The 2019 impact factor (announced end of June 2020) for ISJ is 4.188. This is the third best impact factor in the Basket of Eight IS Journals. See past ISJ impact factors and the Editor’s comment on impact factors here. The next impact factor (2020) will not be available until around mid June 2021.

Abstract

In this study, we investigate the nature of the influence of organisational information technology (IT) on innovation. To examine this relationship, we leverage a fundamental construct: harmonious IT affordance (HITA). HITA is defined as the degree of coalignment between three salient organisational IT affordances, each of which allows an organisation to carry out its most fundamental functions using IT—collaboration, maintenance of organisational memory, and management of organisational processes. We theorize that HITA has a quadratic (U?shaped) effect on innovation. Our theory proposes that when IT affordances increasingly co?align (reflected by increasing HITA), the organisation enters a synergistic, virtuous phase that encourages innovation. Counterintuitively, the increasing misalignment of IT affordances can also result in organisational innovation via creative dissonance, which enables organisations to look for opportunities in the presence of misalignment and leverage it to create a synergistic virtuous cycle. We conducted two empirical studies—one with high?level IT executives knowledgeable about innovation and one with sales and business development executives (who market innovations) knowledgeable about IT—that corroborate our theory. Crucially, if the IT affordances are unrelated (low coalignment, where HITA is close to zero), then innovation does not take place. We thus surmise that the relation between HITA and innovation is quadratic.

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Abstract

IT outsourcing (ITO) remains a popular business practice, but many buyers and suppliers of IT services are caught in a vicious relationship spiral of low trust, bad collaboration and mediocre performance. This paper describes a novel process understanding of how vicious cycles work and suggests a new method for how they can be reversed into virtuous cycles. Based on the action research and complementary system dynamics simulation, this paper demonstrates how an ineffective ITO relationship between a European Harbour Authority and its main IT supplier ITCo was formed and, later, transformed. The method, involving collaborative redesign of service workflows, applied in this action research triggered the reversal of an otherwise downward relationship spiral. Both the empirical facts from the action research data and the system dynamics simulation data are provided as evidence. We conclude the paper with conceptual and methodological contributions as well as scope for future research.

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Abstract

While common wisdom suggests that big data facilitates better decisions, we posit that it may not always be the case, as big data aspects can also afford and motivate knowledge hiding. To examine this possibility, we integrate adaptive cost theory with the resource?based view of the firm. This integration suggests that the effect of big data characteristics (i.e., data variety, volume, and velocity) on firm decision quality can be explained, in part, by data analysts’ perceived knowledge hiding behaviours, including evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding. We examined this model with survey data from 149 data analysts in firms that use big data to varying degrees. The findings show that big data characteristics have distinct effects on knowledge hiding behaviours. While data volume and velocity enhance knowledge hiding, data variety reduces it. Moreover, evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding have varying effects on firm decision quality. Whereas evasive hiding reduces firm decision?making quality, playing dumb does not affect it, and rationalized hiding improves it. These results are further validated with applicability checks. Ultimately, these results can explain inconsistent past findings regarding the return on investment in big data and provide a unique look into the potential “dark sides” of big data.

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In this article, we aim to sensitise the information systems community about the dispossession of choice that the extended reliance on Internet technology creates for individuals. The overemphasis of digital inclusion as a solution to the digital divide problem frames Internet use as desirable in a progressive society but labels non?use as problematic or a deficiency that needs to be remedied. This situation, we argue, creates a new modality of inequality that we term digital enforcement, defined as the process of dispossession that reduces choices for individuals who prefer to minimise their reliance on the Internet if given the opportunity or those who want to live their lives offline altogether. We present digital enforcement as an ethical problem and draw on the concepts of governmentality and technologies of power to explain how practices around Internet use in society result in digital enforcement. We conclude with a hopeful perspective to call for an ethical agenda to develop desirable futures.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

