A Three Cycle View of Design Science Research

As a commentary to Juhani Iivari’s insightful essay, I briefly analyze design science research as an embodiment of three closely related cycles of activities. The Relevance Cycle inputs requirements from the contextual environment into the research and introduces the research artifacts into environmental field testing. The Rigor Cycle provides grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise from the foundations knowledge base into the research and adds the new knowledge generated by the research to the growing knowledge base. The central Design Cycle supports a tighter loop of research activity for the construction and evaluation of design artifacts and processes. The recognition of these three cycles in a research project clearly positions and differentiates design science from other research paradigms. The commentary concludes with a claim to the pragmatic nature of design science

Team Synergy in Software Inspections: A Group Behavior Analysis

Inspections provide many benefits in the software development process. However, the cost effectiveness of inspections has been criticized. Also, many organizations simply do not have the time to perform complete inspections of all software artifacts within the development schedule. Due to its pragmatic and domain-specific nature, little formal research has been performed on inspections. We propose to begin a study of software development inspections by surveying several relevant research papers on group behavior theory. We applythis research to inspections and outline a laboratory experiment for future researc

A Proficiency Model for Design Science Research Education

Design science research (DSR) produces knowledge via the design and evaluation of innovative solutions to real-world problems. DSR provides an improved understanding of how and why the solutions work. While DSR is being widely embraced in many research disciplines, its educational pedagogy so far remains immature with little guidance on how best to inform and train various audiences on relevant and rigorous DSR skillsets. Grounded on the authors’ wide experience in designing and delivering DSR courses over the past decades, we develop a “DSR Proficiency Model” to highlight key skills required to succeed in planning, applying, and communicating DSR. We recognize the different educational environments and student backgrounds that DSR courses must accommodate and provide actionable guidance for mapping the proficiency model to academic, training, and executive audiences. Informative examples demonstrate how we have structured DSR curricula for different academic and executive education programs

Editorial Statement: Information Technology and Systems (ITS) Department

This paper introduces the Information and Technology Systems (ITS) Department of CAIS. The department focuses on articles in design science. The goal of design-science research is the development and evaluation of technologies that extend the boundaries of human and organizational information-processing capabilities. Research must demonstrate the utility of such technologies to address problems or tasks not previously thought to be amenable to IT support. The article presents the objectives, concepts, and publication procedures for the ITS Department

The Design of a System for Online Psychosocial Care: Balancing Privacy and Accountability in Sensitive Online Healthcare Environments

The design of sensitive online healthcare systems must balance the requirements of privacy and accountability for the good of individuals, organizations, and society. Via a design science research approach, we build and evaluate a sophisticated software system for the online provision of psychosocial healthcare to distributed and vulnerable populations. Multidisciplinary research capabilities are embedded within the system to investigate the effectiveness of online treatment protocols. Throughout the development cycles of the system, we build an emergent design theory of scrutiny that applies a multi-layer protocol to support governance of privacy and accountability in sensitive online applications. The design goal is to balance stakeholder privacy protections with the need to provide for accountable interventions in critical and well-defined care situations. The research implications for the development and governance of online applications in numerous privacy-sensitive application areas are explore

Research in Information Systems Analysis and Design: Introduction to the Special Theme Papers

Information systems analysis and design are basic topics in the Information Systems (IS) curriculum. A large number of IS graduates are employed as information systems developers. However, research in the IS field pays relatively little attention to IS analysis and design topics. Few of the articles published in leading IS research journals in the last decade deal with these topics In response, CAIS and JAIS are jointly presenting Special Themes on Research in Information Systems Analysis and Design to begin to fill this void and to attract attention of researchers to this important area

Community Healh Assessments: A Data Warehousing Approach

The measurement and assessment of health status in communities throughout the world is a massive information technology challenge. The Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (CATCH) methodology provides a systematic framework for community-level assessment that can be a valuable tool for resource allocation and health care policy formulation. CATCH utilizes health status indicators from multiple data sources, using an innovative comparative framework and weighted evaluation process to produce a rank-ordered list of critical community health care challenges. The community-level focus is intended to empower local decision-makers and provide a clear methodology for organizing and interpreting relevant health care data. The effectiveness of the CATCH methodology is based on a data warehousing approach. The data warehouse allows a core set of reports to be produced at a reasonable cost for community use. In addition, online analytic processing (OLAP) functionality can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the health care issues. The data warehouse in conjunction with Internet-enabled dissemination methods will allow the information to be presented in a variety of formats and be distributed more widely in the decision-making community. On-going research directions in community health care decision making conclude the paper

Towards a NeuroIS Research Methodology: Intensifying the Discussion on Methods, Tools, and Measurement

The genesis of the Neuro-Information Systems (NeuroIS) field took place in 2007. Since then, a considerable number of IS scholars and academics from related disciplines have started to use theories, methods, and tools from neuroscience and psychophysiology to better understand human cognition, emotion, and behavior in IS contexts, and to develop neuro-adaptive information systems (i.e., systems that recognize the physiological state of the user and that adapt, based on that information, in real-time). However, because the NeuroIS field is still in a nascent stage, IS scholars need to become familiar with the methods, tools, and measurements that are used in neuroscience and psychophysiology. Against the background of the increased importance of methodological discussions in the NeuroIS field, the Journal of the Association for Information Systems published a special issue call for papers entitled “Methods, tools, and measurement in NeuroIS research” in 2012. We, the special issue’s guest editors, accepted three papers after a stringent review process, which appear in this special issue. In addition to these three papers, we hope to intensify the discussion on NeuroIS research methodology, and to this end we present the current paper. Importantly, our observations during the review process (particularly with respect to methodology) and our own reading of the literature and the scientific discourse during conferences served as input for this paper. Specifically, we argue that six factors, among others that will become evident in future discussions, are critical for a rigorous NeuroIS research methodology; namely, reliability, validity, sensitivity, diagnosticity, objectivity, and intrusiveness of a measurement instrument. NeuroIS researchers—independent from whether their role is editor, reviewer, or author—should carefully give thought to these factors. We hope that the discussion in this paper instigates future contributions to a growing understanding towards a NeuroIS research methodology

Controls in Flexible Software Development

Control and flexibility may appear an unlikely pair. However, we propose that effective flexible software development processes must still provide clear control mechanisms to manage the progress and quality of the resulting software products. This paper presents a conceptual study to understand the types of control found in flexible software development processes, termed controlled-flexible approaches. Control theory is used as a lens to study the control mechanisms found in plan-driven and flexible processes. We extend current thinking to include emergent outcome controls and clan controls for team coordination in our taxonomy of control mechanisms. Several popular flexible processes are analyzed for control mechanisms. We conclude with a brief discussion of future research directions

Focus Groups for Artifact Refinement and Evaluation in Design Research

Focus groups to investigate new ideas are widely used in many research fields. The use of focus groups in design research poses interesting opportunities and challenges. Traditional focus group methods must be adapted to meet two specific goals of design research. For the refinement of an artifact design, exploratory focus groups (EFGs) study the artifact to propose improvements in the design. The cycle of build and evaluate using EFGs continues until the artifact is released for field test in the application environment. Then, the field test of the design artifact may employ confirmatory focus groups (CFGs) to establish the utility of the artifact in field use. Rigorous investigation of the artifact requires multiple CFGs to be run with opportunities for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses across the multiple CFGs. In this paper, we discuss the adaptation of focus groups to design research projects. We demonstrate the use of both EFGs and CFGs in a design research project in the health care field