Jim Kenneally

Applying design science research for enterprise architecture business value assessments

In the effort to measure the business value and impact of Enterprise Architecture (EA), we need to adapt an appropriate form of information systems research in order to cope with the encountered challenges. For this purpose, we employed Design Science Research (DSR), a problem-driven approach to provide a solution represented as artifacts to provide the required utility to our stakeholders. The main contribution of this research is the detailed focus on how artifacts are actually conceived in an organizational context and the realization that a complex environment demands for more than just one artifact. Therefore, we are in need of a flexible research methodology. The DSR in this case is conducted within a well-known information systems research framework and follows widely accepted principles and guidelines. We explain the business need that arose from the current business practices in the course of a case study and describe the flexible research methodology we pursue and how we intend to solve the problems we identified as current DSR approaches lack the necessary flexibility we were looking for in practice. This flexibility greatly improves the management of our project in the organizational environment in terms of planning and implementation. Furthermore, we outline the evolutionary state of the artifacts during our adapted research process.

Applying Design Science Research in Enterprise Architecture Business Value Assessments

In the effort to measure the business value and impact of Enterprise Architecture (EA), we need to adapt an adequate form of information systems research in order to cope with encountered challenges. For this purpose, we employed Design Science Research (DSR), a problem-driven approach to provide a solution represented as artifacts offering the projected utility to our stakeholders. The main contribution is the detailed focus on how artifacts are actually built in an organizational context. The DSR we conduct happens within a well-known information systems research framework and follows widely accepted principles and guidelines. We explain the business need that arose from the current business practices in the course of a case study and describe the methodology we pursue and how we intend to solve the problems we identified. Thereby, we outline the evolutionary state of the artifacts during our adapted research process.

Enhancing Benefits from Healthcare IT Adoption Using Design Science Research: Presenting a Unified Application of the IT Capability Maturity Framework and the Electronic Medical Record Adoption Model

This paper details how 16 acute-care hospitals from across Europe and North America where able to plan a more holistic approach to the strategy, implementation and running of electronic medical record (EMR) and general IT services. The paper outlines a design science approach within the information systems (IS) field to developing and applying here-to-fore separately utilised IS management artefacts namely; the IT Capability Maturity Framework (from IVI) and EMR Adoption Model (from HIMSS Analytics). The development of novel artefacts for their joint use allows healthcare organisations systematically improve performance and more readily realise benefits from increased levels of EMR investment. This unified application was supplemented with emerging technology adoption case-studies for healthcare. The combined benefits of this approach allow acute-care hospitals to more holistically plan IT capability enhancements towards achieving improved eHealth outcomes.

IT Frameworks

This article is a collection of papers collected from the nonprofits that run three critical frameworks in use by IT organizations around the globe–the Project Management Institute, Capability Maturity Model Integration, and the Innovation Value Institute. These papers outline the current state and future direction of these organizations and their frameworks.

Sustainable Connected Cities: Vision and Blueprint towards Managing IT for City Prosperity and Sustainability

With the continued global trend of rural to urban population migration, traditional city management approaches are being challenged to both develop and sustainably manage the economies, societies and environments of their cities. Many are turning to the application of computing technologies to address these challenges. While computing technologies are becoming ever more advanced, appropriate management approaches and frameworks for a city to optimize contributions from such computing technologies are often lagging behind. This paper presents a vision for sustainable connected cities (SCC), and a nascent city management framework called the Sustainable Connected Cities Capability Maturity FrameworkTM (SCC-CMFTM) - for how to implement such a vision, and a case study application. The contributions of design science research are briefly discussed in relation to these approaches.

Creating a New IT Management Framework Using Design Science

As Information Technology continues to evolve in an accelerated fashion, it appears that the evolution of associated enterprise IT management practices and standards to harness IT’s ever growing potential for business value is lagging. This paper outlines a rationale for the creation of a new IT Management framework, motivated by the current lack of an existing integrating Chief Information Officer (CIO) framework which addresses all of the important processes the CIO needs to manage in order to improve capability and create more value from IT. The paper summarizes an inventory of existing IT frameworks, their utility and possible limitations. The authors discuss the development and adoption of an emerging new approach - the IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT-CMF). Research and development of the IT-CMF used a Design Science research approach coupled with open-innovation and engaged scholarship to develop an integrating value based framework for CIOs. The paper also discusses the research governance process used to oversee the engaged scholarship research.

Tackling Society's Grand Challenges with Design Science

Direct and indirect persuasions are well known routes for delivering persuasive messages. However, designing and building IS&T artifacts that deliver a persuasion message indirectly is not explored enough yet. This DSR study reports the design, building and evaluation of an indirect persuasion technology. We focus on energy conservation application. Four principles of direct and indirect persuasive design are presented. In addition, these principles are utilized to design and build two different IS&T artifacts: an e-fotonovela application as an indirect persuasion route and the text messaging system as a direct persuasion route. A field study was conducted to evaluate each route. The immediate route effectiveness was measured by a post-survey. Furthermore, results from a longitudinal survey (after one year) showed that indirect persuasion is better remembered than the direct persuasion. This is a significant finding with important implications.

New Horizons in Design Science: Broadening the Research Agenda

Nowadays, the information technology infrastructure within organizations is getting more and more heterogeneous. Recent trends such as bringyour-own-device or choose-your-own-device satisfy user requests for diverse devices they already know from their private life. On the other hand, following these trends results in an increased complexity of the organizations’ infrastructure and a substantial rise in required effort for supporting users. In order to address this increased support demand, the establishment of a user-to-user support culture seems promising. An established concept to provide user-to-user support is the concept of social questions and answers (SQA) sites. SQA sites have been shown to be successful in the private context. Users can seek and provide knowledge and thereby support each other. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an enterprise SQA platform aiming to support employees in solving problems with processes or technologies. Building on already derived design principles, we discuss the design and implementation of the SQA prototype within an existing Customer Relation Management platform. The resulting system was then evaluated within five focus group sessions with professionals from various industries. The evaluation results show the validity of our design principles and the usefulness of the implemented prototype.