How Information Systems are Shaped from the Decision-Making Level to Technical Implementation: Case Trucking

Digitalization is advancing in all walks of life. One of the areas undergoing a sector-wide transformation is trucking, as part of the logistics sector. This will have a profound impact from societal and economic level down to the individual trucker. Information Systems research has for long focused on system design and deployment on organizational level, implying that this level has the actual power to decide about the design directions. However, our study shows that the transformation is more complex and involves technical and societal aspects that shape the decisions before a single organization, or a network of companies get involved. We thus argue that there is a need to take a broader view to the change. We interviewed 14 high-profile actors in Finland and at the European Union level, trying to understand the highest level of this transformation, how the forces are shaped into drivers, what technical manifestations are foreseen, and how the voice of the individual worker can be heard at this level of the process

It\u27s a Big Question – Researchers’ Discourses on Sustainable Technology Development and Use

Sustainability is a major theme in today’s discourses across disciplines, including Information Systems (IS). Creating a more sustainable world is considered an interdisciplinary effort and IS an inherently interdisciplinary field. Working with complex problems benefits from deeper disciplinary understanding than can be obtained by researchers operating within one field. We interviewed 30 researchers from different fields on sustainable technology development and use, analysing their discourses and reflecting those with the Quintuple Helix Innovation Model that aims for sustainable development of innovations. Our findings show power is woven into sustainability: education can empower us to make sustainable choices, politicians must be vigilant of developments in the industry to protect us as companies follow business interests, and we must all be conscious of the impact technology can have on us and our environments. We contribute with insights on the role of researchers in these discourses, and propose an IS research agenda

Cultivating Literacies among the Youth

Although in the Western world illiteracy hasn’t been a major problem for a long time, there are still concerns related to the literacy skills of today’s youth, especially boys. Mobile technology can potentially contribute to the literacies of young people. We examine the current position and potential of mobile technology in the literacies of a challenging group of youth: junior ice hockey players, who due to the lack of free time, do not read almost at all. The study invites this group to ideate future learning environments as regards their literacy practices. The study reports on their usage practices and design ideas as regards mobile technology and reading. The study shows that new literacies were thoroughly embedded in the everyday life of these youth. They also identified opportunities for using mobile technology for fostering their literacy practices. Implications for the design of future learning environments for the youth are discussed

The Future Digital Innovators: Empowering the Young Generation with Digital Fabrication and Making

So far, the implications of digital fabrication and making on digital innovation and the future of IS discipline and profession remain unexplored. This is where this study contributes and it does so by focusing on the perspective of the young generation, in whose hands the future of IS profession, indeed, lies. Digital technology has become intimately intertwined with our everyday life. New stakeholders take part in its development and innovation processes, including children. Calls for offering more in-depth technology knowledge for children have emerged within research on digital fabrication and the maker movement: children need to be educated to design, make, and build new technology. We critically examine existing studies on digital fabrication and making with children, in order to see what the potential of digital fabrication and making for empowering children to become digital innovators of the future is. Implications to IS research, practice, and education are presented

Making it Better: Value Perceptions of Usability Workshops in Education Outreach

IS Education outreach programs are important today, as the need for Information Technology (IT) professionals has risen in the last decades. Information Systems (IS) outreach efforts are often short lived and rely heavily on interested individuals to make them happen. This study looks at one case in Finland, where two universities collaborate with a company to create usability improvement workshops to upper secondary school students. By interviewing the stakeholders, this study aims to map the value for each stakeholder group, and their reasons for participating in the studied outreach project. Service dominant logic and value co-creation are used as the theoretical framework to categorize stakeholders’ value expectations, perceptions, and propositions. The paper reports the value experienced by each stakeholder group, compares those to what others expect them to gain, and seeks to find ways to create outreach programs that benefit all participants

Software Outsourcing Partnership Process – a Life Cycle?

