Green IS: Are We Still Thinking in Mere Economic Imperatives or Are We Striving for Eco-Effectiveness?

Organizations are under increasing pressure to account for their environmental footprint and to adopt environmental sustainable practices, and information systems can support organizations in becoming more environmentally sustainable. Through the analysis of expert interviews with eleven representatives from organizations concerned with environmental sustainability, and drawing on a conceptual model of information systems and ecological sustainability, we provide evidence that these organizations see key capabilities of information systems in automating, informing, and transforming to support goals related to eco-efficiency, eco-equity, and eco-effectiveness. However, our analysis also suggests that there is still little awareness of the potential of information systems in fundamentally transforming business models and business processes towards eco-effectiveness as the ultimate goal of environmental protection

Identifying and Quantifying Cultural Factors That Matter to the IT Workforce: An Approach Based on Automated Content Analysis

Organizational culture represents a key success factor in highly competitive environments, such as, the IT sector. Thus, IT companies need to understand what makes up a culture that fosters employee performance. While existing research typically uses self-report questionnaires to study the relation of culture and the success of companies, the validity of this approach is often discussed and researchers call for new ways of studying culture. Therefore, our research goal is to present an alternative ap-proach to culture analysis for examining which cultural factors matter to the IT workforce. Our study builds on 112,610 online reviews of Fortune 500 IT companies collected from Glassdoor, an online platform on which current and former employees can anonymously review companies and their man-agement. We perform an automated content analysis to identify cultural factors that employees em-phasize in their reviews. Through a regression analysis on numerical employee satisfaction ratings, we find that a culture of learning and performance orientation contributes to employee motivation, while a culture of assertiveness and gender inegalitarianism has a strong negative influence on em-ployees’ satisfaction in the IT workforce. Future research can apply our approach as an alternative method to quantifying culture and its impact on other variables

Text Mining for Information Systems Researchers: An Annotated Topic Modeling Tutorial

Analysts have estimated that more than 80 percent of today’s data is stored in unstructured form (e.g., text, audio, image, video)—much of it expressed in rich and ambiguous natural language. Traditionally, to analyze natural language, one has used qualitative data-analysis approaches, such as manual coding. Yet, the size of text data sets obtained from the Internet makes manual analysis virtually impossible. In this tutorial, we discuss the challenges encountered when applying automated text-mining techniques in information systems research. In particular, we showcase how to use probabilistic topic modeling via Latent Dirichlet allocation, an unsupervised text-mining technique, with a LASSO multinomial logistic regression to explain user satisfaction with an IT artifact by automatically analyzing more than 12,000 online customer reviews. For fellow information systems researchers, this tutorial provides guidance for conducting text-mining studies on their own and for evaluating the quality of others

Using Text Analytics to Derive Customer Service Management Benefits from Unstructured Data

Deriving value from structured data is now commonplace. The value of unstructured textual data, however, remains mostly untapped and often unrecognized. This article describes the text analytics journeys of three organizations in the customer service management area. Based on their experiences, we provide four lessons that can guide other organizations as they embark on their text analytics journeys.Click here for podcast summary (mp3)Click here for free 2-page executive summary (pdf)Click here for free presentation slides (pptx

Reuse, Reduce, Support: Design Principles for Green Data Mining

This paper reports on a design science research (DSR) study that develops design principles for “green” – more environmentally sustainable – data mining processes. Grounded in the Cross Industry Standard Process for Data Mining (CRISP-DM) and on a review of relevant literature on data mining methods, Green IT, and Green IS, the study identifies eight design principles that fall into the three categories of reuse, reduce, and support. The paper develops an evaluation strategy and provides empirical evidence for the principles’ utility. It suggests that the results can inform the development of a more general approach towards Green Data Science and provide a suitable lens to study sustainable computing

In Search of Information Systems (Grand) Challenges - A Community of Inquirers Perspective

The paper reports on the results of a Delphi study with 143 information systems (IS) academics that was designed to explore what IS academics perceive to be the grand challenges of the IS discipline. The results provide evidence that the scholarly IS discipline is still much concerned with itself, for instance, in terms of its identity, relevance, foundational theory, or methodological pluralism – suggesting that the old debate on IS identity is not yet overcome. It thus cannot be claimed that the study identifies the grand challenges of the discipline – still it becomes noticeable that the academic community sees potentials for the IS discipline to have societal impact. A total of 21 challenges are identified, of which six challenges are categorized as “meta challenges for further developing the IS discipline” and the remaining 15 challenges are categorized as “IS research challenges” pertaining to socio-technical systems, IS infrastructures, society and ecology, as well as social well-being and affectivity. We provide a ranking of all challenges according to their relevance, potential impact, and possible time frame of realization. The results have some important implications for IS as a discipline as well as its prospective future societal role. It is hoped that through our study we can contribute to the important debate on the challenges of the academic IS discipline

Economics of Virtual Communities - The Case of the Berlin Stock Exchange

The use of social software and virtual community platforms in particular promises to offer opportunities for customer integration into a company’s value adding activities. Therefore, ideas and innovations generated by members of a virtual community can be analyzed and used in order to enhance the quality of products and services. However, evaluating economic consequences associated with the set-up, operation and maintenance of virtual communities on a quantitative basis has widely been neglected in social network research. Accordingly, no framework for valuation of web 2.0 applications has been established as yet. Thus, the objective of this paper is therefore to develop a measurement framework for the financial performance of a virtual community platform reflecting specific economic conditions relevant to a certain situation. The measurement framework is then applied to a real life example of the Berlin Stock Exchange

Economics of Virtual Communities – A Financial Analysis of a Case Study at the Berlin Stock Exchange

New web based technologies such as social software enables users to interact and collaborate over the internet. Virtual communities are set up by companies in order to bridge the gap between customers and companies and thus serve as a customer relationship management tool. As a result of a continuous dialogue with customers or with companies‟ employees innovations and improvements of products and processes can be generated. Despite intensive discussions about the technical aspects of virtual communities and their value proposition, hardly any research explicitly addresses a financial perspective. Thus, the objective of this paper is therefore to develop a measurement system for the financial performance of a virtual community platform reflecting specific economic conditions relevant in a certain situation. As a proof of concept, the theoretical model is then applied to a case study conducted at the Berlin stock exchange

IT-enabled Sustainability Transformation—the Case of SAP

This teaching case describes how SAP, a leading global information technology (IT) solutions provider, embarked on a large-scale transformation program to implement a dual sustainability strategy of: (a) internally transforming the organization, and (b) addressing a business opportunity by developing IT solutions that enable their customers to become more sustainable. This case provides students with significant information about the development of SAP towards sustainability, including the company\u27s underlying motivation, their approach to change and related challenges, and their use of IT to enable the transformation. The teaching case provides an opportunity to critically examine the benefits and risks of using IT in an effort to improve the sustainability of an organization, and to develop appropriate models for sustainable strategies and IT implementation efforts