One of today’s grand societal challenges is to replace the current ‘take?make?waste’ economic model with a circular economic model that allows a gradual decoupling of economic activities from the consumption of finite virgin resources. While circular economy (CE) scholars have long lauded digital technologies such as sensors, distributed ledgers, or platforms as key enablers, our own community has not fully explored the potentials of information systems (IS) for a CE. Considering recent technological advances in software and hardware and our history of helping address wicked challenges, we believe the time is ripe to mobilise IS scholarship for a CE. Our findings from an interdisciplinary literature review show that research has primarily examined IS potentials for increasing efficiency of isolated intra?organisational processes while neglecting the larger sustainability potential of IS to establish circular material flows—that is, slow down and close material loops across entire product lifecycles. In response, we propose directions for IS research that develop our knowledge of how IS can help understand and enact circular material flows to intensify and extend use of products and components and recycle waste materials. Our directions offer pathways to building and evaluating the problem?solution pairing that could characterise a prolific CE?IS relationship.

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Abstract

To realize their strategic goals and maintain a competitive advantage in the digital era, organizations must periodically renew their digital platforms and infrastructures. However, knowledge about such technology renewal is scattered across diverse research streams, so insights into the process are both limited and fragmented. In this article, we consolidate insights from previous research to conceptualize technology renewal as an inherently paradoxical digital transformation process that requires organizations to simultaneously remove their technological foundation and build on the practices that depend on it to implement a new technological foundation. Previous research suggests that technology renewal initiatives are driven by three paradoxical tensions: (a) established vs renewed technology usage, (b) deliberate vs emergent renewal practices and (c) inner vs outer renewal contexts. We apply this framing to a longitudinal case study in which we analyse and explain how an organization’s responses to manifestations of these tensions eventually led to a vicious cycle of continued investments into two overlapping and largely incompatible digital platforms over a 9?year period. Based on these conceptual and empirical insights, we theorize technology renewal as a paradoxical, and increasingly critical, digital transformation process that forces managers to make decisions in complex and ambiguous choice situations.

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Information Systems Journal, EarlyView. Source

Abstract

Based on three case studies of Chinese Internet start?ups, this study seeks to address the research question: “How is digital entrepreneurship enacted in China?” Our findings reveal that there was a common theme that underpinned the start?ups we studied, which we termed ‘Qinghuai’ in the language of the informants we spoke with. In this paper, we explain the roots of the concept and its six constituent elements at the individual, organizational, and ecosystem levels. These elements are then abstracted into two dimensions: (a) spiritual idealism and (b) perpetual development. We argue that Qinghuai as a concept is a product and reflection of the cultural and institutional complexity of contemporary China. Further, we discuss how Qinghuai facilitates digital entrepreneurship across the business, organizational, and technological domains. This explanation is substantiated by data from our three cases and juxtaposed with what has been discussed in the existing digital entrepreneurship literature. Finally, as we present the contributions of our study, we elaborate on (a) how Qinghuai reflects the contemporary context of China; (b) how Qinghuai is instrumental to digital entrepreneurship in China; and (c) how Qinghuai is different from other related concepts including Guanxi, collectivism, collective action and social entrepreneurship. We conclude the paper by discussing its limitations, future research opportunities, as well as its practical implications.

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Abstract

Software process tailoring (SPT) is a team?based and learning?intensive activity that addresses the particular dynamic characteristics of a development project. Because SPT critically influences how projects are conducted, its performance should be investigated. However, the extant literature lacks empirical evidence on how the underlying effects of SPT performance and its team?supportive factors operate and influence software project performance. From the knowledge perspective, this study adopts dynamic capabilities theory and considers the learning ability and absorptive capacity of software project teams to develop a theoretical model to address this gap. The results of an empirical examination of the model with 135 software project teams advance our understanding of how team?level learning antecedents—experience, communication quality and trust—dynamically facilitate teams’ absorptive capacity (AC) when they conduct SPT, which in turn reinforces project performance. The mediating effects of the proposed model are unveiled and discussed, and theoretical implications as well as practical guidance for how AC and these factors promote SPT and project performance are suggested.

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