Introducing Information Systems Through A Digital Business Course: The New Web-Centric Skill Set For Business Majors

Current approaches to the introductory Information Systems (IS) course focus on IT literacy, and developing skills using PC-centric office software. In this paper, we propose a new set of web-centric digital business skills that can be taught to all business majors. We report on three years of experience with a new set of classes that teach non-technical students how to launch, test, and promote their own business websites without programming, using primarily open source software and low-cost web hosting. A digital business focus makes IS relevant to all business majors by allowing students to develop a real product or service, and interact with live customers, during a single course

Community Building for Open Source Business Applications: The Core-Extensions-Themes Pattern

Open source business applications will require community contributions from business experts with relatively modest technical skills. This position paper briefly examines how active communities have developed around open source platforms that separate core programming code from functional add-ons and user interface add-ons, and how this separation encourages the sharing of specialized business application knowledge. My interest is in finding community and project structures that accelerate the development of open source applications for business

Tutorial: Using Content Management Systems (CMS) and Web Analytics in Information Systems Assignments

The proposed tutorial is an introduction to using Content Management Systems (CMS) and Web Analytics for assignments in Information Systems courses. The tutorial presents the advantages of using these technologies versus alternatives, provides a brief hands-on introduction to CMS and Analytics, and describes how to use them together to increase student IS skills and motivation. The tutorial will also share practical tips based on years of undergraduate and graduate teaching experience

Inclusive Innovation and Entrepreneurship in the New Digital Era

The intensive digitization of society has coincided with rising economic inequality across the developed economies. Missing from the standard list of policy responses to rising inequality is the role of innovation and entrepreneurship. This paper argues that new digital business models, that capture value differently and share the wealth created more broadly, will be a necessary part of addressing technology-based inequality. This in turn will require more support for inclusive innovation and entrepreneurship, which will allow novel, alternative value models to emerge, and be given a chance to compete and succeed. Using a three-part model of the main modes of performance in the digital era - datafication, algorithms, and platforms - the paper will discuss skills and intervention that might help in making digital innovation and entrepreneurship more inclusive

Democratizing Business Software: Small Business Ecosystems for Open Source Applications

Open source has democratized software innovation to an unprecedented degree, but doubts persist as to whether democratized innovation can extend to business applications, where individual developers are not the end users. We report on a new kind of ecosystem around extensions to open source business applications, and examine the types of contributors and contributions relative to previous open source research. Our results show a surprising presence of small businesses, particularly consultants and freelance developers. These smaller firms bridge an important gap between lead users and producers, contributing disproportionately to new back-end and integration features. This study shows how new networks of commercial and semi-commercial players, particularly small businesses, are combining their efforts to create viable business ecosystems around successful open source business applications

Information Systems, Dominant Paradigms, and Emerging Concepts: A Community Clustering Analysis of the Highest Impact Topics in Information Systems Research

We provide a preliminary analysis of how diverse IS research has been, based on the research topics that have had the highest impact, as measured by academic citations. Does IS have a dominant paradigm? Our analysis argues that the impact of IS research has been dominated by a single research paradigm, which we label as ‘IS acceptance’. When this analysis is repeated for the most recent decade, the highest impact topics are still dominated by ‘IS acceptance’, but are joined by three new topics, ‘IS and design’, ‘IS and strategy’, and ‘IS and expertise’. Our analysis maps the intellectual structure of the IS discipline by drawing from a wide range of publication outlets, rather than only the most prestigious IS journals, by assuming a power law distribution of citations, and by using a community structure algorithm from network analysis to identify research paradigms and emerging ideas

Striving for Research Impact: The Peculiar Case of the AIS Bright ICT Initiative

The debate over the real-world impact of research continues in many applied disciplines, including ICT research. We propose that concepts from social informatics can be used to analyze and critique the visions put forward by ICT- based professional societies that are striving for more impactful and pro-social research. Using the recent case of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) ‘Bright ICT Initiative’, we seek to understand how a general desire for more social benefit and research impact translates into a specific problem definition (cybersecurity), and further translates into specific solutions (new internet protocols, a new global governance center). The analysis highlights the importance of interactions (or lack thereof) with other social worlds in the peculiar framing of this initiative

Where Enrollment Meets Structure: Understanding PDA Evolution through Sociotechnological Theory

Sociotechnological theory seeks to understand technology as both material and social artifacts. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) offers an approach to sociotechnological theory that emphasizes a micro-level analysis of political strategies, but has been criticized for not considering larger social and cultural processes. This paper presents an approach to sociotechnological theory that links the enrollment process of ANT with broader social practices, and social group memberships. Two case studies of Personal Digital Assistant (PDA) evolution (Psion, led by David Potter, and Palm, led by Jeff Hawkins) are used to illustrate this approach