Information Systems Journal最新文献

Digital transformation is a complex, multi-level phenomenon that still challenges research and practice. Recent research has highlighted the influence of digital ecosystems on digital transformation, but we lack knowledge about how this relationship unfolds across the organisational and the ecosystem levels. Following a phenomenon-based theorising approach and applying a digital resource-based view, we present the OCO (orientation, cooperation, orchestration) theory of digital transformation. The OCO theory explains the relationship between an organisation's digital transformation and its integration into a digital ecosystem. We uncover and explain three interdependent mechanisms, that is, orientation, cooperation, and orchestration, that are set in motion by cross-level interactions between the organisational and the ecosystem levels and that centre around digital resources. Our work advances the frontier of multi-level digital transformation research explaining the influence of a digital ecosystem on digital transformation. We conclude through six propositions that the deeper its digital ecosystem integration, the more likely an organisation's digital transformation is effective. Therewith, we aim at mobilising future digital transformation research to bridge the organisational and the ecosystem levels and provide four future research themes. Our work also encourages practitioners to acknowledge and manage the influence of digital ecosystems on digital transformation.

To address various business challenges, organisations are increasingly employing artificial intelligence (AI) to analyse vast amounts of data. One application involves consolidating diverse user data into unified profiles, aggregating consumer behaviours to accurately tailor marketing efforts. Although AI provides more convenience to consumers and more efficient and profitable marketing for organisations, the act of aggregating data into behavioural profiles for use in machine learning algorithms introduces significant privacy implications for users, including unforeseeable personal disclosure, outcomes biased against marginalised population groups and organisations' inability to fully remove data from AI systems on consumer request. Although these implementations of AI are rapidly altering the way consumers perceive information privacy, researchers have thus far lacked an accurate method for measuring consumers' privacy concerns related to AI. In this study, we aim to (1) validate a scale for measuring privacy concerns related to AI misuse (PC-AIM) and (2) examine the effects that PC-AIM has on nomologically related constructs under the APCO framework. We provide evidence demonstrating the validity of our newly developed scale. We also find that PC-AIM significantly increases risk beliefs and personal privacy advocacy behaviour, while decreasing trusting beliefs. Trusting beliefs and risk beliefs do not significantly affect behaviour, which differs from prior privacy findings. We further discuss the implications of our work on both research and practice.

Despite alternative work arrangements becoming more prevalent, existing work design approaches are mostly based on research and practice of traditional on-site work. Struggles with capturing employee performance are reported across different off-site, non-traditional forms of work, such as remote and hybrid. This article performs a comprehensive fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis to juxtaposing different configurations of job characteristics across forms of work. Our multi-source study is based on a matched sample of 1215 diverse working personnel (with supervisors, who evaluated employee performance) in Montenegro. Based on the pathways leading to task performance in different forms of work, we develop propositions centered on the key principles of designing traditional and alternative, non-traditional forms of work. While we confirm the importance of enriched work design, several specific characteristics and their accompanying configurations (including compensatory effects) are highlighted with regard to the task performance achieved. These include high levels of task identity for all three forms of work (on-site, hybrid and remote). Work performed in a traditional on-site setting additionally requires greater task variety. Conversely, remote work requires high information processing and social support. The hybrid model calls for the most complicated work design that combines essential elements of both the on-site and remote work paradigms, namely task variety and information processing, and also for enhanced mechanisms for job feedback. Hybrid work is a universal social phenomenon still on the uptake that likely represents the future of work, and since it combines traditional settings with information and communication technologies, we also emphasise the importance of field-bridging future research of information systems and organisational design areas.

The utilisation of information and communication technology (ICT) has a profound impact on e-governance across countries, albeit, with limited attention to rural areas. The existing literature on this topic either examines the positive effects of ICT use on e-governance at the individual level or from the urban–rural dichotomy perspective. Meanwhile, the majority of studies are conducted within an urban context, but they scarcely focus on identifying the challenges in developing rural e-governance. As such, we contend that an ecology perspective is necessary to identify the specific distinctions of ICT use on e-governance in various rural ecosystems. To this end, we employ various empirical specifications, namely a fixed-effects model and an instrumental variable approach, to provide evidence of distinct influences of ICT use on e-governance. As follows, we adopt a qualitative research approach to gather evidence on the differentiations of ICT use on rural e-governance within diverse ecosystems. Subsequently, we have identified five crucial obstacles encountered by rural ecosystems in Western China while attempting to develop e-governance. Furthermore, we delineate an all-encompassing internal-external strategy to overcome these challenges.

