Information Systems Journal最新文献

Given the multifaceted nature of digital phenomena, theorising has shifted from the correlational view toward the configurational approach, which embraces equifinality and seeks to identify conjunctural causal conditions culminating in a given outcome. Despite growing scholarly interest in the configurational approach, little is known about how moderation functions in conjunctural causation. Although there is a growing urgency for elucidating the boundary conditions of conjunctural causation to bolster the precision of theoretical explanations, a systematic approach to theorising, identifying, and interpreting moderation in configurational theories is missing. To bridge this knowledge gap, we first establish the theoretical grounding for moderation in the configurational approach. We then articulate the theoretical mechanism underlying how the interdependence of causal factors in a causal recipe is altered by the presence of a moderator. We also offer guidance on how to validate and interpret moderation in the configurational approach based on Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA). We conduct an illustrative study in the context of technostress to showcase the utility of our proposed guidelines and their value in aiding theory development. Our study hence contributes to extant literature by attesting to the significance of moderation in the configurational approach and offering recommendations for theorising such moderations. Insights from this study can be harnessed to guide future theory development by identifying and validating moderated configurational relationships, which in turn can further enhance our understanding of nuances in multifaceted digital phenomena.

Digital platform ecosystems increasingly dominate the enterprise software domain, and the persistence of platforms depends on the sustained engagement of complementors. However, there is a limited understanding of its antecedents, complementors' evaluation of antecedents and the manifestations and dynamic changes of complementors' engagement. Therefore, we investigate complementors' engagement within platform ecosystems over time. We draw on actor and stakeholder engagement from service research to conceptualise complementor engagement (CE) and create an integrated empirical understanding of CE and its dynamics in digital platform ecosystems. Our embedded case study builds on 30 interviews with complementors in Anubis and Osiris enterprise software platform ecosystems. Inductive data analysis reveals five CE antecedents: platform resources and rules, platform value proposition, platform agents, customer needs and other complementors' value propositions. The antecedents are associated with three CE behaviours: generating, networking and synchronising. Further analysis of CE over time resulted in 26 different sequences representing stable and changing engagement trajectories, the latter comprising selective, growing and abating engagement as subcategories. We show how complementors' evaluations of antecedents lead to behaviour changes, providing a novel perspective on the dynamics underlying CE. Finally, we link complementors' evaluation outcomes to their (dis)satisfaction, contributing to the discussion on what drives and impedes CE. The findings implicate the debate on dynamic platform governance and inform platform owners about using cooperative and competitive approaches in the short and long term.

Workarounds are goal-driven deviations from the standard operating procedures performed to overcome obstacles constraining day-to-day work. Despite starting as temporary fixes, they can become established across an organisation and trigger the innovation of processes and IT artefacts that can resolve misfits permanently. Although prior research has elicited antecedents and types of workarounds, it is not known how workarounds diffuse in an organisation and, thereby, innovating co-workers' activities, IT artefacts, and organisational structures. The results of our multiple two-year case study provide unique empirical insights into the diffusion of workarounds and how they can act as generative mechanisms for bottom-up process innovation.

When presented with the latest statistics on global warming, it becomes evident that ecological sustainability will be equally important as economic sustainability for companies. A new wave of start-ups shows that ecological sustainability can be integral to a business model (BM) without compromising economic success. Like start-ups that designed their BMs to be ecologically and economically sustainable, incumbents also need to undergo two fundamental transformations in parallel: digital and sustainable BM transformation. While each transformation alone is considered demanding, we examined 31 start-ups to develop a taxonomy of digital sustainable BMs to understand how companies can master these complementary challenges and provide guidelines on achieving ecological and economic sustainability by implementing digital BMs. We use this taxonomy to derive four distinct archetypes of how sustainability can be an integral part of the BM: Sustainable Software Solutions, Sustainable Product-Service Systems, Sustainability Intelligence, and Digital Sustainable Platforms. For each archetype, we reveal the role of digital technology in creating ecological BMs and how these BMs create sustainable value from an ecological, economic, and technological perspective. Therefore, we go beyond using digital technology to optimise production or logistics or enable remote work and implement sustainability as an integral part of the core logic of the organisation and its identity. For practice, our strategy guidelines contribute to creating a sustainable reality based on digital technology implemented in the BMs.

