People analytics (PA) systems can enable data-driven decision-making but also have been described as surveillance. Falling back on privacy-calculus theory, we are leveraging a scenario-based survey among German employees to explain employees’ perceptions of PA deployment in their workplace. We find that analytical capability levels of PA—descriptive, prescriptive, and predictive—do not affect participants’ perception of constructs in our theoretical model. Employees’ privacy concerns about PA systems are strong enough to erode organizational trust to a level where employees are likely to consider leaving an organization, and risk perceptions outweigh employees’ perceived usefulness of PA systems. With different analytical capabilities not impacting perceptions, we interpret these effects as related to the employee’s realization that, with PA, managers have access to more information on employee behavior than the employee can get on their own behavior. We find that PA thus has an effect that reverses the traditional asymmetry in which employees generally have more information on their own behavior than their managers. Notably, employees’ perceptions of PA and the organizations using it are less negative when they are not aware of the information asymmetry. Our study contributes by highlighting implications of PA information asymmetry, as the resulting (unfulfilled) intention to leave can have negative consequences for employees’ wellbeing and performance. Further, we contribute theoretically to discussions about transparency of algorithmic systems. In our study, transparency does allow employees to perform an informed privacy calculus, yet they are not given the option to act according to it.

Innovation projects rely increasingly on digital objects as a means of developing and sharing knowledge within an organisation. The maturation of a digital object is important because only those objects that mature lead to actual products. There is, however, a catch 22. For objects to mature, they have to be shared; conversely, only mature objects tend to be shared. This interplay between the functional and social dimensions of object maturation and its role in product development has not been researched.Building on the relational view of objects, we theorise product development as an ensemble of myopic maturation processes of objects that recursively move between formal and informal networks in the organisation using sharing systems such as Product Lifecycle Management (PLM). Investigating patterns, i.e., sequences of events, in these maturation processes is a way to understand how firms overcome this catch 22 situation.We study four product innovation projects in a home appliances company, tracing the maturation and sharing processes of three types of digital objects, namely marketing specifications, technical specifications and virtual prototypes. We find that sharing – maturation patterns are affected by interpersonal networks and by team sharing atmosphere. We also find that sharing and object maturation interactions are coordinated informally through interpersonal networks and formally through PLM systems and stage-gate mechanisms.

In the current context of scientific information overload, we propose a method combining bibliometrics and grounded theory to conduct literature reviews that have a descriptive, understanding or explanatory purpose. This overall inductive combined method, which we name BIBGT (BIB = Bibliometrics; GT = Grounded Theory) provides a powerful instrument for researchers. This instrument has been made more readily accessible by recent technological developments, and scientific advances in the field of bibliometrics. Notably, BIBGT helps grounded theorists identify colleges of thought of the field being reviewed, and representative texts to be reviewed in depth, in each college; it improves the trustworthiness and efficiency of reviews. BIBGT helps bibliometricians achieve in-depth analysis and interpretation of their findings. For all researchers, BIBGT can nurture the emergence of novel insights towards in-depth description, understanding or explanation of a core concept, theme, or research domain.We detail the four steps of this flexible method, providing essential elements and some guidelines as well as an illustration, to help other researchers who wish to apply it.

Using a sample of 848 workers in France, this article aims to explain problematic smartphone dependency, a behavior considered to have negative consequences for sufferers in the context of work. It examines whether and how addictive pleasure at work is related to problematic smartphone dependency (PSD). The authors propose a model with the originality of an exploratory measure of what is conceptualized as a mobile personal information system (PIS) development. The results obtained are paradoxical in that addictive pleasure at work is negatively correlated with PSD, although it positively contributes to the development of a PIS, the latter being itself positively correlated to gratifications. However, PIS development is not positively correlated to PSD. It is plausible that, although addictive pleasure at work drives the development of mobile PIS, it also provides an escape from compulsive smartphone usage, thus mitigating PSD. These findings also highlight the protecting role of mindfulness against PSD.

Contact tracing applications (CTAs) have been presented as important tools in the fight against the Covid-19 pandemic. In France, the government developed the ‘StopCovid' CTA which later became ‘TousAntiCovid.' This research aims at understanding the determinants of the use of this CTA and of the intention to integrate the health pass. To do that, this study focuses on the perceived value of its use based on the privacy calculus theory. A quantitative study was conducted using a sample of 779 French people. The results show that the use of the CTA and the intention to integrate the health pass are influenced, as hypothesized, by perceived value, distrust towards the government, and personal innovativeness. Perceived value is positively influenced by social and individual benefits, as well as social influence, and, to a lesser extent, negatively influenced by social risks but not by individual risks.

1. In their abstract, Gall and Pigni (2022) claim that the information systems and software engineering literature “fails to convey what DevOps is”, and that “the lack of homogeneous and clear conc...

