Despite the substantial body of evidence detailing the multifaceted use of data within organizations, the conceptualizations of data and their value propositions remain disjointed and require updating. Information Systems scholars contend that the traditional ways of conceiving data now appear inadequate in framing this ever-evolving data-driven phenomenon. In this context, we argue for a reassessment of the fundamental assumptions about data in the field. This paper offers a comprehensive literature review, through which we conceptualize the role of data into four distinguishable types: data as a tool, as a commodity, as a practice, and as algorithmic intelligence. Each type possesses a set of identifiable characteristics, usage, and unique pathways of value creation. Together these elements form a typology, which provides an explanation for the intricate and complex nature of data use in organizations and the diverse sources of their value.

Format inconsistency is one of the most frequently appearing data quality issues encountered during data cleaning. Existing automated approaches commonly lack applicability and generalisability, while approaches with human inputs typically require specialized skills such as writing regular expressions. This paper proposes a novel hybrid human-machine system, namely “Data-Scanner-4C”, which leverages crowdsourcing to address syntactic format inconsistencies in a single column effectively. We first ask crowd workers to create examples from single-column data through “data selection” and “result validation” tasks. Then, we propose and use a novel rule-based learning algorithm to infer the regular expressions that propagate formats from created examples to the entire column. Our system integrates crowdsourcing and algorithmic format extraction techniques in a single workflow. Having human experts write regular expressions is no longer required, thereby reducing both the time as well as the opportunity for error. We conducted experiments through both synthetic and real-world datasets, and our results show how the proposed approach is applicable and effective across data types and formats.

Understanding how data workers interact with data, and various pieces of information related to data preparation, is key to designing systems that can better support them in exploring datasets. To date, however, there is a paucity of research studying the strategies adopted by data workers as they carry out data preparation activities. In this work, we investigate a specific data preparation activity, namely data quality discovery , and aim to (i) understand the behaviors of data workers in discovering data quality issues, (ii) explore what factors (e.g., prior experience) can affect their behaviors, as well as (iii) understand how these behavioral observations relate to their performance. To this end, we collect a multi-modal dataset through a data-driven experiment that relies on the use of eye-tracking technology with a purpose-designed platform built on top of iPython Notebook. The experiment results reveal that: (i) ‘copy–paste–modify’ is a typical strategy for writing code to complete tasks; (ii) proficiency in writing code has a significant impact on the quality of task performance, while perceived difficulty and efficacy can influence task completion patterns; and (iii) searching in external resources is a prevalent action that can be leveraged to achieve better performance. Furthermore, our experiment indicates that providing sample code within the system can help data workers get started with their task, and surfacing underlying data is an effective way to support exploration. By investigating data worker behaviors prior to each search action, we also find that the most common reasons that trigger external search actions are the need to seek assistance in writing or debugging code and to search for relevant code to reuse. Based on our experiment results, we showcase a systematic approach to select from the top best code snippets created by data workers and assemble them to achieve better performance than the best individual performer in the dataset. By doing so, our findings not only provide insights into patterns of interactions with various system components and information resources when performing data curation tasks, but also build effective and efficient data curation processes through data workers’ collective intelligence.

Governments are increasingly relying on algorithmic decision-making (ADM) to deliver public services. Recent information systems literature has raised concerns regarding ADM’s negative unintended consequences, such as widespread discrimination, which in extreme cases can be destructive to society. The extant empirical literature, however, has not sufficiently examined the destructive effects of governmental ADM. In this paper, we report on a case study of the Australian government’s “Robodebt” programme that was designed to automatically calculate and collect welfare overpayment debts from citizens but ended up causing severe distress to citizens and welfare agency staff. Employing perspectives from systems thinking and organisational limits, we develop a research model that explains how a socially destructive government ADM programme was initiated, sustained, and delegitimized. The model offers a set of generalisable mechanisms that can benefit investigations of ADM’s consequences. Our findings contribute to the literature of unintended consequences of ADM and demonstrate to practitioners the importance of setting up robust governance infrastructures for ADM programmes.

Abstract The appetite for effective use of information assets has been steadily rising in both public and private sector organisations. However, whether the information is used for social good or commercial gain, there is a growing recognition of the complex socio-technical challenges associated with balancing the diverse demands of regulatory compliance and data privacy, social expectations and ethical use, business process agility and value creation, and scarcity of data science talent. In this vision paper, we present a series of case studies that highlight these interconnected challenges, across a range of application areas. We use the insights from the case studies to introduce Information Resilience, as a scaffold within which the competing requirements of responsible and agile approaches to information use can be positioned. The aim of this paper is to develop and present a manifesto for Information Resilience that can serve as a reference for future research and development in relevant areas of responsible data management.

