Genre Analysis in Information Systems Research

In this paper we examine the information systems (IS) literature surrounding the use of genre analysis. We look at why IS researchers use genre analysis, the insights that using genre analysis brings forth, and the resulting impact the research has. We also show that genre analysis is successfully providing an identity for the IS discipline. We use this review to provide insight into new avenues that IS researchers might explore using genre analysis, as well as show how practitioners may be able to benefit from its use

The use of genre analysis in the design of electronic meeting systems

WOS:000237136400002 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science)Introduction. Genre analysis is an approach to study communication patterns and thus it can be applied to the specific context of meetings. This research investigates the use of genre analysis in the design of electronic meeting systems. Background. The primary goal of genre analysis is to understand how virtual communities use digital communication to collaborate. This knowledge is fundamental for informing the design of information systems, particularly in areas where communication and informality are paramount. However, the research literature does not report any experiments where genre analysis has been used to inform the design of electronic meeting systems. Problems. The paper tackles the following common problems found in current electronic meeting systems: (1) reduced organizational integration, neglecting many contextual cues and explaining factors necessary to make meeting outcomes usable within the organization; (2) lack of support to specific communities of users, stressing the dependency on a facilitator to configure and manage the technology; and (3) lack of support to meeting occurrences that span long time periods. Conclusions. The paper describes how genre analysis was used to develop electronic meeting systems for several organizations and meeting genres. It covers the complete design process, from genre elicitation to validation. The obtained results demonstrate that the genre approach produces electronic meeting systems focused on organizational integration, pre-configured to communities of users, supporting long-term usage and added organizational value

La notion de genre(s) : un outil transférable pour l'évaluation des documents numériques

Travail de recherche sur le thème de l’évaluation des archives à l’ère du numérique réalisé à l’hiver 2009 dans le cadre du cours BLT6112 L'évaluation des archives sous la direction du professeur Yvon Lemay.Dans le contexte du numérique, un document ne se trouve plus être un objet fixe et stable. Les informations échangées via les technologies de l’information, avec l’usage de plus en plus répandu des outils collaboratifs et des réseaux sociaux, tendent à rapprocher les ressources produites, bien qu’inscrites sur un support, davantage de la tradition orale (non fixité apparente de la forme et du contenu), que de l’imprimé, qui a historiquement fixé les formes et le contenu en raison de l’héritage technique de la procédure d’impression. Après avoir rapidement parlé du concept de document, nous avons rapidement passé en revue quelques lectures sur le concept de genre. Nous avons ainsi constaté que les genres prenaient en compte le contenu mais aussi la structure rhétorique alliant forme et contenu selon une approche rappelant les bases de la diplomatique

Knowledge structuring-Knowledge domination. Two interrelated concepts

“Sociology for me is not only about the big institutions, such as governments, organizations, business firms or societies as a whole. It is very much about the individual and our individual experiences. We come to understand ourselves much better through grasping the wider social forces that influence our lives.” ( Anthony Giddens, published at www.polity.co.uk, a leading social science and humanities publisher. ) This quotation helps identify one reason for integrating ideas about knowledge management with concepts from Anthony Giddens structuration theory in the theoretical framework that I use as an analytical tool in this research. Structuration theory concerns itself with the “social forces that influence our lives” and these forces interest me. In the same article Giddens continuous: ”We live in a world of quite dramatic change…There are three major sets of changes happening in contemporary societies and it is the task of sociology to analyze what they mean for our lives today. First there is globalisation….The second big influence is that of technological change. Information technology is altering many of the ways in which we work and in which we live. The nature of the jobs people do, for example, has been transformed….The third fundamental set of changes is in our everyday lives. Our lives are structured less by the past than by our anticipated future”. In this paper I agure that there is a continous structuring going on in society. I therefore concern myself with a pair of twin concepts that are interrelated. The first one is knowledge structuring; the second is knowledge domination. These two concepts are of vital importance when trying to understand, assess and monitor implications of transformations of work processes and tools at work.Knowledge structuring; knowledge domination; knowledge management; structuration theory; cognitive theories; transformations; information technology; globalisation.

TOWARDS A PROCESS-ORIENTED APPROACH TO ASSESSING, CLASSIFYING AND VISUALIZING ENTERPRISE CONTENT WITH DOCUMENT MAPS

Nowadays, documents can be scattered across a company in different versions, formats, and languages, and even on different systems. Not only is the resulting content chaos inefficient, it brings with it a number of risks. However, information that is contained in unstructured documents is increasingly becoming a key business resource. Enterprise content management (ECM) is used to manage unstructured content on an enterprise-wide scale. Despite the practical importance of ECM, research is still at an immature state and the process perspective is widely neglected. We suggest a process-oriented approach to identifying, assessing, documenting, classifying and visualizing enterprise content. Within a globally operating engineering company, we check to what extent the applicability of the designed research artifact can be assumed. We give process-oriented guidelines to identify and document enterprise content. Our 7W Framework (7WF) for content assessment contains a collection of metadata (attributes, typical attribute values) to create customized content surveys. Different visual representations of content are proposed, including a document map. Combining business processes and the content of an enterprise, the document map is able to integrate the ECM perspectives and provides decision support. Technical requirements can be derived from it and in-depth analysis of business-critical content is enabled

Coordinating information using genres

Title from cover. "August 2000."Includes bibliographical references (leaf 10).Takeshi Yoshioka, George Herman

Invisible Social Infrastructures to Facilitate Time-pressed Distributed Organizing

How do complex societal demands and time constraints posed by distributed temporary organizing affect organizational communication? Extending Bowker and Star’s (2002) work on infrastructures, we introduce two context-specific ‘invisible’, social infrastructures: organizational and relational. We empirically assess their role in an international, multi-site ERP-software implementation. We investigated how these infrastructures shaped organizational activities, aligned discourses, created order, and prevented divergent behaviours. We found that mutually interdependent organizational and relational infrastructures strengthened social relationships and saved time by facilitating non-routine collaboration and organizational communication under geographic and temporal constraints. We argue that the conceptualization of (infra)structural and process dynamics will help researchers and practitioners understand and handle organizational communication in distributed temporary organizations