Information Systems Research
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Bonnie Kaplan, Duane P. Truex, David Wastell, A. Trevor Wood-Harper, Janice I. DeGross
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Information Systems Research
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Springer-Verlag
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9781402080951
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1
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CHF 134.40
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Sonstiges
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English
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768
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DRM
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PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
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PDF
"Information Systems Research: Relevant Theory and Informed Practice" comprises the edited proceedings of the WG8.2 conference,"Relevant Theory and Informed Practice: Looking Forward from a 20-Year Perspective on IS Research," which was sponsored by IFIP and held in Manchester, England, in July 2004.
The conference attracted a record number of high-quality manuscripts, all of which were subjected to a rigorous reviewing process in which four to eight track chairs, associate editors, and reviewers thoughtfully scrutinized papers by the highly regarded as well as the newcomers. No person or idea was considered sacrosanct and no paper made it through this process unscathed. All authors were asked to revise the accepted papers, some more than once; thus, good papers got better. With only 29 percent of the papers accepted, these proceedings are significantly more selective than is typical of many conference proceedings.
This volume is organized in 7 sections, with 33 full research papers providing panoramic views and reflections on the Information Systems (IS) discipline followed by papers featuring critical interpretive studies, action research, theoretical perspectives on IS research, and the methods and politics of IS development. Also included are 6 panel descriptions and a new category of"bright idea" position papers, 11 in all, wherein main points are summarized in a pithy and provocative fashion.
2 THEORETICAL FOUNDATION
(p. 517-518)
The strategization of information technology (IT) to attain a competitive edge is ritualistic among private institutions (Ives and Learmonth 1984; McFarlan 1984) and contributes to an extensive list of classical business applications (Clemons 1991). Notwithstanding these testimonial cases of successful MIS, the feasibility of IT-based competitive sustainability remains debatable within academia (see Mata et al. 1995; Mykytyn et al. 2002). Citing reasons such as the prevailing adoption of IT as a strategic necessity (Clemons 1986) and the possibility of generating even deadlier reactions from rivals through creative duplication (Kettinger et al. 1994; Vitale 1986), many have contested the viability of IT-derived competitiveness and emphasized that research in this domain should focus on"describing how, rather than systematically why" IT can deliver strategic benefits (Reich and Benbasat 1990, p. 326).
Unsurprisingly, in light of their copious organizational influence and the substantial implementation investments they require, ES are readily conceived by scholars as the next logical candidate for the reimbursement of competitive value (Ross and Vitale 2000). As IT-based business solutions, ES are touted as configurable software packages that purportedly enable the collation of transaction-oriented data and functional processes into a singular infrastructure (Lee and Lee 2000; Markus et al. 2000a; Markus and Tanis 2000). Nevertheless, despite the projected benefits of prepackaged ES (Markus et al. 2000b), there remain unresolved adoption hurdles. Implicit within ES packages are business principles that emulate industry best practices (Everdingen et al. 2000).
These posited business paradigms, as predefined by the vendor, serve as convenient templates for corporations to mirror competitive praxis, although in many instances the projected benefits of the implemented ES do not materialize (Markus and Tanis 2000). The failures have been attributed to a blend of socio-technical constraints surrounding ES, such as their complexities, their customization difficulties, and the presence of cultural misfits underlying their inherent business process assumptions and those of the adopting organization (Howcroft and Light 2002; Lee and Lee 2000; Soh et al. 2000).
While we do not underestimate the aforementioned technological and organizational challenges of ES implementation, the purpose of this paper is to shed light on how competitive benefits can be manifested through ES adoption, rather than the reason why they can or cannot be realized. As conceived by Rosemann (1999), the fundamental notion of ES is analogous to the developmental objective in mapping the entire array of enterprise business processes into an integrated infostructure.
From this perspective, ES are predominantly operational commodities that double up as"the key element of an infrastructure" which conveys a holistic business solution to adopters (Rosemann and Watson 2002, p. 201). Yet, despite the consensus among researchers of the strategic significance of ES, their exact business potential has not been exploited beyond the extrapolative predictions of existing MIS trends (Davenport 2000a; Hayman 2000; Markus et al. 2000b). Consequently, the question of how ES can deliver competitive qualities continues to evade answering in strategic MIS research and, specifically, ES literature.
Contents
6
Foreword
12
Preface
16
Conference Chairs
20
Associate Editors
21
Reviewers
22
1 Young Turks, Old Guardsmen, and the Conundrum of the Broken Mold: A Progress Report on Twenty Years of Information Systems Research
25
1 INTRODUCTION
25
2 OVERVIEW OF THE PAPERS AND OTHER SUBMISSIONS
27
2.1 Panoramas
27
2.2 Reflections on the IS Discipline
28
2.3 Critical Interpretive Studies
30
2.4 Action Research
31
2.5 Theoretical Perspectives in IS Research
32
2.6 Systems Development: Methods, Politics, and Users
34
2.7 Panels and Position Papers
36
3 CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS
38
Part 1: Panoramas
43
2 DOCTOR OF PHILOS
