Observing Organizati onal Environments: Is it Really of Any Use to the Information Analyst?

Previously the authors developed a framework for observing key elements in the organizational environment. The art structure proposed was borrowed from film criticism, but the correlation between office environments and characteristics of the people who use them is grounded in individual research efforts of others. Since first proposing the mise-en-scbne framework as a tool for information analysts, the authors set out to determine if reliable and valid measures could really be developed. Once satisfied with their results, they attempted to use the technique to identify information requi rements in a regional bl ood service organization. Thls paper describes the problems encountered in rel ating physical surroundings to decision maker characteristics, improvements to the general framework, rel iabil ity, and validity limitations, and options for implementing the observational technique in a consulting project. Suggestions are provided for future research that woul d sol idify the useful ness of observing organizational environments

Information Delivery Systems:An Exploration of Web Pull and Push Technologies

The Web is alive with news stories, pictures, music, and videos. How will organizations, managers, and other users find out what content is available, then locate it, analyze it, and make it meaningful? In this tutorial, we identify and classify eight types of information delivery systems (IDS) that we refer to as alpha, beta, gamma and delta and push technologies. For pull technologies we explain surfing the Web , search engines, spiders and bots, personal agents, and finally evolutionary agents. For push technologies we explain Webcasting, channels and subscriptions, and data mining methods for determining preferences and filtering topics. We also examine the role of the evolutionary agents in push technologies. Throughout the paper, we provide examples of current pull and push technologies in each of the categories for pull and push. We include both personal and corporate applications. We then examine the managerial and social implications of higher-level IDS and suggest what is in store for users of information delivery systems in the future

A Paradoxically Peaceful Coexistence Between Commerce and eCommerce

Common opinion on the street is that 1) ecommerce cannot coexist with traditional commerce, and that 2) ecommerce can\u27t work given the economics of business. Neither is true. … Just as parts of our world can be described in Newtonian physics and others parts in quantum mechanics, so too can both ecommerce and traditional commerce coexist. This paper discusses the paradigm shift that allows ecommerce to pursue a profitable and sustainable model. Three paradoxes are used to explain how ecommerce and traditional commerce can coexist

The Challenge of Improving Software Quality: Developers\u27 Beliefs about the Contribution of Agile Practices

We observe that systems developers who have had experience with agile development projects often express their opinion that agile methodologies are superior to plan-driven methodologies. In order to collect empirical evidence to support or discount this belief, we conducted a survey among software developers about software quality and development practices. Our study identified eight quality goals from the software quality literature. We then asked the participants to identify which of eight practices contributes the most towards that quality goal. Half of the practices were agile practices; half were plandriven practices. We found that, for each and every quality goal, the participants as a whole chose one of the agile practices as a best practice enabling them to reach each quality goal. While this study does not conclude that agile methods are always the best approach, it does reveal that agile practices are being noticed and appreciated by many system developers

Reframing as Positive Design: An Exemplar from the Office of Civil Registry in Mexico

Systems analysts are continuously seeking innovative ways to improve their designs, often by engaging users in the process. The idea of the positive lens has been broached as a valuable approach to designing organizations and information systems. Positive design is an emergent viewpoint in the research of individuals and groups that attempts to use a positive outlook to improve companies and nonprofit organizations and the technologies they use through use of positive spoken or written words or discourse. In this paper we use a positive approach to reframing, which we situate within the perspective of the Social Construction of Technology. We provide an exemplar from our work with the Office of Civil Registry in Mexico where positive design using reframing opened the design experience to users and facilitated a successful design for resolving their problems. Positive reframing is a useful design technique for achieving positive results when faced with intractable systems problems

Understanding Disaster Recovery Planning through a Theatre Metaphor: Rehearsing for a Show that Might Never Open

Disaster recovery planning for organizations is fundamental and often urgent. Planning supports the firm\u27s ability to recover the core business functionality of its software, data, and systems after the occurrence of a natural or man-made disaster. Organizations must take steps to protect their software, systems and data backups from natural disasters, power outages, and even terrorist attacks. However the issue of disaster recovery is often awash in checklists or marooned in mundane statistics. Such sterile approaches tend to lead key managers, CEOs, and CIOs to relegate disaster recovery planning to a lower priority when they become overwhelmed with planning minutiae or bored with staid presentations. This paper introduces a theatre metaphor to enable a lively discussion and deeper understanding of disaster recovery planning. Specifically, we introduce the concept of workshopping a play. We explore this new approach from the world of theatrical productions to illuminate and deepen understanding of the importance of testing, evaluation, and reworking of scenarios for each potential disaster

