Debate Section Editorial Note: Information Systems Research: Thinking Outside the Basket and Beyond the Journal

This Communications of the Association for Information Systems debate marks the seventh debate since the debate section’s inception in 2014. Like four of its predecessors, it deals with the way and where we publish and implicitly with the relationship between publication outlets and how we evaluate individual scholarly output for hiring, tenure, and promotion purposes

Debate Section Editorial Note: Is Information Systems a Science?

In this debate section, Neil McBride (affiliated with the Centre for Computing and Social Responsibility at De Montfort University in Leicester in the United Kingdom) asks: “is information systems a science?”

Debate Section Editorial

This is the debate section of CAIS; the section editor takes the initiative to bring about debates, but we are dependent upon suggestions and material provided by the community. We are also open to receive material in various formats, so please take contact and send your proposals and manuscripts through either the CAIS editorial team or directly to the section editor

Inaugural Debate Section - Debate Editor\u27s Note

This is the first debate section of CAIS; the section editor takes the initiative to bring about debates, but we are dependent upon suggestions and material provided by the community. We are also open to receive material in various formats, so please take contact and send your proposals and manuscripts through either the CAIS editorial team or directly to the section editor

Focussing on Humanistic Outcomes on the Sociotechnical Axis of Cohesion of the IS Discipline: User Participation in Distributed Participatory Design

Following a recent plea to recommit to the sociotechnical perspective as a foundation of the IS discipline by connecting instrumental and humanistic outcomes, we present a study of user participation in distributed participatory design, which was initiated by UNICEF and executed largely by youth to develop a digital game to raise attention about climate change. We apply an integrative framework for user participation, which consists of well-established concepts and show that it can be fruitfully used in a new context. We found genuine user participation carried out by the adolescents. The user participation had a focus on individual users and the form of direct and indirect participation, where the juvenile participants took informative and consultative roles. The project resulted both in functional and democratic empowerment, and as such represents an instance of information systems development and research, which emphasises a humanistic orientation and outcome while not neglecting any instrumental outcomes

Information Systems Development as Value Co-Creation

In this research, we investigate information systems development (ISD) as value co-creation and how different actors perform co-creation as an ISD approach. For this purpose, we present a case study of an ISD project that developed a digital game on the topic of climate change in a not-for-profit, intergovernmental context. The project had limited resources. It involved a number of youth and used a social media platform. We apply a taxonomic framework for value co-creation that we derived from a taxonomy of Web-based co-creation. The taxonomy had originally been developed for a commercial context and researchers have not empirically validated it before. Our study shows that the taxonomic framework explains the project as value co-creation especially with regard to co-creators’ motivation and the types of value they created. We further discuss our findings in reference to information systems (IS) literature on service innovation. This literature contributes to additionally explaining what value co-creation is and how one can perform it as an instance of ISD practice. Against this background, we offer some propositions for how future ISD research could benefit from adopting a value co-creation perspective. Although we derived our findings from a specific project in a particular setting, we argue that they can be used to 1) prepare any co-creation project, 2) cope with co-creation during the development process by explaining co-creation as an approach to ISD, and 3) reflect and derive lessons learnt. While researchers need to further empirically validate these claims, we develop insight into value co-creation in ISD with respect to participatory approaches to ISD beyond conventional environments, roles, and participant and contributor types

Debating Sociomateriality: Entanglements, imbrications, disentangling, and agential cuts

Sociomateriality is on everyone\u27s lips these days. Since Orlikowski (2006; 2007; 2009), together with Scott (Orlikowski and Scott 2008; Scott and Orlikowski 2009) first introduced this term in organisation studies and in information systems (IS) research, we count an impressive number of contributions on this topic along with calls for papers in renowned journals and conferences. Without going so far as to propose sociomateriality as the defining identity of the IS field, as suggested by Hassan and Hovorka (2011), we acknowledge that this new lens offers a way of challenging and expanding the prevailing modus operandi of the theoretical foundations of the relationships between artefacts and agency, technology and practice. This is well expressed by Cecez-Kecmanovic et al. (2010) who argue that sociomateriality can help us question and rethink \u27the supposed ontological separation among the social and the technological.\u2

What’s in a User Story: IS Development Methods as Communication

This paper challenges claims made by Scrum proponents when characterising the communicative nature of user stories: including being more ‘authentic’ because they comprise spoken language and that they are stories. We argue and decisively demonstrate that neither can be upheld. By incorrectly characterising user stories, we miss opportunities to understand what they are and how they work during development. User stories are better understood by applying a functional theory of communication that emphasises how language is used. By selecting systemic functional linguistics, we can analyse user stories, and have developed a method for factoring unwanted epics into usable user stories

A Conceptual Investigation of Maintenance Deferral and Implementation: Foundation for a Maintenance Lifecycle Model

Despite the fact that society and organizations rely heavily on Information Systems (IS) and software, the maintenance of vendor-supplied IS, in particular standard package software has gained little attention within the academic literature. This paper presents a conceptual study of the current state of research concerning the reasons for deferral and performance of vendor-supplied maintenance by the purchasing organization. These reasons have so far neither been investigated together nor from that perspective. Based on a systematic literature review and taking the purchaser’s viewpoint, reasons for maintenance deferral and performance are identified from the literature. They build the groundwork and foundation for a Maintenance Lifecycle and Process Model that provides a starting point to research vendor-supplied maintenance from the customer’s point of view

The Perceived Impact of the Agile Development and Project Management Method Scrum on Team Leadership in Information Systems Development

This research contributes to the body of knowledge in information systems development (ISD) with an empirical investigation in the form of a case study that demonstrates the positive impact of the agile development and project management method Scrum on team leadership in information systems and software development projects. It also provides a useful operationalization of the concept through six identified indicators for team leadership. Despite the fact that the case unit had challenges with the use of Scrum, the indicators identified the areas where the company had managed to exploit the potential of Scrum and its practices with regard to increasing team leadership. The research results are discussed with regard to the existing Scrum literature and briefly related to complex adaptive systems (CAS) as a foundation for ISD and agile developmen