William Kuechler

The emergence of design research in information systems in North America

Information Systems (IS) is a relatively new field of study that investigates information and communications technology (ICT) in organisational settings. Originally a branch of management science, IS became an independent field in the late 1960s. Only recently in North America has IS design research (ISDR) become a distinct line of inquiry within the field. This paper details the emergence of ISDR within North American IS research and outlines its current state. ISDR, as currently conceived in North America, is narrower in scope than design research in fields where it has a longer history. With reference to the literature, we expose directions of research highly germane to ISDR that are precluded by the current common understanding, which requires an artefact as the output of all design research efforts. We propose suggestions for relaxing this constraint on research output while still retaining a focus on research relevance and ICT artefacts.

Business applications of unstructured text

Crunching unstructured text rather than numbers is the basis for a new class of high-value applications ranging from regulatory compliance monitoring to business intelligence.

Universal Enterprise Integration: Challenges of and Approaches to Web-Enabled Virtual Organizations

We began the call for papers for this special issue by implying that the foremost challenges to web-enabled virtual organizations were due to the need to spontaneously link different organizations: entities with different worldviews, different cultures, different processes, different descriptions for their processes and different and even divergent goals. Further, we stressed two points. First, this is a previously defined problem, that of the “integration of semantically heterogeneous entities” and much research has been devoted to the problem across many fields over many years. Second, the WWW, with the potential for the linking of constantly evolving global mass of consumers and producers via a common technological infrastructure, has brought new salience and technical difficulties to these time honored (and only partially solved) problems. We find in the papers in this issue that the time-honored approaches to the problem (or conceptual lenses used to view the problem) continue. However the same technological infrastructure that accentuates the semantic heterogeneity issue yields the potential for new solutions. Though the traditional lenses are still in place, the distinctions along all dimensions have blurred. As a brief example, consider that at one time the dimension nexus of control would yield either a clean centralized translation or a many-to-many web model. Now, however, hybrid, models are technologically possible and pragmatically desirable. The classification of solutions is much fuzzier than 15 years ago when the same problems were addressed as “distributed artificial intelligence” or as “office information systems”. In this overview of the special issue we first discuss both the traditional approaches and the new and very interesting hybrid models seen in many of the papers in this issue through a framework with three dimensions. We then briefly review each of the special issue papers with reference to the framework in the hope of making the context, applicability and assumptions of each more quickly evident.

An expert system for dynamic re-coordination of distributed workflows

A persistent problem in the use of automated workflow management systems for inter-organizational workflows has been the need for manual redefinition of coordination points in the process models when either organization changes its processes. Coordinating communications between production-chain organizations are usually based on the notification of completion of tasks by one party which constitute pre-conditions for activity in another organization; autonomous task changes disrupt coordination. This paper describes a workflow re-coordination model and corresponding expert support system based on workflow goals which are more stable than the low-level machine, role and technique dependent activities which implement them. Following development of the model, we describe a set of three elementary disruption cases which span a large number of common workflow changes. Using these cases we demonstrate that common coordination disruption situations can be totally or partially repaired by use of an expert coordination subsystem.

The Aggregate General Design Cycle as a Perspective on the Evolution of Computing Communities of Interest

The manner in which the research and development efforts of different groups, each focused on a different aspect of a single complex computing artifact (e.g., database), evolve and mutually support the development of the artifact as a whole has fascinated researchers, economists, and philosophers of science alike. In this paper we propose the Aggregate General Design Cycle (AGDC), an aggregated form of the General Design Cycle (GDC), as a predictive model of the evolution over time of a computing research community of interest. We begin by demonstrating that the GDC accurately depicts the progress of any individual research effort. We then propose that multiple research and development efforts on a theme, even when conducted by nominally distinct groups (i.e. computer science cf. information systems; academics cf. practitioners) are predicted by the AGDC. We provide support for the proposal through a longitudinal meta-bibliographic study of database research.