Understanding how data workers interact with data and various pieces of information (e.g., code snippet examples) is key to design systems that can better support them in exploring a given dataset. To date, however, there is a paucity of research studying information seeking patterns and the strategies adopted by data workers as they carry out data curation activities. In this work, we aim at understanding the behaviors of data workers in discovering data quality issues, and how these behavioral observations relate to their performance. Specifically, we investigate how data workers use information resources and tools to support their task completion. To this end, we collect a multi-modal dataset through a data-driven experiment that relies on the use of eye-tracking technology with a purpose-designed platform built on top of iPython Notebook. The collected data reveals that: (i) searching in external resources is a prevalent action that can be leveraged to achieve better performance; (ii) 'copy-paste-modify' is a typical strategy for writing code to complete tasks; (iii) providing sample code within the system could help data workers to get started with their task; and (iv) surfacing underlying data is an effective way to support exploration. By investigating the behaviors prior to each search action, we also find that the most common reasons that trigger external search actions are the need to seek assistance in writing or debugging code and to search for relevant code to reuse. Our findings provide insights into patterns of interactions with various system components and information resources to perform data curation tasks. This bears implications on the design of domain-specific IR systems for data workers like code-base search.

Business process models are used heavily in practice as a basis for process improvement, systems development, and understanding business operations. While prior research has identified a clear need for integrating business rules into graphical business process models, there is little guidance on the circumstances under which business rules should be integrated into business process models. Unnecessary integration may hamper business rule reuse, increase business process model complexity, and lead to difficulties with business rule modification, to name a few. Accordingly, it is important to understand when such integration is appropriate. The aim of this article is to address this need for guidance on when business rules should be integrated in process models, and when they should remain separate. To this end, we explain 12 factors posited to influence such modeling decisions, conduct an empirical study to identify their importance, and develop empirically based modeling guidelines that inform business rule modeling decisions.

Unstructured text data, such as emails, blogs, contracts, academic publications, organizational documents, transcribed interviews, and even tweets, are important sources of data in Information Systems research. Various forms of qualitative analysis of the content of these data exist and have revealed important insights. Yet, to date, these analyses have been hampered by limitations of human coding of large data sets, and by bias due to human interpretation. In this paper, we compare and combine two quantitative analysis techniques to demonstrate the capabilities of computational analysis for content analysis of unstructured text. Specifically, we seek to demonstrate how two quantitative analytic methods, viz., Latent Semantic Analysis and data mining, can aid researchers in revealing core content topic areas in large (or small) data sets, and in visualizing how these concepts evolve, migrate, converge or diverge over time. We exemplify the complementary application of these techniques through an examination of a 25-year sample of abstracts from selected journals in Information Systems, Management, and Accounting disciplines. Through this work, we explore the capabilities of two computational techniques, and show how these techniques can be used to gather insights from a large corpus of unstructured text.

Business process modeling is widely regarded as one of the most popular forms of conceptual modeling. However, little is known about the capabilities and deficiencies of process modeling grammars and how existing deficiencies impact actual process modeling practice. This paper is a first contribution towards a theory-driven, exploratory empirical investigation of the ontological deficiencies of process modeling with the industry standard Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN). We perform an analysis of BPMN using a theory of ontological expressiveness. Through a series of semi-structured interviews with BPMN adopters we explore empirically the actual use of this grammar. Nine ontological deficiencies related to the practice of modeling with BPMN are identified, for example, the capture of business rules and the specification of process decompositions. We also uncover five contextual factors that impact on the use of process modeling grammars, such as tool support and modeling conventions. We discuss implications for research and practice, highlighting the need for consideration of representational issues and contextual factors in decisions relating to BPMN adoption in organizations.

Enterprise systems interoperability (ESI) is an important topic for business currently. This situation is evidenced, at least in part, by the number and extent of potential candidate protocols for such process interoperation, viz., ebXML, BPML, BPEL, and WSCI. Wide-ranging support for each of these candidate standards already exists. However, despite broad acceptance, a sound theoretical evaluation of these approaches has not yet been provided. We use the Bunge-Wand-Weber (BWW) models, in particular, the representation model, to provide the basis for such a theoretical evaluation. We, and other researchers, have shown the usefulness of the representation model for analyzing, evaluating, and engineering techniques in the areas of traditional and structured systems analysis, object-oriented modeling, and process modeling. In this work, we address the question, what are the potential semantic weaknesses of using ebXML alone for process interoperation between enterprise systems? We find that users lack important implementation information because of representational deficiencies; due to ontological redundancy, the complexity of the specification is unnecessarily increased; and, users of the specification have to bring in extra-model knowledge to understand constructs in the specification due to instances of ontological excess.