NAVIGATING TOWARDS A DIGITAL ECOSYSTEM: THE CASE STUDY OF OFFSHORE INFRASTRUCTURE INDUS- TRY

While Information Systems (IS) researchers have studied the role of digital platform governance mechanisms in digital ecosystems formation, less is known about the dynamics shaping nascent eco-systems formation prior to platfromization. This is particularly important in understanding transitions towards digital ecosystems in established industrial settings. Applying the theoretical lens of ambidex-terity, we investigate a case study of establishing a digital ecosystem in the offshore infrastructure in-dustry. Our findings indicate that although firms seek transition towards operating in a digital ecosys-tem, the uncertainties of the situation ahead make it difficult for them to know just how such a digital form of organizing would look. To this end, we identify three digital ecosystem strategies companies pursue during nascent digital ecosystems formation: data structure control, data flow control and data content control. Based on these, we offer three contributions to existing digital ecosystems literature

Situated with Infrastructures: Interactivity and Entanglement in Sensor Data Interpretation

This paper elaborates on situatedness as an empirical phenomenon in computer-mediated settings. It is based on studies of petroleum engineers and how they work with digital sensor data. We show how their work practices are born out of a history of constitutive entanglement with specific types of sensors, the data they produce, and the information systems that process them. This entanglement arises from interaction between humans, technology, and the oil reservoir and is a fundamental aspect of the situations in which interpretative work occurs. We empirically show how different sensors in the petroleum production systems produce data in interaction with their surroundings, and that these data are creatively “stretched” to represent subsurface phenomena. When groups of engineers collaborate remotely with colleagues to make sense of problematic data, entanglement with specific II’s is an important aspect of situatedness. The situationally particular in these settings is not as much a matter of locations as of histories of interaction with specific technologies. The notion of situatedness has been pivotal in stressing the importance of the particular circumstances in which work is performed. It has throughout its history been a counterweight to rationalistic accounts of work and the focus on design of standardized work processes. Here we show that patterns of interaction with specific information infrastructures make up a crucial part of situated work and that these may have non-local dimensions

Geological Multi-scenario Reasoning

In the oil and gas industry, during exploration prospect assessment, explorationists rely on ad hoc manual work practices and tools for developing and communicating multiple hypothetical geological scenarios of the prospect. This leaves them with little efficient means to make the fullest use of state of the art digital technologies to communicate and systematically compare and assess different hypothetical geological scenarios before deciding which scenario to pursue. In this paper, we present a formal framework for geological multi-scenario reasoning, a novel tool-based method for geologically oriented subsurface evaluation. The methodology applies formal methods and logic-based techniques to subsurface evaluation and expresses interpretive uncertainty as discrete scenarios with branches of potential alternatives. This framework consists of (i) a proto-scenario generator that takes user observations and geological evidence as input and generates semantically valid initial states based on formalized geological knowledge in first-order logic (ii) geological processes formalized as a rewrite theory that are executable in Maude. By applying geological rewrite rules onto the proto-scenarios, we are able to assist explorationists with multi-scenario generation and reasoning beyond human capacity

Problems and solutions: Maintaining an integrated system in a community of volunteers

Motivation. Software maintenance is a significant part of the software life-cycle cost. Current research focuses on the maintenance of application software. Despite increased focus on systems integration, there is limited research on maintaining integrated systems. Before progressing with informing software integration practice, researchers therefore need to better understand the actual work of maintaining integrated systems. Research. To this end, a study of maintaining an integrated system in practice has been conducted. The study is conducted in the context of a community of volunteer software integrators. The research combines field studies with document analysis, asking: RQ1: How is knowledge of software failures developed during geographically distributed software maintenance? RQ2: How do software developers build knowledge of how to replace a businesscritical software system? RQ3: What are the characteristics of large-scale software maintenance work in a geographically distributed community of volunteers? Contributions. The main empirical contribution offered by this thesis is insight into the socia

Producing and Interpreting Debug Texts An Empirical Study of Distributed, Parallel Debugging in Open Source Software Development

Abstract. This paper presents preliminary findings from an ethnographic study of distributed, parallel debugging in an open source software (OSS) community. Focusing on the OSS developers ' daily activities, I propose the concept of making software debuggable. In so doing, I see a somewhat different story than common narratives of debugging in current OSS research, which describes distributed, parallel debugging as a set of highly cohesive tasks within loosely couple groups. I find that parallel, distributed debugging is rather a closely coupled collective process of producing and interpreting debug texts with high cohesion between the activities of reporting, finding, and understanding bugs.