A Guide to Conducting a Standalone Systematic Literature Review

Many scholars are not well trained in conducting a standalone literature review, a scholarly paper that in its entirety summarizes and synthesizes knowledge from a prior body of research. Numerous guides that exist for information systems (IS) research mainly concentrate on only certain parts of the process; few span the entire process. This paper introduces the rigorous, standardized methodology for the systematic literature review (also called systematic review) to IS scholars. This comprehensive guide extends the base methodology from the health sciences and other fields with numerous adaptations to meet the needs of methodologically diverse fields such as IS research, especially those that involve including and synthesizing both quantitative and qualitative studies. Moreover, this guide provides many examples from IS research and provides references to guides with further helpful details for conducting a rigorous and valuable literature review. Although tailored to IS research, it is sufficiently broad to be applicable and valuable to scholars from any social science field

Business Models for Online Education and Open Educational Resources: Insights from a Delphi Study

This article determines the most important business models that try to achieve the goals of various online education stakeholders. We employed the Delphi method to consult leading experts in online education, asking them to identify existing business models; describe potentially feasible models that are not currently implemented; identify specific categories of stakeholders involved; and identify the various goals and priorities of these stakeholders. The experts, who included creators, distributors and facilitators of online education courses and materials, identified ten of the most important existing and potential business models for online education which they analyzed and commentated in detail

Critical Review of Organization-Technology Sensemaking: Towards Technology Materiality, Discovery and Action

More than two decades of sensemaking research has brought thorough knowledge of how people understand organisational phenomena and attach meaning to them. This stream of research explores varied social and cognitive aspects of the process in the context of organisations and information technology (IT). However, such a large body of literature exhibits some significant shortcomings: there is a lack of IT materiality; a neglect of the discovery aspect of perception; and a lack of action orientation. So, there is limited understanding of the role that the material artefact plays in shaping users’ sensemaking of new IT, as well as how users’ actions affect their sensemaking. Moreover, while the literature mostly focuses on sensemaking as the creation of new meanings to rationalise user experiences, it neglects the discovery aspect of sensemaking that refers to perception of the meaning already available. To address these issues, this article provides a thorough review of the literature on organisation-technology sensemaking and synthesises our current understanding of the phenomenon. It then analyses the major shortcomings in our knowledge and highlights the need to address those shortcomings. It subsequently discusses an ecological approach consistent with the tenets of critical realism that can address some of the existing shortcomings

Business Models for Free and Open Source Software: Insights from a Delphi Study

This article describes a Delphi study that consulted leading FOSS experts to identify the most important business models for FOSS. We employed the Delphi method to consult leading experts in FOSS, asking them to identify existing business models; describe potentially feasible models that are not currently implemented; identify specific categories of stakeholders involved; and identify the various goals and priorities of these stakeholders. The experts, who included software developers, corporate and individual users of software and members of leading software development industry organizations, highlighted 10 particularly important business models for FOSS which they analyzed and commentated in detail. Among other issues, the experts discussed the sustainability of various models and the extent to which they upheld users’ software freedoms

Strategic Growth of Firms in the Digital Economy: Simulation and Research Proposal

With the rise of the Internet as an important dimension of business, fierce competition is resulting in industries that fit skew distributions, where those few firms that can best leverage the digital economy accrue the majority of the revenues. Porter points out that the Internet erodes industrial profitability and intensifies the need for sound strategy. As a tool for modeling the growth of firms in the competitive Internet environment, we apply Herbert Simonís model for business firm growth and relate its two key parametersórate of entry and industrial growth potentialóto Porterís strategic theories. We also introduce the idea of individual growth potential as a measure of firm competitiveness within an industry. We present a research proposal to empirically test the model, and provide the results from a simulation to demonstrate the applicability and usefulness of Simonís model to the business environment in the digital economy

Strategic Growth of Firms in the Digital Economy: A Simonian Research Agenda

Strategic growth of firms, in the words of Herbert Simon, is within the framework of decision making under “massive and unending uncertainty.” In the rapidly changing digital economy, the cycle of winning and losing and asset redistribution intensifies as the speed of information exchange increases. It is thus more necessary than ever to find explanatory theories to describe, model, and predict the emerging market structures of the hypercompetitive digital economy. In this paper, we draw upon several Simonian models of bounded rationality in decision making and propose a research agenda for strategic growth of firms in the digital economy. The agenda consists of three major topics: (1) skew distributions in the digital market competition, (2) empirical laws of information use, and (3) a framework of strategic information systems. Some ongoing projects related to the agenda are discussed

Generating quality open content: A functional group perspective based on the time, interaction, and performance theory

We applied the Input-Process-Output approach and Time, Interaction, and Performance theory to examine the input factors (organisational, group-related, and individual) and process factors (group production, group well-being, and member support) that yield group effectiveness, measured as high-quality articles in Wikipedia. The results provided evidence of the positive effects of: group size and shared experience on both group process variables and group effectiveness; group heterogeneity on group production; organisational support and member activeness on group well-being; member activeness on member support; and organisational support and member activeness on group effectiveness

The best of adaptive and predictive methodologies: open source software development, a balance between agility and discipline

Open source software development (OSSD) is a promising alternative for synthesizing agile and plan-driven (e.g. waterfall) software development methodologies that retains most benefits of the two approaches. We contrast the traditional systems development life cycle approach, more recent agile software development methods, and OSSD. We compare the first two approaches with OSSD, highlighting its synthesis of benefits from both, with unique benefits of its own, offering solutions to areas where the other methodologies continue to face difficulties. OSSD is highly responsive to user needs, and draws talent from a global team of developers. OSSD is a low-risk methodology with potentially high return on investment. While not appropriate for all applications, especially those where the needed applications are extremely idiosyncratic to one company, it is nonetheless a valuable asset in an organization’s portfolio of software development solutions