Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects

Cyber projects are large-scale efforts to implement computer, information, and communication technologies in scientific communities. These projects seek to build scientific cyberinfrastructure that will promote new scientific collaborations and transform science in novel and unimagined ways. Their scope and complexity, the number and diversity of stakeholders, and their transformational goals make cyber projects extremely challenging to understand and manage. Consequently, scholars from multiple disciplines, including computer science, information science, sociology, and information systems, have begun to study cyber projects and their impacts. As IS scholars, our goal is to contribute to this growing body of inter-disciplinary knowledge by considering three areas of IS research that are particularly germane to this class of project, given their characteristics: development approaches, conflict, and success factors. After describing cyber projects, we explore how IS research findings in these three areas are relevant for cyber projects, and suggest promising avenues of future research. We conclude by discussing the importance and unique challenges of cyber projects and propose that, given our expertise and knowledge of project management, IS researchers are particularly well suited to contribute to the inter-disciplinary study of these projects

Engineering the scientific corpus: routine semantic work in (re)constructing a biological ontology

In face of the burgeoning interest in ‘ontology’ in science studies, Michael Lynch (2008) called for a move toward ‘ontography’, to talking about ontologies by way of studies in which ontologies (or at least, an ontology) are of demonstrable relevance to the doings of those being studied. This paper provides an ontography, or some part of one, in that it reports on work in ontology development being done by a group of researchers in bioinformatics, drawing its examples largely from a workshop in which some members of that group were participant and which was organised by a research network to which they belonged. Methodologies for building ‘good’ ontologies were part of the interests of this wider research group and were a motivation for the work undertaken. What is evident from our study is the fact that methods to be applied, avenues to be explored and even fundamental purposes were all in the event ‘up for grabs’ and formed a closely interlinked and mutually explicating part of the ‘logic in practice’ deployed. We will show how this research work was undertaken with reference to an existing body of knowledge, yet requiring distinctive courses of ‘discovering work’, concerning both method and substantive content. How were its results examined and reexamined in the light of ongoing, evolving and unanticipated considerations? Describing how the involved participants go about their work is, then, ‘an ontography’ in precisely the sense that Lynch proposes

Sustaining scientific infrastructures: transitioning from grants to peer production (work-in-progress)

Science now relies on mid-level infrastructure, including shared instruments, cell lines, supercomputing resources, data sets, and software components. These are beyond the facilities and services traditionally provided by individual universities; funding agencies such as the NSF often support their initial creation but their long-term sustainability is a challenge and commercialization is only rarely an option. A promising model, though, is broad-based community support through peer production, often inspired by the organization of open source software projects. Such transitions, though, are not automatic or easy, just as commercialization is not. In this research I am studying successful and unsuccessful attempts to transition, building theory and practical guidance for scientists and funding agencies. In this work-in-progress paper, I present the motivation and background for the study and provide motivation through preliminary description of my first case study.ye

DoR Communicator - June 2014

The June 2014 issue of the Division of Research newsletter.https://digitalcommons.fiu.edu/research_newsletter/1009/thumbnail.jp

Collective action in national e-health initiatives: Findings from a cross-analysis of the Norwegian and Greek e-prescription initiatives.

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Keynote Address—Black Box Arguments and Accountability of Experts to the Public

Contemporary deliberation depends on an infrastructure of expertise the way travel depends on transportation infrastructure. Like other forms of infrastructure, the inner workings of expertise become less visible to its users, even as expertise itself becomes more indispensable. Accountability is an essential design requirement for any such system

Institutional and Individual Factors Affecting Scientists\u27 Data-Sharing Behaviors: A Multilevel Analysis

The objective of this research was to investigate the institutional and individual factors that influence scientists\u27 data-sharing behaviors across different scientific disciplines. Two theoretical perspectives, institutional theory, and theory of planned behavior, were employed in developing a research model that showed the complementary nature of the institutional and individual factors influencing scientists\u27 data-sharing behaviors. This research used a survey method to examine to what extent those institutional and individual factors influence scientists\u27 data-sharing behaviors in a range of scientific disciplines. A national survey (with 1,317 scientists in 43 disciplines) showed that regulative pressure by journals, normative pressure at a discipline level, and perceived career benefit and scholarly altruism at an individual level had significant positive relationships with data-sharing behaviors, and that perceived effort had a significant negative relationship. Regulative pressure by funding agencies and the availability of data repositories at a discipline level and perceived career risk at an individual level were not found to have any significant relationships with data-sharing behaviors

Polycentric Governance of Interorganizational Systems: Managerial and Architectural Arrangements

In an increasingly digital world, introducing new interorganizational systems requires establishing associations and relying on contributions of multiple actors that control existing technical solutions. This article examines the question: “how can large-scale system implementations across multiple organizations be governed in situations of distributed control over components?”. To answer this question, we present the findings of a longitudinal case study on the introduction of e-prescription in Norway over a 14-year period. The findings point to complementary architectural and managerial arrangements that make possible a polycentric governance approach. This work contributes to research on Information Systems Governance by providing insights relevant to mandating large-scale system implementations across organizations by mobilizing and orienting multiple contributors that control various pre-existing solutions