Despite the pervasiveness and high costs of burnout in IT, our understanding of this problem remains limited. Review of IS research on job stress/burnout reveals that this body of work has relied heavily on general OB theory (parsimonious models generalizable across a variety of occupations and social contexts). More recently, scholars have argued for the addition of an occupation-specific approach to complement general OB theory, incorporating factors and concerns particular to a profession/work environment to increase explanatory power and relevance. The purpose of the exploratory study in this paper is to provide a foundation for such an occupation-specific research agenda on burnout in the IT profession. As an initial step, we employ social representations theory and methods to understand how IT professionals today make sense of and assign meaning to burnout in the context of their work. Transcripts from in-depth interviews of 20 IT professionals were content-analyzed and 22 key topics (concepts) were identified. Quantitative methods, including analysis of similarity, were used to create a social representations ‘map’ reflecting these professionals' views of burnout. The study contributes to the development of a renewed research agenda by pinpointing highly salient issues and specific work contexts warranting priority in future investigations.

Managing the development of software requirements can be a complex and difficult task. The environment is often chaotic. As analysts and customers leave the project, they are replaced by others who drive development in new directions. As a result, inconsistencies arise. Newer requirements introduce inconsistencies with older requirements. The introduction of such requirements inconsistencies may violate stated goals of development. In this article, techniques are presented that manage requirements document inconsistency by managing inconsistencies that arise between requirement development goals and requirements development enactment. A specialized development model, called a requirements dialog meta-model, is presented. This meta-model defines a conceptual framework for dialog goal definition, monitoring, and in the case of goal failure, dialog goal reestablishment. The requirements dialog meta-model is supported in an automated multiuser World Wide Web environment, called DEALSCRIBE. An exploratory case study of its use is reported. This research supports the conclusions that: an automated tool that supports the dialog meta-model can automate the monitoring and reestablishment of formal development goals; development goal monitoring can be used to determine statements of a development dialog that fail to satisfy development goals; and development goal monitoring can be used to manage inconsistencies in a developing requirements document. The application of DEALSCRIBE demonstrates that a dialog meta-model can enable a powerful environment for managing development and document inconsistencies.