A Maturity model for IS action research project management

Abstract

The importance of Action Research in Information Systems Qualitative Research has been stated by several researchers. But also several problems had been reported. To address these problems, the Information Systems community has raised the need to have frameworks that allow to take advantage and to facilitate the use of Action Research as a more valid research method, while at the same time trying to overcome the lack of rigor of some of its applications. Project management (PM) was proposed in a first research report at LSI-99-54-R by the authors to address the reported problems in Information Systems Action Research (IS-AR). Without losing the interpretative nature of IS-AR, project management provides good and consolidated practices to help the researcher to avoid diminish and/or solve IS-AR problems. Thus, the goal with this approach is to improve the use of IS-AR through consolidated PM practices. The results related for this goal are a maturity model for IS-AR and a user's guide of IS-AR both under the project management approach. In this sense, this document shows such maturity model and the process followed to obtain it. We relate the proficiency levels for Action Research with the competence levels of the project management maturity models. Thus we obtain five IS-AR maturity levels: novice, basic, organized, managed and adaptive. Next, we leverage IS-AR practices with the IS-AR maturity levels. In this last step, we use Bloom's taxonomy and Ramirez et al. educational congruence model