A Three Cycle View of Design Science Research

As a commentary to Juhani Iivari’s insightful essay, I briefly analyze design science research as an embodiment of three closely related cycles of activities. The Relevance Cycle inputs requirements from the contextual environment into the research and introduces the research artifacts into environmental field testing. The Rigor Cycle provides grounding theories and methods along with domain experience and expertise from the foundations knowledge base into the research and adds the new knowledge generated by the research to the growing knowledge base. The central Design Cycle supports a tighter loop of research activity for the construction and evaluation of design artifacts and processes. The recognition of these three cycles in a research project clearly positions and differentiates design science from other research paradigms. The commentary concludes with a claim to the pragmatic nature of design science

Team Synergy in Software Inspections: A Group Behavior Analysis

Inspections provide many benefits in the software development process. However, the cost effectiveness of inspections has been criticized. Also, many organizations simply do not have the time to perform complete inspections of all software artifacts within the development schedule. Due to its pragmatic and domain-specific nature, little formal research has been performed on inspections. We propose to begin a study of software development inspections by surveying several relevant research papers on group behavior theory. We applythis research to inspections and outline a laboratory experiment for future researc

Box-Structured Requirement Determination Methods

Requirements determination is an iterative process of eliciting, gathering, modeling, specifying, and analyzing system requirements information. It is the most critical, yet least understood, phase of systems development. This paper presents a rigorous approach for performing requirements determination with box-structured methods. By capturing requirements information in black box transactions and transaction hierarchies, intellectual control is maintained over large amounts of requirements information. The results of the box-structured requirements determination methods provide the basis for formal system design techniques. A concise example of box-structured requirements determination is included in an appendix

A Proficiency Model for Design Science Research Education

Design science research (DSR) produces knowledge via the design and evaluation of innovative solutions to real-world problems. DSR provides an improved understanding of how and why the solutions work. While DSR is being widely embraced in many research disciplines, its educational pedagogy so far remains immature with little guidance on how best to inform and train various audiences on relevant and rigorous DSR skillsets. Grounded on the authors’ wide experience in designing and delivering DSR courses over the past decades, we develop a “DSR Proficiency Model” to highlight key skills required to succeed in planning, applying, and communicating DSR. We recognize the different educational environments and student backgrounds that DSR courses must accommodate and provide actionable guidance for mapping the proficiency model to academic, training, and executive audiences. Informative examples demonstrate how we have structured DSR curricula for different academic and executive education programs

Editorial Statement: Information Technology and Systems (ITS) Department

This paper introduces the Information and Technology Systems (ITS) Department of CAIS. The department focuses on articles in design science. The goal of design-science research is the development and evaluation of technologies that extend the boundaries of human and organizational information-processing capabilities. Research must demonstrate the utility of such technologies to address problems or tasks not previously thought to be amenable to IT support. The article presents the objectives, concepts, and publication procedures for the ITS Department

The Design of a System for Online Psychosocial Care: Balancing Privacy and Accountability in Sensitive Online Healthcare Environments

The design of sensitive online healthcare systems must balance the requirements of privacy and accountability for the good of individuals, organizations, and society. Via a design science research approach, we build and evaluate a sophisticated software system for the online provision of psychosocial healthcare to distributed and vulnerable populations. Multidisciplinary research capabilities are embedded within the system to investigate the effectiveness of online treatment protocols. Throughout the development cycles of the system, we build an emergent design theory of scrutiny that applies a multi-layer protocol to support governance of privacy and accountability in sensitive online applications. The design goal is to balance stakeholder privacy protections with the need to provide for accountable interventions in critical and well-defined care situations. The research implications for the development and governance of online applications in numerous privacy-sensitive application areas are explore

Research in Information Systems Analysis and Design: Introduction to the Special Theme Papers

Information systems analysis and design are basic topics in the Information Systems (IS) curriculum. A large number of IS graduates are employed as information systems developers. However, research in the IS field pays relatively little attention to IS analysis and design topics. Few of the articles published in leading IS research journals in the last decade deal with these topics In response, CAIS and JAIS are jointly presenting Special Themes on Research in Information Systems Analysis and Design to begin to fill this void and to attract attention of researchers to this important area

Community Healh Assessments: A Data Warehousing Approach

The measurement and assessment of health status in communities throughout the world is a massive information technology challenge. The Comprehensive Assessment for Tracking Community Health (CATCH) methodology provides a systematic framework for community-level assessment that can be a valuable tool for resource allocation and health care policy formulation. CATCH utilizes health status indicators from multiple data sources, using an innovative comparative framework and weighted evaluation process to produce a rank-ordered list of critical community health care challenges. The community-level focus is intended to empower local decision-makers and provide a clear methodology for organizing and interpreting relevant health care data. The effectiveness of the CATCH methodology is based on a data warehousing approach. The data warehouse allows a core set of reports to be produced at a reasonable cost for community use. In addition, online analytic processing (OLAP) functionality can be used to gain a deeper understanding of the health care issues. The data warehouse in conjunction with Internet-enabled dissemination methods will allow the information to be presented in a variety of formats and be distributed more widely in the decision-making community. On-going research directions in community health care decision making conclude the paper