Van de Ven and Poole contend that all the specific theories of organizational change and development used in management research come back to four basic theories: life cycle theory, evolution theory, dialectic theory, and teleology, and that most of the organizational theories are some kind of combination of these four. In outsourcing research most of the researchers implicitly assume that an outsourcing process follows the life cycle theory. In this study we analysed a software outsourcing partnership model and found out that the model indeed followed life cycle theory

Examining relational digital transformation through the unfolding of local practices of the Finnish taxi industry

Digital transformation has become a central construct in information systems (IS) research. Current conceptualizations largely attribute transformation to intentionality, focus on transformation within a single organization, or assign technology the role of a disruptive agent of change. Likewise, “digital” tends to be a general category of technology, rather than a specific technology enacted in a time and place. Inspired by Schatzkian practice theory and its site ontology, we suggest a contextual viewpoint on digital transformation and call it “relational digital transformation.” We analyzed the change dynamics in the context of taxi dispatch practice in Finland, studying the changing taxi dispatch platforms over years. We investigated five powerful industry actors: two incumbents, two entrants, and a federation of taxi entrepreneurs. We identified events of change in the material arrangements in sites and explain the changes through the process dynamics in the focal practice. We define relational digital transformation as a process through which practice-arrangement bundles of digital technologies evolve over time. This approach assumes the default nature of an industry is to be found in the changing relations between entities rather than in entities themselves. This provides a theoretical extension to the prevailing views of digital transformation in IS literature. It enables studying digital transformation in retrospect without attributing change agency to any entities or technologies a priori. We also contribute to practice-theoretical IS literature by demonstrating how the applicability of practice theoretical analysis extends beyond microphenomena to larger industry-level changes.©2020 Elsevier. This manuscript version is made available under the Creative Commons Attribution–NonCommercial–NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY–NC–ND 4.0) license, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/fi=vertaisarvioitu|en=peerReviewed

Policy Ambiguity: a Problem, a Tool, or an Inherent Part of Policymaking?

It has been acknowledged that the Information Systems (IS) discipline needs to pay attention to policymaking. However, the IS field has not yet sufficiently acknowledged complexities of policymaking and the resulting ambiguity. We present two worldviews that underlie how IS research has approached policymaking and, indirectly, policy ambiguity. In the dominant “representationalist” view, a policy is planned and implemented in a linear manner, and ambiguity is seen as problematic. The “enactivist” view sees a policy and its implementation as mutually constitutive: a policy does not exist without its implementation but it also guides the implementation. This can result in unresolvable paradoxes that manifest as ambiguities. Based on our review of the extant IS research we present existing perspectives to policy(making) and ambiguity. We call for IS researchers invested in policy/regulation-related research to be aware of and explicit about the views to policy(making) and ambiguity guiding their research

“It’s Just Computers and Science” - Exploring Upper Secondary School Students’ Value Expectations, Perceptions and Propositions Around IS Outreach Programs

Education outreach programs for Information Systems (IS) major are important today. As the need for Information and Communication Technology (ICT) professionals increases, higher education institutions create education outreach programs to attract students to study ICT majors, including IS. For the outreach programs to be successful, it is important to take the target audience and their needs and expectations into account. For this purpose, this paper investigates education outreach programs through the lens of service dominant logic and conducts an interview study with upper secondary education students to map their expected, perceived, and proposed values towards higher education outreach programs

Perceiving ICT: Factors Influencing the Selection of Information Systems as a Major

There is a shortage of employees in the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field, including Information Systems (IS). Student recruitment is a challenge in IS in many countries despite different student marketing efforts and extensive research on the topic. We conducted a survey with first year students in a Finnish university to understand what factors seem to affect their career choice. Our findings indicate that ICT students mostly share their view of ICT with other students, with the exception that they seemed to see the field as more creative, and people oriented. We highlight the creative aspects of the work in IS to potentially attract new students, including more women, to study in IS