studies on BPM maturity or on business process design. We call for a governancetheory perspective on process innovation as a fundamental basis for understanding and designing the institutions that shape collaboration in open process innovation

Business Process Model-Based Evaluation of ICT Investments in Public Administrations

This paper presents an approach to asses ICT investments in public administrations. The public sector bears great potential for business process optimization through ICT. However, these possibilities remain largely unexploited since the effects of ICT on the processes are not clear to decisions makers. To asses this impact all processes of a public administration, the process landscape, have to be taken into account. The PICTURE modeling method has been proposed as a way to efficiently model the whole process landscape. Based on the knowledge captured with those process models, the impact of certain ICT functionalities on the processes can be analyzed. ICT investment decisions become more transparent towards the political leadership. This paper has two research objectives: First, an architecture for an automated evaluation of ICT investment decisions is introduced. Second, the practical feasibility of the architecture is shown based on an investment decision for a document management system

The Impact of Service-Oriented Architecture on Business Networkability

Increased networking among firms has become a competitive necessity in many industries and the ability to efficiently establish, operate and dissolve business relationships has become a competitive advantage. The degree of this networkability is influenced by several factors, such as organizational structure, business processes, people and culture, but also information systems. In fact, current technological developments aim at the efficient and flexible orchestration of standardized modules, referred to as services. Past research has analyzed networkability primarily qualitatively without providing a specific perspective on the concept of service-oriented architecture (SOA) which has only emerged on a broad scale since the beginning of this century. This paper is a first attempt to investigate the impact of SOA on the notion of business networkability. It is assumed that the ability to flexibly link business services among business partners also positively influences the firm’s networkability. Empirical evidence will be provided from the financial industry which is currently undergoing a strong vertical disintegration. The results show a moderate, but nevertheless significant impact