“Nothing I could use at all”

Abstract not available

IT consultants\u27 voluntary contract termination - a psychological contract perspective

This research explores the question why IT consultants terminate their employment contracts in a labour market with job drought, downsizing and salary cuts when they were among those who kept their jobs during layoffs. A process model for the maintenance of a psychological contract between employees and employers is presented, which combines the concept of psychological contract with a theory of the relation between intrinsic motivation and management practices and with theories of identity, self-esteem, influence and power. The research verifies and specifies the model based on a revelatory case study. The model helps explaining IT consultants&rsquo; behavior of voluntarily terminating their employment contracts beyond the crisis situation in the IT industry some years ago which motivated this research originally. It should assist managers in a more general context in avoiding practices, which might lead to their employees&rsquo; loss of intrinsic motivation and as a consequence to the loss of valuable employees for the organization.<br /

Agile Development as Service Ecosystems

On the background of an emerging shift from a product, goods-dominant to a service-dominant logic (SDL) in business and society, there is a need for further theoretical grounding of information systems development (ISD) in general and for agile development in particular. This paper presents SDL and the concept of service ecosystem as a promising complementary theoretical basis for broadening the understanding of agile development. Based on an analysis of in-depth interviews with experienced agile practitioners and their current involvement in large agile projects related to managing such projects, we investigate the question how agile development can be understood as a service ecosystem, and how such a perspective impacts more general on the scholarly understanding and practice of information systems development

User Participation and Democracy: A Discussion of Scandinavian Research on System Development

Scandinavian research projects in system development have traditionally put a strong emphasis on user participation as a strategy for increasing working life democracy. The article analyses a few of these projects with respect to this goal. We argue that there has been a development from politics to ethics in system development research, and that the political dimension should be reintroduced. A reorientation of system development strategies aiming at increasing working life democracy can learn from the historical success stories, in particular the combination of global strategy and local action used in the trade union projects in the 60’s. Recent development in technology and working life will, however, introduce new challenges to system development

Information Systems Development as Value Co-Creation

In this research, we investigate information systems development (ISD) as value co-creation and how different actors perform co-creation as an ISD approach. For this purpose, we present a case study of an ISD project that developed a digital game on the topic of climate change in a not-for-profit, intergovernmental context. The project had limited resources. It involved a number of youth and used a social media platform. We apply a taxonomic framework for value co-creation that we derived from a taxonomy of Web-based co-creation. The taxonomy had originally been developed for a commercial context and researchers have not empirically validated it before. Our study shows that the taxonomic framework explains the project as value co-creation especially with regard to co-creators’ motivation and the types of value they created. We further discuss our findings in reference to information systems (IS) literature on service innovation. This literature contributes to additionally explaining what value co-creation is and how one can perform it as an instance of ISD practice. Against this background, we offer some propositions for how future ISD research could benefit from adopting a value co-creation perspective. Although we derived our findings from a specific project in a particular setting, we argue that they can be used to 1) prepare any co-creation project, 2) cope with co-creation during the development process by explaining co-creation as an approach to ISD, and 3) reflect and derive lessons learnt. While researchers need to further empirically validate these claims, we develop insight into value co-creation in ISD with respect to participatory approaches to ISD beyond conventional environments, roles, and participant and contributor types

Focussing on Humanistic Outcomes on the Sociotechnical Axis of Cohesion of the IS Discipline: User Participation in Distributed Participatory Design

Following a recent plea to recommit to the sociotechnical perspective as a foundation of the IS discipline by connecting instrumental and humanistic outcomes, we present a study of user participation in distributed participatory design, which was initiated by UNICEF and executed largely by youth to develop a digital game to raise attention about climate change. We apply an integrative framework for user participation, which consists of well-established concepts and show that it can be fruitfully used in a new context. We found genuine user participation carried out by the adolescents. The user participation had a focus on individual users and the form of direct and indirect participation, where the juvenile participants took informative and consultative roles. The project resulted both in functional and democratic empowerment, and as such represents an instance of information systems development and research, which emphasises a humanistic orientation and outcome while not neglecting any instrumental outcomes

EVOLUTION OF FINISHED COMPUTER SYSTEMS: The Dilemma of Enhancement

The notion of computer systems as finished products that operate in a stable environment leads to viewing system enhancement as an error correcting activity. However computer systems change due to new requirements stemming from organisational changes and the users\u27 experience with the system. Because of this, it is more fruitful to view system enhancement as an evolving activity. This is a better basis for balancing the technical and functional quality of a computer system during its working life. On this basis we suggest that system enhancement should be planned, and that techniques known from system development should be applied also during enhancement. Both development and enhancement aim at adjusting computer systems to changes in usage. By means of a case study we show how our proposals for changes in the organisation of enhancement tasks in the computer department may be realized

A Balanced Theory of Knowledge Management in Software Process Improvement

This research employs a social network analysis (SNA) approach to study the longitudinal changes in co-authorship and affiliations of authors, who published in the Australasian Conference on Information Systems (ACIS) from 2001 to 2011. The research explores the structural patterns of co-authorship at the institution and individual author levels, and found research collaboration tend to occur between authors in the same regions and institutions. Descriptive findings further revealed key authors with rich and diverse co-authorship ties, as well as the tendency of authors to collaborate in silos within institutions. A longitudinal SNA method was performed to statistically deduce the changing patterns of co-authorship and affiliations from a sample of the authors in this 11-year period, which complements the descriptive findings. The discussion of our findings results in recommendations to improve the ACIS community’s productivity and in directions for future studies concerning the applications of SNA in examining research collaboration

A Process Model of Co-Creation as an Approach to Information Systems Development

This paper investigates the development of a digital game on a social media platform which involved primarily youths as co-creators. We applied a process model for crowdsourced development as a framework to understand information systems development (ISD) as co-creation in a not-for-profit environment. Using innovation theory we further discuss why co-creation fostered the co-creators to successfully carry out the investigated project. On this background, we provide lessons learned for practical use