Integrating the competition and the cooperation perspectives on value co-creation in platform ecosystems, this study explores complementor responses to platform owner moves that adversely affect the complementor's positioning. Our primary focus is to discern dynamic patterns of complementor responses and to understand their role in the process of re-stabilising the complementor's positioning. To this end, we conducted a 14-year longitudinal study, analysing 21 move-response instances across four platform partnerships. Our findings reveal three distinct complementor response archetypes: insist, pivot, and detach. Over time, complementors combine these archetypes into three unique response patterns. Through progressive diverging, complementors sidestep platform owner moves by diversifying their offer beyond the focal ecosystem. Although this can entail substantial multi-homing costs, it reduces dependence on the platform owner and bolsters resilience against future moves. Through adaptive oscillating, complementors use platform owner moves as opportunities to gradually diversify their offer within the focal ecosystem. This stepwise market expansion makes them resilient against future moves, while mitigating costs and efforts related to multi-homing. Through persistent insisting, complementors can re-establish their previous positioning, but at the cost of increased dependence on the platform owner, leaving the complementor vulnerable to future moves. We synthesise these findings in our process model of complementor positioning. Emphasising the importance of complementor responses in fostering resilient software ecosystems, this model bears important implications for research on platform governance and platform-dependent entrepreneurship.

IT has an enormous potential to democratise, equalise and decolonize development aid; however, the right IT governance is needed to actualize this potential. Such governance must align with the general efforts in development work to decolonize and eradicate adverse power imbalances. Power imbalances are at play when donors from the Global North finance and thereby set the development agenda for the Global South without concern for the actual needs. IT use in development aid is an important tool in decolonisation struggles, but corresponding structures also risk cementing problematic power distributions. As such, guidelines are needed on how to set up and decolonize IT governance structures. Using insights from a case study of a large international development aid NGO and building on the African emancipation philosophy Ubuntu, we propose five organising principles for a decolonized IT governance. These organising principles serve as guidelines to set up decolonized and emancipating IT governance structures and extend current IT governance theories.

As the discourse regarding digital transformation has developed, we see an opportunity to extend the concept of becoming digital into an as-of-yet unrealized future. By examining the foundational assumptions of digital transformation, we reveal two frontiers that expand the current transformation discourse into futures where their implications and outcomes will reside. A conceptual frontier suggests that we begin to conceptualise the worlds in which future organisations and people observe digital technologies and their enactments as an unexceptional and quite mundane aspect of their daily lives. We initiate conceptualising being digital as an outcome of the transformations our current research studies. A second analytic frontier embraces world-making in current theorizations and the development of future-leaning conceptualization of alternative worlds. Speculative foresight is an approach for staging new concepts and relationships, critiquing current research practice and theory boundaries, and creating novel and generative theorizations. An example speculative foresight scenario illustrates onto-epistemic assumptions and ambiguities in current theories of digital transformation regarding how future ethics will be conceived. The implications and limitations of this approach are discussed in the context of the need for IS research to develop orientations that can contribute to understanding digital transformation processes and both positive and negative transformation outcomes that will constitute yet unrealized futures.

In this paper, we mobilise new frontiers in digital transformation (DT) research by deconstructing the literature's underlying assumptions and analysing their correspondence with current theory. To do so, we conduct a problematization review across the fields of IS, strategy and entrepreneurship, organisation theory and management studies, to capture the multidimensionality of DT research. Unlike systematic literature reviews commonly found in DT research, a problematization review critically questions how theoretical contributions have been constructed in past research to develop novel theoretical questions. Our findings offer three contributions. First, we uncover five research trajectories, each with its own in-house assumptions about the nature of digital technologies and how organisations, groups and individuals interact with those technologies and the data they generate. Second, we show how individual studies within the identified research trajectories position themselves against prior research, pointing at six distinct processes of constructing theoretical contributions. Finally, we mobilise new frontiers of research by questioning DT research field assumptions that cut across the five research trajectories. We conclude by discussing the theoretical implications of our problematization review for further DT research.