Designing an information system for updating land records in Bangladesh: action design ethnographic research (ADER)

Open Access. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits any use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author(s) and the source are credited.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.Information Systems (IS) has developed through adapting, generating and applying diverse methodologies, methods, and techniques from reference disciplines. Further, Action Design Research (ADR) has recently developed as a broad research method that focuses on designing and redesigning IT and IS in organizational contexts. This paper reflects on applying ADR in a complex organizational context in a developing country. It shows that ADR requires additional lens for designing IS in such a complex organizational context. Through conducting ADR, it is seen that an ethnographic framework has potential complementarities for understanding complex contexts thereby enhancing the ADR processes. This paper argues that conducting ADR with an ethnographic approach enhances design of IS and organizational contexts. Finally, this paper aims presents a broader methodological framework, Action Design Ethnographic Research (ADER), for designing artefacts as well as IS. This is illustrated through the case of a land records updating service in Bangladesh

Refocusing where and how IT value is realized: An empirical investigation

This study examines the direct and interaction effects of IT investments and IS department efficiency on different facets of firm performance. Specifically, measures for financial, sales, and intermediate firm performance are considered. IS budget is used as a measure of IT investment; asset turnover and labor productivity are used as intermediate performance measures; and sales per IS employee and income per IS employee are used as measures of IS department efficiency. Secondary sources were used to construct a database of 210 firms, which was used for statistical analysis. Our results suggest that; (i) IS budget is not related to financial firm performance, but is positively related to sales performance; (ii) The results for intermediate performance were mixed; (iii) IS efficiency had no impact on the relationship between IS budget and firm performance measures, except market share. Analysis of the results suggest that the effect of IT investments should be assessed simultaneously on both aggregate and intermediate performance. Furthermore, IS departments with 'high' efficiency may be unable to better leverage each additional dollar spent on IT. This has significant implications for organizations considering radical downsizing and elimination of their IS departments, as in the process they could reduce their conversion effectiveness.information systems technology productivity cost benefit analysis investment

Consumer choice, information product quality, and market implications

The paper concerns with the peculiarities of consumer choice in information product markets. This is a multidisciplinary study based on both information system research and microeconomic theory. An extension is introduced to the conventional general theory of consumer choice for explicitly taking into account the impact of information product quality on consumer behaviour. Multiple quality characteristics, considered against the price of product, are an essential reason for consumer choice of high tech product in general and information product in particular. We assume that consumers are able to aggregate their preferences of multiple product characteristics into a product preference order. On the supply side, the product quality characteristics incur costs. In the case of information product, those costs are the costs of the first copy, and marginal costs are near zero. All of the above constitute the distinctive characteristics of the competitive mechanism in the digital economy and in information product markets. A model, based on the game theory is used to consider two special cases. The first one deals with monopolistic competition for a share of the market with a limited number of customers. Conditions are derived for IT firm survival. The second one considers conditions at which a monopoly is able to successfully introduce a new version if its information product.<br /