TEAM AGILITY AND TEAM PERFORMANCE – THE MODERATING EFFECT OF USER INVOLVEMENT

Software development organizations increasingly adopt agile software development (ASD) in order to react to manifold challenges and respond to increasing user expectations. User involvement is men-tioned as the most important success factor in software development projects. However, little is known about the right intensity of user involvement for development teams. The paper investigates the mod-erating effect of different dimensions of user involvement intensity are investigated, i.e. types, practic-es and continuity. While prior research in ASD focuses on the project or method, this paper adopts a team-theoretical view towards agility. In addition, the effect of user involvement on the relationship between team agility on team performance is investigated. A model for team agility and its empirical survey-based investigation is proposed. The expected results extend the nomological net of team re-search in IS and help scholars to extend ASD theory. Practitioners benefit by identifying the right in-tensity of user involvement for their development team

How Inconsistencies Between Multiple Conceptual Modeling Scripts Affect Readers’ Understanding

IS professionals often use multiple conceptual modeling scripts to develop an understanding of a domain. However, using multiple scripts introduces potential inconsistencies between scrips which can reduce script readers’ cognitive ability to develop an understanding. While there are computational methods to avoid or detect inconsistencies, there is a lack of studies on how individuals deal with inconsistencies when they are performing different tasks. We developed a 2x2 between-subject experimental design to investigate the effects of syntactic vs semantic inconsistency on two different systems analysis and design tasks. We expect to contribute to conceptual modeling research, by investigating the effect of inconsistencies, comparing the effects of two tasks, and by elaborating on the role of a pragmatic factor, domain familiarity

Ambidexterity in Information Systems Research: Overview of Conceptualizations, Antecedents, and Outcomes

Organizations that are not efficient and innovative today quickly become irrelevant tomorrow. Ambidexterity (i.e., simultaneously conducting two seemingly contradicting activities, such as exploitation and exploration) helps organizations to overcome this challenge and, hence, has become increasingly popular with manifold applications in information systems (IS) research. However, we lack a systematic understanding of ambidexterity research, its research streams, and their future trajectory. Hence, we conduct a systematic literature review on ambidexterity in IS research and identify six distinct research streams that use an ambidexterity lens: IT-enabled organizational ambidexterity, ambidextrous IT capability, ambidexterity in IS development, ambidextrous IS strategy, ambidextrous inter-organizational relationships, and organizational ambidexterity in IS. We present the current state of research in each stream. More so, we comprehensively overview application areas, conceptualizations, antecedents for, and outcomes of ambidexterity. Hence, this study contributes to the emergent theme of ambidexterity in IS research

Teams in agile software development: Design principles and examination of human factors

In response to new customer requirements, market dynamics, mergers, and technological innovation, modern software development organizations are adopting agile software development (ASD). Yet, the simple adoption of agile methods such as Scrum or eXtreme programming does not automatically result in a very agile team. While we understand the introduction and adoption of ASD from a methodical perspective, we have yet to explore design principles that guide methodical extensions of ASD, and we need to learn more about the human factors that influence software development teams. This thesis presents four studies. Studies 1 and 2 investigate the methodical extension of ASD by identifying design principles from secondary data. Study 1 extends ASD with processes and practices from user-centered design. Study 2 investigates early activities that precede development activities. The thesis also investigates human factors of agile software development in studies 3 and 4. Study 3 compares teams along their extents of agility in order to identify influential factors using a multicase study design. Study 4 tests the effects of emotional contagion in virtual software development teams using a large dataset from an open source software repository. Thus, this thesis makes two primary contributions. First, it develops design principles for methodical extensions of ASD; second, it contributes to the human factors that influence software development teams. Managers also receive guidance on the improvement of ASD in their organization

Establishing Data Provenance for Responsible Artificial Intelligence Systems

Data provenance, a record that describes the origins and processing of data, offers new promises in the increasingly important role of artificial intelligence (AI)-based systems in guiding human decision making. To avoid disastrous outcomes that can result from bias-laden AI systems, responsible AI builds on four important characteristics: fairness, accountability, transparency, and explainability. To stimulate further research on data provenance that enables responsible AI, this study outlines existing biases and discusses possible implementations of data provenance to mitigate them. We first review biases stemming from the data’s origins and pre-processing. We then discuss the current state of practice, the challenges it presents, and corresponding recommendations to address them. We present a summary highlighting how our recommendations can help establish data provenance and thereby mitigate biases stemming from the data’s origins and pre-processing to realize responsible AI-based systems. We conclude with a research agenda suggesting further research avenues

A Taxonomy of Digital Service Design Techniques

In a digital world, service designers need to apply design techniques to meet increasing user expectations. While there are many design techniques out there, the current taxonomies of design techniques provide little guidance for designers when it comes to selecting appropriate design techniques during the design process. Hence, a well-structured taxonomy is needed. This research-in-process seeks to apply a taxonomy development method to classify design techniques and to identify important dimensions in order to provide an overview of digital service design techniques. Our preliminary results present a taxonomy with five dimensions, each of which includes mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive characteristics. In future research, we plan to evaluate the usefulness of our taxonomy and compare our taxonomy with those that are currently available. Furthermore, we expect to look into the potential interrelations among the dimensions and build a model that explains and predicts the appropriate techniques for a given situation