Understanding Information Technology and its Relationship to Organizational and Societal Change

In recent years, IT scholars have adopted from historians of technology a social constructivist approach to study IT and organizational change. Actor-network theory has also shown to be a promising tool to analyze the complexity of the intricate relationships between technical and nontechnical aspects of change, and thus to serve as a framework for studies on IT and organizational change. In this paper we want to extend this argument by stating that the interdependence and influence of IT in the case of complex, networked, infrastructural technologies is not limited to that of organizational change, but has a broader scope that encompasses society as a whole. Thus, we want to explore how information technology is transforming our lives, and how to account for this transformation. We base our argument on an evaluation of the criticism voiced of social constructivist approaches to technology studies, and on our observations gleaned from studies of the development of cellular technologies in Europe

Snow, buses, and mobile data services

Development and advancement of Information Society in on agenda of many nationstates today. As scholars, we can contribute to the effort by attempting to reconcile to the official rhetoric with the real life situations of "netizens". This paper is inspired by the publication of Leonard Jessup and Daniel Robey [2002], in wich the authors use anecdotes to demonstrate what advanced service possibilities are afforded by ubiquitous technology as contrasted to the residue of social behavior.This story illustrates that the succes of establishing Information Society should not be measured by the number of available services to citizens over the wireline and mobile Internet. The ultimate measure for success must be the extent to which poeple are aware about the availability of relevant content and are using the services [Daniel and Wilson, 2003, p.285]

Theories of ICT Design: Where Social Studies of Technology Meet the Distributed Cognitive Perspective

In this paper we examine the possibility to bridge theory of Distributed Cognition with popular theories of Social Studies of Technology (in particular, Actor-Network Theory and Social Construction of Technology). Responding to a recent call for revisiting the design metaphor, in this paper we aim to obtain more precise terminology for describing the phenomena of ICT design in theoretical terms. We argue that establishing correlations between the two bodies of literature adds new knowledge to a community of scholars caters for betterment of managerial practice in complex design tasks

How Companies Can Modify R&D for Integrating Social Media Activities into the New Products Development

Through past decade open innovation achieved enormous amount of attention from scholars and practitioners as well. We took one part of open innovation – customer innovation through social media, and looked into companies‟ practices to more efficiently integrate information from social media into New Product Development (NPD). We used mechanism of coordination method to explore how moving from traditional product development to open one, affects changes in R&D. We found three types of changes, that affects product development related processes, and four important factors to which companies are paying attention while integrating social media into NPD process: (1) frequent interaction with customers, (2) open information flow, (3) building a unit for coordinating activities, and (4) dividing R&D into units for tackling with ideation, concept development, and actual product building separately

Open Standards and Government Policy: Results of a Delphi Survey

In an increasing number of countries governments consider to stimulate the role of open standards in public Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure development. The aim of this work is to identify important issues related to government policy with regard to open standards and the development of public ICT infrastructure. This multi-method research presents results from an exploratory literature review and multi-round Delphi survey of key experts in the field of standardization

Literature review

Literature revie

Open Standards and Their Early Adoption

Standards have proven themselves indispensable to the industrial revolution. How are standards developed today? What does the economics of standards tell about the impact of standards upon economic growth and productivity? Do standards influence industry innovation? How are the standardization processes in the field of ICT taking place? How and why do open standards differ from other types of standards? How may open standards influence ICT government policy and the reverse: How will government need to take action in the face of the international trend toward open standards in ICT

The Espoused Theories of IS: A Study of General Editorial Statements

In the IS field there has been the ongoing debate about a potential identity crisis, which has led researchers to study the output of the community in order to evaluate where IS research currently is and where it could potentially be. This has resulted in various proposals for IS research ‘in practice’. This research follows a different strategy and studies what IS research is claimed to be (the espoused theories of IS). The section of IS journals’ General Editorials Statements (GES), that is, the informative section offered by most journals where they position themselves with regard to potential authors, already contains the answer. Basing our study on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for a sample of 30 IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. The results of the analyses show how the institutionalized discourse about IS research has changed over the last decade

Empowering Domain Experts in Developing AI: Challenges of bottom-up ML development platforms

Recent trends in AI development, exemplified by innovations like automated machine learning and generative AI, have significantly increased the bottom-up organizational deployment of AI. No- and low-code AI tools empower domain experts to develop AI and thus foster organizational innovation. At the same time, the inherent opaqueness of AI, complemented by the abandonment of requirement to follow rigorous IS development and implementation methods, implies a loss of oversight over the IT for individual domain experts and their organization, and inability to account for the regulatory requirements on AI use. We build on expert knowledge of no- and low-code AI deployment in different types of organizations, and the emerging theorizing on weakly structured systems (WSS) to argue that conventional methods of software engineering and IS deployment can’t help organizations harness the risks of innovation-fostering bottom-up developments of ML tools by domain experts. In this research in progress paper we review the inherent risks and limitations of AI - opacity, explainability, bias, and controllability - in the context of ethical and regulatory requirements. We argue that maintaining human oversight is pivotal for the bottom-up ML developments to remain “under control” and suggest directions for future research on how to balance the innovation potential and risk in bottom-up ML development projects

Globalization and E-Commerce VII: Environment and Policy in the U.S.

The United States is a global leader in both Business-to-Customer (B2C) and Business-to-Business (B2B) electronic commerce. This leadership comes in part from the historical US strengths in information technology, telecommunications, financial services, and transportation - all of which are essential enabling components of e-commerce. The size and strength of the US economy, the wealth of its consumer base, and the relatively open access to venture capital creates an attractive environment for e-commerce investment. Official US Government policy toward e-commerce is to let the private sector take the lead, with government helping to make the business climate right for innovation and investment. Prior US Government investments in essential e-commerce infrastructure for military purposes (e.g., digital computing, the Internet) and for civilian purposes (e.g., interstate highways, air transport) played an important role in the US lead in e-commerce. US Government policies favoring widespread economic liberalization since the 1970\u27s in areas such as financial services, transportation, and telecommunications helped enable and stimulate private sector investment and innovation in e-commerce. The collapse of the dot.com era in the late 1990\u27s hit key sectors of e-commerce hard, suggesting that some of the more dramatic and positive predictions of e-commerce growth and impact will either be delayed substantially or will not come to pass. The strength of surviving e-commerce companies (e.g., Amazon and eBay), as well as the relative stability of the technology sector (e.g., Cisco Systems, Dell, Intel, IBM) and the continued investment of large industry sectors (e.g., autos, finance) suggest that e-commerce is still growing and is here to stay. Consumers are intrigued by B2C e-commerce, and many have used such services, but serious concerns related to privacy and transaction security remain obstacles to universal adoption of B2C e-commerce