Control is necessary for aligning the actions of management (i.e., controllers) and subordinates (i.e., controlees) around common goals. The enactment of control often fails in practice; however, as controlee perceptions may not match those of controllers, leading to a myriad of possible outcomes. Through an interpretive case study of two inter-organisational IT projects, we reveal how controlees' appraisals and responses to controls are context-dependent and play out across multiple levels (e.g., personal, professional, project and organisational contexts). We build on a coping perspective of IS controls to theorise the ‘coping strategies’ that controlees pursued relevant to these contexts and the ‘coping routes’ followed when combining different consecutive coping strategies. We find the process need not end with the selection of a single strategy but can potentially continue as both the controller and controlees make ongoing readjustments. While Behavioural Control Theory traditionally assumes the presence of a single control hierarchy, interorganisational IT projects are multi-level entities that amalgamate different structures and cultures. Our study moves beyond the existing assumptions of Behavioural Control Theory to discuss how a controller's choice of activities shapes the salience of different contexts in controlee appraisals.

Although off-the-shelf enterprise systems (ES) have been widely adopted in organisations, the extant literature repeatedly documents ES failures caused by misfits between organisational processes and the ES. Although some misfits can be identified early in the ES lifecycle, others emerge in the onward and upward phase (i.e., after the implementation) and, hence, must be resolved reactively. Prior research on misfits and resolution strategies has primarily focused on the implementation phase, often assuming that close-to-perfect information on the misfit's nature and characteristics is available. However, no study has examined how to effectively complete a shared diagnosis and resolution of misfits when diverging individual user perceptions are taken as the starting point. Such situations may be particularly pronounced in pluralistic organisations, where a variety of interdependent processes and potentially competing perceptions of processes are prevalent. The main objective of this study is to address this gap. To this end, we propose a pragmatic method for the diagnosis and resolution of misfits between organisational processes and enterprise systems, which builds on an actionable conceptualization of misfits. This method builds on theoretical concepts of affordances, affordance actualization, user participation, and change agentry. To demonstrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method, we conducted an action research study in a university hospital. Our analysis focused on a specific misfit involving the hospital's ES-supported clinical processes. The findings suggest that the method effectively diagnoses and resolves misfits and optimises the resources required for their resolution through efficient management of user participation. We conclude with a discussion of the theoretical and practical contributions of our work.

The use of digital technologies for extracting information from various data sources can help organisations to reduce uncertainty and improve decision-making. The increasing availability in volume, velocity, and variety of data, however, can give rise to significant risks and challenges in ensuring a high level of information quality (IQ). Pre-digital organisations can be particularly susceptive to such challenges due to their limited experience with digital technologies and IQ governance. We adopt a theory-infused interventionist research approach to assist a pre-digital multinational military organisation in navigating its digital transformation (DT) by focusing on IQ. We design and implement an IQ strategy (IQS) by drawing upon organisational information processing theory and examining how the level of IQ can affect the balance between information processing requirements and capacity. We demonstrate that an IQS that incorporates both technological, as well as IQ governance solutions, can support organisations in setting the scope of their DT, decreasing employees' resistance to change, and increasing their satisfaction, while concurrently improving organisational efficiency. Our work stresses the importance of IQ in the digital era and delineates how pre-digital organisations can navigate DT by strategically addressing IQ.

Scale adaptation, where authors alter the wording of an already published scale, is a deeply rooted social practice in IS research. This paper argues that the time is ripe to question this activity as well as the beliefs that have progressively formed around it. We identify and challenge five fallacious scale adaptation beliefs that hinder the development of more robust measure development norms. Contributing to this area of research, this paper offers a conceptual definition of the cognitive validity concept, defined as the extent to which a scale is free of problematic item characteristics (PICs) that bias the survey response process and subsequent empirical results. Building on this conceptualization effort, a new methodological process for assessing the cognitive validity of adapted IS measures is introduced. Through a series of three programmatic studies, we find converging evidence that the method can benefit the IS field by making the scale adaptation process more robust, transparent, and consistent. Along with the method, we introduce a new index that IS scholars can use to benchmark the cognitive quality of their scales against venerable IS measures. We discuss the implications of our work for IS research (including detailed implementation guidelines) and provide directions for future research on measurement in IS.