Examining Virtual Organizations Using Fantasy Theme Analysis: A Study of ICT Policy Advisors\u27 Discourse About Developing Countries

Virtual organizations (also called virtual communities) are entities that use information technology to adapt to changing project, information, or marketplace demands. In this paper, we use fantasy theme analysis to identify dramas created in a virtual community or organization composed of individuals and organizations involved in giving policy-making advice to developing countries. We extend a particular kind of dramatism (fantasy theme analysis) into the realm of policy makers who create and enact dramas in their virtual communities. Fantasy theme analysis as envisioned by Bormann (1972, 1980, 1982, and 1983) is a departure from other types of dramatism in that it does not rely on the costumes, props, and physical settings to identify dramas. Our analysis found that the heroes were not the benefactors who donated money for the information technology, nor the adopters of the technology, nor even the practitioners who facilitated the implementation of information and communications technology (ICTs). Rather, the hero, surprisingly, turned out to be the ICT policy researchers. These are the people who analyze, compare and debate ICT policies, and how best to measure ICT impacts, in a free exchange within their virtual community. In our analysis of the virtual community’s exchanges, the villain emerged as people within developing countries who suppressed or warped the use of ICTs. The group does not equate villainy with government, but equates it more closely with ruling authorities who pervert the use of ICTs who want to hinder their introduction. We conclude that the script created by a virtual organization via an Internet forum discussion is usefully examined taking a fantasy theme analysis approach, and that the resulting analysis is useful in helping policy makers identify the heroes, villains, plots and subplots of their policy discussions in their virtual community. We recommend three actions: 1) for ICT researchers we would urge them to recognize the dramas they and their colleagues are creating through their group interactions, 2) for policy advisors we encourage them to reflect on the power they possess to participate in ongoing discussions on a positive, symbolic and creative level, and 3) for researchers we recommend taking up the challenge of examining virtual communities by developing research methods that can capture the full panoply of interactions not readily available through traditional approaches. Fantasy theme analysis is one such method

Tapestries of Innovation: Structures of Contemporary Open Source Project Engagements

Since the origins of the free-software movement, open source projects have fostered an environment for innovative ideas that has transformed much of our understanding of technology in everyday life. In our quest to learn more about the structures of large-scale contemporary open source engagements, we examine three open source networks as part of an ongoing field study (Van Maanen, 2011). We explore the innovation networks described by Lyytinen, Yoo, & Boland (2016) and resolve whether any of the open source innovative networks that we have been studying can be classified as Project, Clan, Federated, or Anarchic networks. We examine two collaborative open source projects (SPDX and OpenMAMA) housed at the Linux Foundation, and determine that they correspond to the Federated and Project innovation networks respectively. Further, we determined that the Linux Foundation itself, as an organization that houses numerous open source projects, did not fit any of the four types of networks. We therefore propose and authenticate a fifth type of network that we characterize as a Tapestry innovation network, which can illuminate the Linux Foundation’s complexity of horizontal “weft threads” of participating organizations with the vertical, less visible “warp threads” of responsibilities and endeavors. Our study reveals important implications for research and practice by challenging the accepted view of open source projects, which still largely regards engagement around loosely structured groups of volunteers working on publicly available software. It also reveals that foundations are playing increasingly strategic roles in creating and stabilizing open source projects

The Third Design Space: A postcolonial perspective on corporate engagement with open source software communities

Corporations increasingly engage with open source software communities in the co‐creation of software. This collaboration between corporate professionals and open source software community members is strikingly different from the early days of software development where for‐profit firms attempted to dominate and control the industry while attempting to throttle the success of independent developers offering an alternative, open source option. While many metaphors like trading zones, common pool resources and ecosystems have helped understand the phenomenon, the metaphors do not portray what the industry was like before and after the transition. We adopt a postcolonial metaphor as an analytical lens to examine such collaboration based on qualitative data gathered over three years from executives, managers and developers within corporations that engage in open source software development. Drawing on these insights, we then theorize a “Third Design Space,” based on the concept of the third space proposed by Bhabha. This metaphor encourages the cultivation of a new design environment, creation of new design associations and circulation of shared design resources. Together these practices and behaviours make it possible to nurture innovative methods and new rituals for designing software with results and methods that represent a distinct departure from the competitive and proprietary past, even creating innovative artefacts that could not have been created without the Third Design Space