A Rural Tale: A Cautionary Allegory for IS Researchers

We present a fragment of text which describes the introduction of a water delivery system to a rural village that is comprehensively rejected by a group of women. We use the story allegorically, examining the contributions from different research traditions to make sense of the rural tale and apply the lessons to the study of Information Systems. We briefly examine how hermeneutics, management change theories, a more critical approach and information systems studies can individually help us to make sense of the text. This shows that no one research tradition gives any more than a partial view of the events in the text but that some are more insightful than others. We discuss the findings including a sideways look at several IS issues (such as the complexity of success and failure, and escalation of commitment)

Disrupt the Disruptor: Rethinking \u27Disruption\u27 in Digital Innovation

Disruptive innovation has been described in the literature as a force that sweeps aside existing technology and business models. This paper presents a case study that aims to understand the disruptive nature of digital innovation. It questions how and why digital innovation comes to have (or not) a disruptive effect. It describes a case study of App and mobile innovation and offer preliminary findings of the case. It argues that digital innovation based on App and mobile technology development could offer a different model of disruption than has been discussed in traditional literature on disruptive innovation that is largely based on manufacturing

The Rise and Decline of the Ethics Methodology of Systems Implementation: Lessons for IS Research

Professor Mumford has contributed significantly to the information system (IS) field. Among her achievements and pioneering thinking is the development of an integrated methodology for systems implementation named Effective Technical and Human Implementation of Computer Systems (ETHICS) that incorporates job design as part of the systems planning and implementation effort. This study questions why ETHICS initially rose in popularity and then declined over the years. To answer this question, we apply Latour\u27s (1999) five-loop framework to describe the formation of science. The findings reveal that Mumford held and aligned many heterogeneous actors and resources that together contributed to the shaping of ETHICS. As the content of ETHICS was shaped by the intertwining of many elements, when some of these elements later changed and undermined their previous alignment, the content of ETHICS was not reshaped, and hence it lost its status and declined. The paper ends by drawing more general lessons for IS research

Houston, We\u27ve had a Problem… … Offshoring, is Employment and the is Discipline: Perception is not Reality

We believe that the information system (IS) discipline has a major and urgent problem to contend with: the general public appears to believe that there are ‘no jobs in IS’ because of offshoring. They see the offshoring of IS jobs as an inevitable consequence of economic and competitive pressures to drive down labor costs, which leads them to conclude that there is no future in IS. In particular, the discipline is suffering from the erosion of its student base and in this article we explore some of the reasons as to why this is occurring; focussing specifically on the role offshoring may be playing on the perception that there are no jobs in IS. Despite fairly robust figures showing that there are virtually as many IS jobs now as ever before, the public\u27s perception appears to be at odds with this. We thus examine where these beliefs may have come from and in our stakeholder action plan we suggest some radical solutions to align perception with reality

Computer-Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software: An Illustration of Limitations and Advantages

Computer-assisted qualitative data analysis software (CAQDAS) is a well-known acronym in qualitative research. Nowadays, qualitative researchers are inclined to apply such software for various purposes. Critiques of the use of CAQDAS in qualitative research focus on the term “analysis”, claiming that that the tool does little to analyze data. According to these critiques, some users of CAQDAS advocate a positivist or quantitative approach using CAQDAS as a so-called “devil-tool” for science. In contrast, although the use of CAQDAS can be seen to do the mechanical part of the analysis (i.e. coding), it can never fulfill the conceptual part of the analysis which requires a human-touch. Thus the better use of CAQDAS is for coding, not for analysis. This research paper attempts to illustrate the challenges of manual versus computer assisted coding by identifying events that create gaps during an ISD change process using a grounded theory methodology (GTM)

Where We Stand

We are at a unique moment in global history. Against the backdrop of social and economic upheaval, there is growing awareness that our current systems and lifestyles disempower us and are not sustainable. The world’s resources are finite and inequitably distributed. People throughout the world are embracing their inner activist and demanding the right to shape their own destinies

Competitive Advantage and Enterprise Resource Planning Systems: Some Conflicts in the Value-Chain

Whether an organization gains a competitive advantage (CA) from an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system is a topic of much debate in the literature. However, when we differentiate between the stakeholders in the ERP value-chain and their relative CA positions, the literature is curiously silent. We depict the ERP value-chain as having three stakeholders: an ERP vendor, an ERP partner or re-seller, and the ERP end-users or client. The paper suggests how the interests these stakeholders have in maintaining or improving their CA in their own markets is complex and in some circumstances may hinder the development of future ERPs. This paper formulates a set of propositions to address this gap in our knowledge. We close the paper by proposing eight scenarios and suggesting how these and our propositions may be explored empirically