Agile can be seen as an accelerator to develop software, yet it suffers from bottlenecks between development and operations. DevOps can overcome bottlenecks between agile development teams and operations, notably by providing continuous integration, delivery and deployment, thus improving end-to-end processes between development and operations functions. However, literature on DevOps effects is scant. Using job design characteristics theory and Herzberg’s job satisfaction theory, this paper investigates perceptions of job (dis)satisfaction, risks and work conditions among 59 employees working within 12 agile and DevOps teams in the same firm. Findings show that DevOps provides greater job satisfaction than agile alone. However, this case study also unveiled an effect of risk amplification with DevOps, and the greater need to orchestrate automation and sharing, contingent on work conditions. We theorise that orchestration of interactions between automation and sharing and related risks must be managed to improve job satisfaction when agile teams transition to DevOps.

Using a core idea of critical social theory, alienation, we interrogate the failure in the design and adoption of a Stop-COVID app in France. We analyse the political and scientific discourse, to develop an understanding of the conditions giving rise to this failure in this unprecedented moment. We argue that the digital-first solutionist approach taken by the government failed because, as in all Western countries, most stakeholders were alienated from the reality of the COVID-19 pandemic and lacked concrete knowledge of it. Furthermore, the French government and its COVID-19 council excluded relevant scientific experts in favour of quantitative modelling based on abstract partial knowledge. This along with coercion and lack of transparency about the app, reinforced alienation, undermined effectiveness in managing the crisis and resulted in the digital design failure. We suggest that such alienation will prevail in the COVID-19 era characterised by regimes of control, rampant abusive location tracking, and data collection, and where public officials are more concerned with managing effects than seeking causal explanations. The digital-first solutionist approach was adopted, not because digital solutions (to contact tracing) are superior to traditional ones, but by default due to alienation and lack of interdisciplinary cooperation.

Although prior research has frequently focused on aggregate IT capital, most firms invest in specific types with different goals. Each type of capital represents a distinct factor of a firm’s production function. Drawing on a theory-of-production framework, we disaggregate overall IT capital into specific types to examine their unique effects on firm performance over time. We categorize these IT-specific production factors into a firm’s installed personal computers for individual information access, servers for collective information access, storage capacity for information stock, and nodes for information flow. We investigate when and how each IT capital type contributes to firm performance by analyzing the 5-year panel data of 1,548 US firms. Our findings show that individual information access capital and collective information access capital have immediate effects on profitability through cost efficiency or sales growth. By contrast, information stock capital has a lagged effect on profitability. In addition, information stock capital complements individual information access capital in improving profitability, as well as contributing to sales growth and cost efficiency equivalent to firm size. These results extend the existing research on firm-level effects of IT investments by demonstrating that different IT capital effects have unique ways of affecting firm performance.

Being critical is a self-directed and self-correcting capacity to think otherwise about an issue in order to see the limitations of ones’ or others’ past or present theoretical or practical reasoni...

Most experienced authors know that getting papers through the revision process on the way to publication is challenging (Mingers, 2002), but fewer may have confronted the challenges of trying to si...

With this issue we conclude 2015 and are about to enter 2016, closing a quarter of a century, which has taken the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS) out of the 20th century, in which th...

In Orlando the EJIS Board decided to implement a policy change that I had proposed in my last editorial addressing the IS community (Rowe, 2012), asking authors (starting January 2013) to explicitl...

This paper, based on a cross-sectional empirical study of information system (IS) architectures within 143 small to medium enterprises (SMEs) in France, reports findings on how SMEs architect to achieve IS integration and interoperability. This research provides an empirically derived taxonomy of enterprise architectural variants of the types often described in the literature for large firms. This study finds indications that for SMEs the immediate goal of interoperability prevailed over fuller and more formal system integration. The most common means for approaching enterprise architecture and any form of integration is via the construction of software bridges and interfaces. Partially standardized architectures based on Enterprise Systems (ERP) are the next most common type. Hybrid architectures – mixed Enterprise Applications Integration and ERP – are the third most common. The contribution of this paper lies not in the identification of the three types but resides (1) in the description of their distribution in SMEs; (2) in the absence of other integration/interoperability types in this population; and (3) most importantly in the interpretation of the organizational and historical rationale explaining the emergence of these types in this organizational context.

In this editorial I would like to make a general and effective call for more diversity in information systems research genres. This is a general call that goes beyond a particular journal and attem...

Experts and business pundits forecasted drastic changes in Vietnam’s fledgling e-commerce when the Southeast Asian country became an official member of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2007. Over the past few years, as part of the Reform – called Doi moi – some Vietnamese enterprises have adopted e-commerce and already benefitted from it. In this research, the authors adapt the Technology-Organization-Environment (TOE) framework and test a model of e-commerce adoption including numerous internal and external factors identified in empirical studies. The final sample of 926 small and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam includes both adopter and non-adopter firms. The policy implications of this study on promoting e-commerce adoption by SMEs in transition economies, such as Vietnam, are discussed.

EJIS values diversity in all domains: topics, research methods, philosophy of science, origin of scholars and writing styles. This strategy aims at making wider connections and avoiding conformism ...

When Ray Paul and Richard Baskerville informed and encouraged me about the possibility to apply for this position of co-Editor at the European Journal of Information Systems, I felt tremendously ho...

This opinion paper gives Frantz Rowe's viewpoint, as the Editor in Chief of Systèmes d’Information et Management, on two of three main theme he had discussed at the 13th European Conference on Info...