Developing Interoperable Collaboration Services to Sustain Activities of Communities of Practice

Communities of Practice (CoPs) have attracted the interest of professionals and researchers as successful environments for enhancing, developing and improving practices through collaboration between their members. More and more, CoPs are choosing virtual environments and services to support their activities. However, recent research has underlined the lack of adequate scaffolding in terms of technical support and appropriate use of technology for communication and collaboration. The paper argues in favour of a collaborative design methodology for the development of services based on new technologies, open-source or open-source minded . Producing interoperable, evolutionary, flexible and truly collaborative services appears of major interest to sustain activities of distributed CoPs. The paper uses as a case study the description of collaboratively designed services addressing the needs of distributed CoPs within the European Project PALETTE. The example of PALETTE shows that in complex project situations, collaborative design sustained by Actor-Network Theory is a helpful framework to reach the goals of the project

Twenty Years of Boundary Spanning and Brokering in ISD: Implications for the Data Warehouse Domain

Data warehouse (DWH) systems are developed to support the process of decision making. Due to the number of involved communities and the complexity of their collaboration, DWH projects are costly. Nevertheless, despite a growing amount of research on DWH project management, success factors of DWH development projects and so forth, we still lack a thorough understanding of how processes on the borders between participating communities, namely boundary spanning and brokering, influence the DWH development process per se. To our knowledge very few studies and with no extensive research have examined this topic. We therefore conducted literature review of a more general research domain, namely information systems development (ISD). As a result, we found helpful implications for the development of DWHs

Towards inter-organizational Enterprise Architecture Management - Applicability of TOGAF 9.1 for Network Organizations

Network organizations and inter-organizational systems (IOS) have recently been the subjects of extensive research and practice. Various papers discuss technical issues as well as several complex business considerations and cultural issues. However, one interesting aspect of this context has only received adequate coverage so far, namely the ability of existing Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) frameworks to address the diverse challenges of inter-organizational collaboration. The relevance of this question is grounded in the increasing significance of IOS and the insight that many organizations model their architecture using such frameworks. This paper addresses the question by firstly conducting a conceptual literature review in order to identify a set of challenges. An EAM framework was then chosen and its ability to address the challenges was evaluated. The chosen framework is The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF) 9.1 and the analysis conducted with regard to the support of network organizations highlights which issues it deals with. TOGAF serves as a good basis to solve the challenges of “Process and Data Integration” and “Infrastructure and Application Integration”. Other areas such as the “Organization of the Network Organization” need further support. Both the identification of challenges and the analysis of TOGAF assist academics and practitioners alike to identify further research topics as well as to find documentation related to inter-organizational problems in EAM

The Role of IT Governance and Information Infrastructure in the Process of Strategic Alignment

Drawing upon Actor Network Theory (ANT), this paper presents a discussion on how ITG arrangements and IT infrastructure actor-networks achieve strategic alignment (i.e., alignment of interests). This is achieved by exploring how ITG arrangements and IT infrastructure are implemented, and how their interests become dynamically aligned. Considering both ITG arrangements and IT infrastructure as emerging phenomena, their dynamic relationships are analysed using a local/global network approach. The negotiation process towards achieving the alignment of interests is illustrated and explained by using a trajectory of ITG implementation at a Malaysian public listed company

Types, obstacles and sources of empowerment in co-design: the role of shared material objects and processes

Co-design is intrinsically linked to the notion of empowerment, however little research has focussed specifically on understanding the types, obstacles and sources of empowerment in co-design. This paper combines theoretical investigations with observations derived from co-designed research by academic and non-academic partners to explore these issues, in particular, the role of shared material objects and processes in supporting empowerment during co-design. The paper uses the notions of ‘power over,’ ‘power to’, ‘power with’ and ‘power within’ to tease out different aspects of empowerment, and draws on empirical observations to determine different obstacles and sources associated with each. The study therefore makes a theoretical contribution to the understanding of co-design as an empowerment process and should be useful for design researchers undertaking co-design projects with non-experts

ANT-Maps: Visualising Perspectives of Business and Information Systems

In the IS-literature, graphical representations often accompany Actor-Network Theory (ANT) analyses of IS-initiatives, serving as tools for improving visibility of the case and interest and power of actors. Building on a comprehensive literature survey, we identify a gap in existing visualisation approaches, as these mainly focus on offering visual support of the case. We present a visualisation approach and a generic, precise and well defined notation that is directly mapped to key concepts of ANT, highlighting the process of translating actors to commit to the implementation initiative. The approach is illustrated by an actor-network analysis of a particular IS-initiative in a Swedish media organisation

Symbolic meanings and e-learning in the workplace: The case of an intranet-based training tool

This article contributes to the debate on work-based e-learning, by unpacking the notion of ‘the learning context’ in a case where the mediating tool for training also supports everyday work. Users’ engagement with the information and communication technology tool is shown to reflect dynamic interactions among the individual, peer group, organizational and institutional levels. Also influential are professionals’ values and identity work, alongside their interpretations of espoused and emerging symbolic meanings. Discussion draws on pedagogically informed studies of e-learning and the wider organizational learning literature. More centrally, this article highlights the instrumentality of symbolic interactionism for e-learning research and explores some of the framework’s conceptual resources as applied to organizational analysis and e-learning design. </jats:p

Attempts to share information between public sector organisations over time: A case-based exploration of value conflicts

Despite the importance of inter-organisational information sharing (IOIS) in the public sector, such endeavours often fail. Existing research has shown that the values held by collaborating organisations are one important factor affecting these kinds of initiatives. However, research has sought only to a limited extent to address how value conflicts come into play over time. Therefore, this paper aims to explore how conflicting values shape an inter-organisational information-sharing practice in the public sector over time. Using the local/global network framework, we analyse four years’ worth of information sharing in an inter-organisational advisory group in the context of Swedish nuclear waste management. We conclude that different value conflicts are emphasised to different extents at different points in time. That is, values do not uniformly affect IOIS activities, and such conflicts over time reduce the set of potential IOIS activities. We also conclude that when IOIS activities are driven by an individual organisation’s values, individual value rational activities may co-exist with a dysfunctional long-term IOIS practice.publishedVersio