A Review of Subjective Values and Their Implications for Green IS Research

Green Information Systems (IS) are defined in terms of certain sustainability-related characteristics. Sustainability itself is a concept based on subjective values and value judgments, which are political, value-laden, and context-dependent. However, Green IS literature does not provide a sufficient understanding of such subjective values nor their treatment. Also, value-judgments for Green IS have hardly been considered. We adapt material value-ethics to expose the fundamentals of subjective values. Reviewing and synthesizing work in which subjective values and value judgments have been explicitly considered in sustainability decision-making, we improve our understanding of their use and formalization. Finally, we discuss our findings through the lens of material-value ethics, and offer reflective arguments towards clarifying the role of values in Green IS. The paper contributes to a deeper understanding of subjective values and subjective value judgments for sustainability, along with their critical and significant implications for Green IS research

Knowing Your Population: Privacy-Sensitive Mining of Massive Data

Location and mobility patterns of individuals are important to environmental planning, societal resilience, public health, and a host of commercial applications. Mining telecommunication traffic and transactions data for such purposes is controversial, in particular raising issues of privacy. However, our hypothesis is that privacy-sensitive uses are possible and often beneficial enough to warrant considerable research and development efforts. Our work contends that peoples behavior can yield patterns of both significant commercial, and research, value. For such purposes, methods and algorithms for mining telecommunication data to extract commonly used routes and locations, articulated through time-geographical constructs, are described in a case study within the area of transportation planning and analysis. From the outset, these were designed to balance the privacy of subscribers and the added value of mobility patterns derived from their mobile communication traffic and transactions data. Our work directly contrasts the current, commonly held notion that value can only be added to services by directly monitoring the behavior of individuals, such as in current attempts at location-based services. We position our work within relevant legal frameworks for privacy and data protection, and show that our methods comply with such requirements and also follow best-practice

DIGITAL PROCTORING IN HIGHER EDUCATION: A SYSTEMATIC LITERATURE REVIEW

To improve the academic integrity of online examination, digital proctoring systems have been implemented in higher education worldwide, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper, we conducted a literature review of the research on digital proctoring in higher education. We found 115 relevant publications in nine databases. We applied topic modeling methods to analyze the corpus which resulted in eight topics. The review shows that the previous studies focus largely on the systems’ development, adoption of the systems, the effects of proctored online exams on students’ performance, and the legal, ethical, security, and privacy issues of digital proctoring. The annual topic trends indicate future research concerns, such as systems’ development, online programs (MOOCs) and proctoring, along with various issues of using digital proctoring. The results of the review provide useful insights as well as implications for future research on digital proctoring, a crucial process for digitalizing higher education

Utilizing Consumer Preferences to Promote Values Awareness in Information Systems Development

The challenges of developing the information systems (IS) that support modern enterprises are becoming less about engineering and more about people. Many of the technical issues of the past, such as hardware size and power, connectivity, and robust software, are engineering problems that have largely been solved. In the next stage of computing, the human factor will be far more important than it has been in the past: the colors of an interface or the shape of an icon are the engineering problems of the past, and the availability and usefulness of such basic solutions is rapidly coming to a close. A new paradigm is needed that provides a roadmap of higher level conceptions and values, one about humane computing. A part of this older, mechanistic approach are quantitative, economic values whose impact on IS are readily visible and acknowledged within software engineering. However, qualitative values, and in particular consumer preferences, have been researched to a lesser degree, and there has been very little direct application.  To create the next-generation information systems, requirements engineers and systems developers need new methods to capture the real preferences of consumers, conceptualize these abstract concepts, and then relate such preferences to concrete requirements for information systems. To address this problem, this thesis establishes a conceptual link between the preferences of consumers and system requirements by accommodating the variations between them and expressing them via a conceptual model. Modeling such preferences and values so that they can be used as requirements for IS development is the primary contribution of this work. This is accomplished via a design science research paradigm to support the creation of the works’ primary artifact—the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM is intended to improve the alignment between business and information systems by capturing and concretizing the real preferences of consumers and then expressing such preferences via the requirements engineering process, with the eventual output being information systems. CPMM’s development relies on theoretical research contributions within three areas in information systems—Business Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Requirements Engineering—whose relationships to consumer values have been under-researched and under-applied. The case studies included in this thesis each demonstrate the significance of consumer preferences to each of these three areas.  In the first, a set of logical mappings between CPMM and a common approach to business strategy (strategy maps/balanced scorecards) is produced. In the second, CPMM provides the conceptual undergirding to process a massive amount of unstructured consumer-generated text to generate system requirements for the airline industry. In the concluding case, an investigation of foreign and domestic students at Swedish universities is structured through CPMM, one that first discovers the requirements for a consumer preference-based online education and then produces feature models for such a software product line-based system. The significance of CPMM as a lens for discovering new concepts and highlighting important information within consumer preference data is clearly seen, and the usefulness of the meta-model is demonstrated by its broad and beneficial applicability within information systems practice and research

Explorations in Values Awareness : Elicitation of Consumer Preferences for Information Systems Development

