This study describes the design and evaluation journey for a mental health education app for individuals experiencing paternal postpartum depression (PPD), employing the double diamond model of design thinking and design science research. We explore the problem space with qualitative analysis of primary and secondary data; and design and evaluate two versions of an artifact – one with a traditional interface and the other incorporating gamification elements. Our findings highlight unique challenges faced by fathers with PPD and an assessment of utility and usability of both prototypes. This work makes three key contributions: (1) a tentative “theory of the problem” of paternal PPD as a specific mental health concern, (2) a comparative assessment of traditional and gamified app designs for educating about paternal PPD, and (3) recommendations for designing engaging and effective mental health educational tools. The educational app has practical implications for providing personalized content about paternal PPD with/without gamification.

This essay investigates the ontology question in design science research. Writings on the philosophy of science do not fully address this concern for design science research because of the traditional emphasis on discovering truthful laws. In contrast, design science research dares to create novel IT artifacts with a view to realizing alternative futures. Taking this into account, the author articulates fundamental world-views for the canonical form of design science research, which involves instantiation of the outcomes as a software artifact. These world-views include an ontological basis and an epistemological stance that are the foundation of design science research practice. The author’s derivation of these world-views reflects shifts in the researcher’s stance through the research process, and the interconnectedness of the problem and the artifact. The author discusses implications of these proposed world-views including comparisons against other research traditions, greater clarity for design research practice, and the potential for extending the analysis to other strands of design science research.

Traditionally, IT projects have been conceptualized as efforts that must be managed and tracked to ensure that requirements are met and resource constraints are respected. We contend that for large IT projects, this conceptualization may be flawed because they occasion broad changes to the IT and work practice environment and can endanger the very stakeholder networks that provide the backdrop for the work practice. We suggest viewing such large projects as interventions in a digital ecosystem. This paper investigates a specific concern following this perspective: the incidence of risks in such large projects. We perform a meta-analysis to identify categories of risks in IT projects and compare these against disturbances to an ecosystem. Our analysis shows that proactive preservation or controlled evolution of the ecosystem is likely to provide a more useful conceptualization of IT project risks.

Business processes are increasingly distributed and open, making them prone to failure. Monitoring is, therefore, an important concern not only for the processes themselves but also for the services that comprise these processes. We present a framework for multilevel monitoring of these service systems. It formalizes interaction protocols, policies, and commitments that account for standard and extended effects following the language-action perspective, and allows specification of goals and monitors at varied abstraction levels. We demonstrate how the framework can be implemented and evaluate it with multiple scenarios that include specifying and monitoring open-service policy commitments.

Large IT projects, such as the US Government's Internal Revenue Service Business Modernization Effort, can take a decade or more and consume billions of dollars. Traditional approaches to the study of such projects emphasize concerns such as monitoring requirements and tracking progress. We propose an alternative approach guided by a digital ecosystems view instead of a hierarchical, decision-oriented view. We argue that a digital ecosystem perspective is more suited to understand how such projects evolve and cause changes in the underlying digital ecosystem characterized by not only the IT infrastructure but also the transactional relationships among stakeholders. We illustrate our arguments by drawing on an archaeological case study of the IRS effort, and discuss implications of the digital ecosystem perspective for the study of large IT projects.

This study questions the traditional view of software architecture as a specification that needs only be understood by software architects and engineers. Based on an intensive study of three software-producing organizations, we identify multiple metaphors (‘Blueprint,’ ‘Literature,’ ‘Language’ and ‘Decision’) that stakeholders use to understand the term software architecture, which in turn, allows them to effectively participate in its creation and use. Our results point to new research directions that may better encompass a broader view of software architecture.

The design of large and complex enterprise integration solutions is a difficult task. It can require solutions that are unique because of constraints from the current set of legacy applications. Design knowledge for enterprise integration solutions is, therefore, difficult to articulate and reuse. In particular, the nature and form of knowledge for conceptual design of integration solutions is difficult to pin down. In this paper, we investigate whether design knowledge for enterprise integration in the form of patterns can be reused to develop systems integration solutions, and whether such reuse leads to more effective design outcomes. The research follows design science guidelines in which we describe a research artifact, and evaluate it to assess whether it meets the intended goals. The results indicate that approaches to facilitate reuse of conceptual design knowledge are feasible in the domain of enterprise integration, and that such reuse does, in fact, lead to more effective design solutions.

