An investigation of the factors affecting the successful treatment of organisational issues in systems development projects

A review of the relevant literature confirms the importance of treating organisational issues in order to avoid information systems development failures. To investigate how such issues are treated in practice and the factors associated with their successful treatment, a large-scale survey was conducted. A questionnaire was mailed to senior IS executives and over 600 responses were received. A majority of the respondents (60%) perceived that organisational issues were more important than technical issues and a similar proportion reported treating these issues explicitly, although there was noticeable variation in the frequency with which specific types of issues were treated. However, only 50% felt that organisational issues were successfully dealt with in more than 30% of the projects for which they were responsible. This proportion seems to be independent of the type of organisation or the general development approach adopted, but the results also indicate that using an approach to treating organisational issues which is explicit, frequent and covers a wide range of specific issues is associated with higher levels of success. These results suggest that senior IT executives need to go further in ensuring that the treatment of organisational issues is given greater time, resource and level of priority

Developing a Personality Model for Speech-based Conversational Agents Using the Psycholexical Approach

We present the first systematic analysis of personality dimensions developed specifically to describe the personality of speech-based conversational agents. Following the psycholexical approach from psychology, we first report on a new multi-method approach to collect potentially descriptive adjectives from 1) a free description task in an online survey (228 unique descriptors), 2) an interaction task in the lab (176 unique descriptors), and 3) a text analysis of 30,000 online reviews of conversational agents (Alexa, Google Assistant, Cortana) (383 unique descriptors). We aggregate the results into a set of 349 adjectives, which are then rated by 744 people in an online survey. A factor analysis reveals that the commonly used Big Five model for human personality does not adequately describe agent personality. As an initial step to developing a personality model, we propose alternative dimensions and discuss implications for the design of agent personalities, personality-aware personalisation, and future research.Comment: 14 pages, 2 figures, 3 tables, CHI'2

Apps vs Devices: Can the usability of mobile apps be decoupled from the device?

In this paper we present a study using subjective measures to examine usability of mobile phone applications running on two different platforms, the OSX iPhone and an O2 Orbit running Windows Mobile operating system.The aim was to enhance the understanding of the influence of devices on mobile application usability.We gathered subjective measures using questionnaires to assess the satisfaction level while using mobile applications installed on two different devices.Results indicate that the device on which an application is installed strongly influence user satisfaction

Performing research: four contributions to HCI

This paper identifies a body of HCI research wherein the researchers take part in digitally mediated creative experiences alongside participants. We present our definition and rationale for "self-situated performance research" based on theories in both the HCI and performance literatures. We then analyse four case studies of this type of work, ranging from overtly "performative" staged events to locative audio and public making. We argue that by interrogating experience from within the context of self-situated performance, the 'performer/researcher' extends traditional practices in HCI in the following four ways: developing an intimate relationship between researchers and participants, providing new means of making sense of interactions, shaping participants' relationship to the research, and enabling researchers to refine their work as it is being conducted

Application of User Profiling on Ontology Module Extraction for Medical portals

One fit all for approach for searching and ranking discovered knowledge on the Internet does not cater for the diverse variety of users and user groups with different preferences, information needs and priorities. This is of a particular case in the National electronic Library of Infection in the UK (NeLI, www.neli.org.uk) accessed by a number of medical professionals with different preferences and medical information needs. We define personal and group profiles, based on user-specified interests, and develop an ontology module extraction service defining the key area of the infection ontology of a particular relevance to each user group. In this paper we discuss how ontology modularisation can improve the NeLI portal by providing customised alert, recommender service and specialitycustomised browsing tree structure

A Glorious and Not-So-Short History of the Information Systems Field

In this paper, the more than 40-year history of the information systems discipline is discussed by dividing history into four somewhat overlapping eras. For each era, important events that occurred are highlighted. The events are categorized as “management/governance of the IS function”, “technology”, “research themes”, “research methodology”, “education”, and “infrastructure” (organizations, conferences, journals, etc.). The paper then speculates on what the value would be if the IS community were to adopt a shared history. The paper contends that such a shared history would be effective in helping to bridge the communication gaps that exist between the different sub-communities that make up the discipline