A Concern for Engaged Scholarship:The Challenges for Action Research Projects

In SJIS volume 20 (2008), Mathiassen and Nielsen analyzed engaged scholarship in Scandinavian IS research. They conclude that the collaborative research practice and tra- dition for conducting action research projects might be jeopardized by a recent and general tendency to publish in compliance with traditional IS research publication channels: Invest- ing a substantial amount of time in collaborating with industry partners and communicat- ing results specifically to practitioners does not contribute efficiently to maintaining a high publication volume in academic journals. In this article, I contribute to a debate concerning this issue. Action research is without doubt an exciting and relevant research strategy for IS providing first-hand experiences of IS theory in practice. However, the recent publication trend may be incommensurable with some of the characteristics of engaged scholarship as represented by two critical challenges inherent when conducting action research projects: (1) Action research is a very time-consuming way of producing empirical data and there is a high risk for the project not evolving as planned, which might lead to the failure of acquir- ing the anticipated empirical data. (2) Action research is also personally demanding and challenging because it entails a close engagement with and commitment to collaborating industrial practitioners. I characterize action research projects and compare action research to the case study research approach. I present the above mentioned challenges of action research and give examples from my own experiences. Finally, I discuss possible ways for the IS community to sustain engaged scholarship and maintain our productive traditions for conducting action research projects

Scaling Participation -- What Does the Concept of Managed Communities Offer for Participatory Design?

This paper investigates mechanisms for scaling participation in participatory design (PD). Specifically, the paper focuses on managed communities, one strategy of generification work. We first give a brief introduction on the issue of scaling in PD, followed by exploring the strategy of managed communities in PD. This exploration is underlined by an ongoing case study in the healthcare sector, and we propose solutions to observed challenges. The paper ends with a critical reflection on the possibilities managed communities offer for PD. Managed communities have much to offer beyond mere generification work for large-scale information systems, but we need to pay attention to core PD values that are in danger of being sidelined in the process

Effects-Driven IT Improvement: Pursuing local post-implementation opportunities

Many opportunities for benefitting from information technology (IT) are not discovered until IT systems are in operational use. The realization of these benefits depends on local efforts that cannot presume top-management support but must themselves generate the innovation potential necessary to improve system use. To facilitate such local efforts, we propose effects-driven IT improvement. It consists of iteratively specifying, realizing, and evaluating the usage effects pursued with a system. We describe the effects-driven process and illustrate it with three real-world cases. On this basis, we discuss its contributions toward local benefits realization at the post-implementation stage. Our overarching contribution is to provide a means of operationalizing and packaging improvement initiatives in a manner that combines local and lightweight experimentation with the data-driven realization of meaningful effects. The three cases illustrate that the effects-driven process can reopen the window of opportunity for benefits realization, result in learning that calls for respecifying the pursued effect, and render evaluation data almost superfluous because the local actors are confident that the effect is substantial and real. In addition, local initiatives to improve system use may create the momentum, evaluation infrastructure, and benefits documentation necessary to pave the way for further improvements. However, these potentials come with challenges, which we also discus