The need for complex software to coordinate the activities of modern enterprises has become a necessity for their success. As business sectors are rapidly reshaped, organizations become global, and consumers have a seemingly endless degree of choice, these competitive conditions require software engineers to incorporate consumer values—personal judgments based on comparative, preferential experiences—into the design of such supporting software. Traditional modes of thinking, whose primary focus was often on economic value, are being left behind, as consumers are requiring more qualitative experiences than ever before. And while the impact of quantitative values on IT is readily seen and acknowledged within software engineering, such qualitative values, and in particular consumer values, have been researched to a lesser degree. To foster greater alignment between business and its supporting IT infrastructure, requirements engineers operating under such conditions need new means to both capture real preferences of consumers and then relate such preferences to requirements for next-generation software.  To address this problem, this thesis establishes a conceptual link between the preferences of consumers and system requirements by systematically accommodating the variations between them. It accomplishes this by following a design science research paradigm to support the development of the works' primary artifact—the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM is designed to improve alignment between business and IT by both capturing the real preferences of consumers and then relating such preferences to the requirements engineering process. It relies on research contributions within three areas in information systems—Business Strategy, Enterprise Architecture, and Requirements Engineering—whose relationships to consumer values have been under-researched and under-applied. These support the design and development of CPMM and its relevance to the problem area. The benefits it provides towards solving the problem are then exemplified in three demonstrations: via logical mappings between CPMM and a common approach to business strategy (strategy maps/balanced scorecards); the application of CPMM to generate requirements for a Patient Health Record (PHR) system; and an empirical study of the development of a consumer preference-based system for online education for foreign and domestic students at Swedish universities.I moderna företag har behovet av komplex mjukvara för att samordna verksamheten blivit en nödvändighet för att uppnå framgång. Då branscher snabbt omformas, organisationer globaliseras och konsumenter ges till synes oändliga valmöjligheter; krävs att mjukvaruingenjörer införlivar konsumentvärden - personliga bedömningar baserade på jämförande förmånliga upplevelser - i utformningen av dylik stödjande mjukvara. Traditionella sätt att tänka, primärt fokuserade på ekonomiska värden; hamnar lätt på efterkälken eftersom konsumenterna i högre utsträckning kräver alltmer kvalitativa upplevelser. Och medan det kvantitativa genomslaget av IT lätt kan observears och bekräftas med mjukvaruvaruteknik; är forskning kring kvalitativa värden, särskilt konsumentvärden, betydligt ovanligare. För att underlätta överensstämmelsen mellan företag och dess stödjande IT-infrastruktur, måste kravställande ingenjörer som arbetar under dessa förhållanden hitta sätt att fånga konsumenternas verkliga preferenser, och sedan relatera dessa till kraven för nästa generations programvara. För att lösa detta problem, fastställer denna avhandling ett begreppsmässigt samband mellan konsumentpreferenser och systemkrav genom att systematiskt tillmötesgå och jämka skillnader mellan dem. Detta åstadkoms genom att använda ett designvetenskapligt forskningsparadigm som också är avhandlingens primära artefakt; the Consumer Preference-aware Meta-Model (CPMM). CPMM är utformat för att förbättra anpassningen mellan affärsmässighet och IT genom att fånga upp konsumenternas verkliga preferenser och relatera dessa till kravhanteringsprocessen. CPMM bygger på forskningsinsatser inom tre informationssystemområden; affärsstrategi, verksamhetsarkitektur och kravhantering; vars relation till kundvärdering hittills är tämligen outforskad. Dessa tre områden stödjer både utformning och utveckling av CPMM och dess relevans för problemområdet. Fördelarna med CPMM exemplifieras slutligen i tre demonstrationer: genom logiska mappningar mellan CPMM och redan etablerade tillvägagångssätt för affärsstrategier (strategikartor/balanserade styrkort); genom tillämpning av CPMM för att generera krav på patientjournalsystem (PHR); samt en empirisk studie av utvecklingen av en konsumentpreferensbaserat system för online-utbildning riktat till både utländska och svenska studenter vid svenska lärosäten

A Semi-automated Method for Capturing Consumer Preferences for System Requirements

Part 2: Regular PapersInternational audienceThere is a pressing need in the modern business environment for business-supporting software products to address countless consumers’ desires, where customer orientation is a key success factor. Consumer preference is thus an essential input for the requirements elicitation process of public-facing enterprise systems. Previous studies in this area have proposed a process to capture and translate consumer preferences into system-related goals using the Consumer Preference Meta-Model (CPMM) used to integrate consumer values from the marketing domain into objectives of information systems. However, there exists a knowledge gap between how this process can be automated at a large scale, when massive data sources, such as social media data, are used as inputs for the process. To address this problem, a case in which social media data related to four major US airlines is collected from Twitter, is analyzed by a set of text mining techniques and hosted in a consumer preference model, and is further translated to goal models in the ADOxx modelling platform. The analysis of experimental results revealed that the collection, recognition, model creation, and mapping of consumer preferences can be fully or partly automated. The result of this study is a semi-automated method for capturing and filtering consumer preferences as goals for system development, a method which significantly increases the efficiency of large-scale consumer data processing

REFLECTIONS ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ALIGNMENT WITH HUMAN VALUES: A PHENOMENOLOGICAL PERSPECTIVE

The need for a systematic approach to work with artificial intelligence (AI) is current and rapidly growing. It is important that Information Systems researchers get ahead of public sentiment and be able to provide proactive commentary about the current state-of-the-art, as well as solutions for future systems. One critical question is how can we ensure value alignment between AI and human values through AI operations from design to use? For the purposes of this discussion, we adopt the phenomenological theories of material values and technological mediation to be that beginning step. In this paper, we firstly analyze the AI phenomenon from selected resources from the top IS research outlets (basket of 8 journals and 5 AI journals in IS). Secondly, we briefly present what are material values and technological mediation and reflect on the AI value alignment principle through the lenses of these theories. Supported by these new understandings and reflections, we propose to build a common principle of human values to understand the AI value alignment principle through phenomenological theories. The paper contributes the unique aspect of material values to the discourse within current AI research