This article presents a study identifying benefits and challenges of a novel hospital-to-hospital information technology (IT) outsourcing partnership (HHP). The partnership is an innovative response to the problem that many smaller, rural hospitals face: to modernize their IT infrastructure in spite of a severe shortage of resources. The investigators studied three rural hospitals that outsourced their IT infrastructure, through an HHP, to a larger, more technologically advanced hospital in the region. The study design was based on purposive sampling and interviews of senior managers from the four hospitals. The results highlight the HHP's benefits and challenges from both the rural hospitals' and vendor hospital's perspectives. The HHP was considered a success: a key outcome was that it has improved the rural hospitals' IT infrastructure at an affordable cost. The investigators discuss key elements for creating a successful HHP and offer preliminary answers to the question of what it takes for an HHP to be successful.

We report on the use of scenario-based methods for evaluating collaborative systems. We describe the method, the case study where it was applied, and provide results of its efficacy in the field. The results suggest that scenario-based evaluation is effective in helping to focus evaluation efforts and in identifying the range of technical, human, organizational and other contextual factors that impact system success. The method also helps identify specific actions, for example, prescriptions for design to enhance system effectiveness. However, we found the method somewhat less useful for identifying the measurable benefits gained from a CSCW implementation, which was one of our primary goals. We discuss challenges faced applying the technique, suggest recommendations for future research, and point to implications for practice.

Currently Web services composition problems are addressed using AI planning techniques. The team-based approach, with emphases on the sharing of mental models and proactive collaboration, provides an alternative to current static approaches to Web service composition. The approach provides clear advantages for proactive handling of failures that may be encountered during execution of a complex Web service. The paper proposes a generic framework for dynamic Web-service composition, and extends the CAST architecture to realize the framework.

Conceptual business models and conceptual models of information systems represent widely different perspectives, which are difficult to integrate due to differences in structure and meaning that exist across these two viewpoints. Such problems in integration can be difficult for an information architect to predict. Yet, the interoperability between the two is essential to ensure efficacy of the information system that will be built. Our research provides an approach to integrate a specific business modeling vehicle, based on workflows, against a specific IS implementation vehicle, based on object-oriented programming. The approach takes into account semantic constraints to ensure that the two perspectives can be integrated, thus moving the integration beyond the level of structures. Using a deductive argument form, we apply semantic constraints to the core concepts of in workflow management, mapped onto those in object-oriented programming languages. The mapping builds on ontological models of both domains-treating the concepts in each as things in the world – and integrates both worlds into a single ontology enriched with semantic constraints. The key innovation of this work, therefore, lies in reasoning about the semantics of conceptual mappings by standard logical means. The results demonstrate a practical approach to map semantic constraints across domains with example derivations. The research, thus, extends existing work closer towards practical application in several contexts including projects involving embedded workflow. The approach has been successfully used in several large real-world projects to reduce design efforts by increasing the consistency, simplifying the overall structure, and making the enterprise architecture more concrete.

Object-orientation and distributed systems are quickly becoming norms for new system development, generating renewed interest in distribution schemes traditionally directed at relational databases. Though a number of facilitating technologies, such as EJB, COM, or CORBA, are available, pragmatic, and rigorous approaches for effective distribution are still lacking. In this paper, we develop an approach for deriving object distribution models by exploiting design information. The approach exploits information realistically available during the design stage, without requiring guesstimates of operational parameters. It spans multiple layers, mappings across which may be adjusted depending upon changes in assumptions and operational conditions to create specific models. We demonstrate the approach by operationalizing it to create a model for object distribution in closely coupled client/server configurations. The detailed model we demonstrate, therefore, represents one specific instantiation of our approach. The model is accompanied by a decision support procedure that assists the designer in the search for a satisficing solution in the resulting combinatorial multiple criteria problem. We briefly describe a research prototype that served as proof-of-concept and demonstrate usefulness based on an analysis of results obtained for distribution of a real-world object-oriented application.