An increasing presence of practitioners with doctoral degrees in Information Systems and related disciplines holds promise to advance Information Systems research. The prospect is to gain more knowledge from the practical experience of developing, using, and managing information systems in context. To scientifically capitalise on this opportunity, this EJIS special issue introduces the research genre of “Information Systems Clinical Research”. The genre presents knowledge generated from practitioner-researcher interventions to achieve desired outcomes in information systems development, use, and management practice contexts. In this editorial, we introduce and conceptualise the genre; we present a research framework that defines its four key elements; and we discuss how to address its key challenges in research projects. As a result, we derive ten criteria for rigorous Information Systems Clinical Research and provide examples on how the articles published in the special issue have addressed these criteria. We conclude with a call to further advance clinical research as an important part of the Information Systems discipline.

To advance knowledge about evolution of practices within a software organisation, we offer a retrospective reflection based on several years of research into a software unit at Ericsson AB. Covering 16 years of evolution, we developed multiple publications from continuously expanding sources of software technology implementation data. While these publications report from specific junctures of software practice evolution at the unit, our retrospective reflection allows us to consider the impacts of the unit’s investments into two technology paradigms over the sixteen-year period: first into CMM-RUP with a focus on discipline and structured practices and years later into Agile-Lean with a focus on flexibility and responsive practices. Hence, we adopt retrospective reflection to investigate how imprints from the two paradigms, despite considerable timespan between the related technology implementations, eventually complemented each other in the unit’s software practices. Because one paradigm focuses on discipline and structured practices and the other on flexibility and responsive practices, our retrospective reflections consider how the two paradigms together impacted the software unit’s ambidextrous capability. As a result, we advance the idea that as software organisations over time invest in complementary technology paradigms they leave important technology traces with sustainable impacts on their software practices.

In this special issue, we advocate a critical stance toward the presentational conventions that we – as authors, reviewers, and editors – accept as the academic article genre. We seek to highlight and illustrate the generative capacity and the significant role of genres in the production of knowledge. Furthermore, we wish to encourage Information Systems (IS) scholars to leverage a wider array of alternative genres to present their research in order to develop new insights on subject matters of interest to the IS discipline, as well as expand on how contemporary and emergent phenomena of interest are conceived and studied. Adopting a broad view of alternative genres, we solicited articles that apply unconventional presentational modalities to expand or challenge the prevailing modus operandi of communicating IS scholarship and practice. Six articles survived a rather lengthy and challenging review process. We briefly discuss the nature of the academic article genre and the role of alternative ways of writing. We also introduce the six exemplars of alternative genres in the special issue, namely conversation, French new novel, meditation, memoir, allegory, and crowdsourced research. We highlight key insights and contemplate their implications for current and future IS research.

The literature has traditionally focused on how decision makers choose among alternatives based on rational behaviors, organizational politics, and organized anarchies. However, there is little research on decision making as a creative process where managers discover and evaluate alternatives. We address this gap by proposing a design approach to transform decisions in organizations. The approach views decision making as a creative and adaptive process in which managers recursively collect and interpret heterogeneous evidence, explore and test different ideas, and discover and evaluate alternatives. While the approach is rooted in the know-how of the involved stakeholders, its underpinning design attitude invites managers to better understand possible alternatives based on analyses of structured as well as unstructured data. To assess its utility, we applied the approach to IT investment evaluations through a Collaborative Practice Research project involving Swedish public organizations. Building on the project findings, we discuss the proposed approach and spell out its implications for transforming decision making in organizations.

Information Systems (IS) is a profession-based discipline that constantly seeks new ways to bridge the practice-research gap. These efforts include enacting scholar-practitioner roles across institutional boundaries, developing and disseminating new knowledge, and engaging professionally qualified doctoral students. Against this backdrop, we provide a confessional account of 10 years of Collaborative Practice Research (CPR) between Anna, an IS practitioner, and Lars, an IS researcher. The collaboration was initiated when Anna, while working full-time, engaged as doctoral student with Lars as supervisor. Combining social process modeling with theories of change and learning, we show how Anna and Lars responded to the experienced challenges and opportunities, how Anna's action strategies developed as she grew into becoming a practitioner-researcher, how the collaboration impacted the practice context, and, how the research resulted in traditional publication outcomes. On the basis of these analyses, we discuss how to engage professionally qualified doctoral students within the IS discipline. In addition, we offer lessons on how CPR can help bridge the practice-research gap as a path towards becoming a practitioner-researcher.

In the course of conducting studies in information systems (IS), researchers must oftentimes investigate, design, and develop sound methods or approaches to best conduct their research. While new t...

Vendors of IT-enabled services must address equivocal and changing requirements from diverse customers while simultaneously making a profit. However, our knowledge of how these organizations can achieve the necessary scalability is limited. Against this backdrop, we leverage organizational sensemaking to investigate how a large vendor attempted to create a scalable service infrastructure through three sequential strategies. This in-depth case study reveals key factors that challenged the efficacy of each strategy. First, addressing equivocality through structural separation exacerbated the organization’s challenges because of misaligned collective identities between business units. Second, reducing equivocality through market segmentation proved to be inadequate because individual-level cognitive constraints shaped pre-packaged solutions that lacked functionality. Third, responding to equivocality through service modularization was challenged due to lack of social interaction about standardization of component interfaces, system and process redundancies, and inflexible process architectures. We offer a detailed analysis of these strategies and discuss implications in relation to theory and practice.

Software organizations increasingly face contradictory strategic choices as they develop customized and packaged solutions for the market. They need to improve efficiency of development processes while at the same time adapting to emerging customer needs; they need to exploit software products in relation to existing customers while simultaneously exploring new technology and market opportunities; and, they need to consider both incremental and radical innovations. While the integration of such opposing strategies requires software organizations to become ambidextrous, there is limited actionable advice on how managers can develop such capability. Against this backdrop, we report from a two-year action research study into a small software firm, TelSoft. Based on Pettigrew's contextualist inquiry, we develop a framework that integrates existing theory on contextual ambidexterity with a generic process for improving software organizations, and we apply this framework to analyze how TelSoft improved its coordination of products, projects, and innovation efforts. As a result, we offer principles for how software managers can build ambidextrous capability to improve firm-level coordination.

Despite its information-intensive nature and considerable investments, healthcare continues to lag behind other industries in effectively exploiting information technology (IT). This paradox suggests that the healthcare industry presents particular challenges for successful implementation of information systems. As a result, there is an increasing interest in research into how information systems implementation efforts are shaped in interaction with the healthcare context. This paper contributes to this emerging body of knowledge by applying Actor-Network Theory (ANT) to explore the implementation of a radiology network system in a Swedish hospital. The analysis of the process reveals how complex contextual dynamics had disruptive effects. First, we identified important dynamics related to implementation content; these were mainly expressed as tensions between the radiology network system and medical work practices. Second, we found important dynamics related to implementation context; these were mainly expressed as tensions between shifting networks of actors within the implementation project and the broader institutional setting. Seeking to understand contextual dynamics during healthcare information systems implementation, we use events to focus, structure, and present the ANT analysis. This event-based approach furthers our understanding of how researchers can apply ANT to study IT-based change in general.

While post mortem evaluation (PME) has long been advocated as a means of improving development practices by learning from IT project failures, few organizations conduct PMEs. The purpose of the study is to explain this discrepancy between theory and practice. This paper integrates findings from a Delphi study of what experienced practitioners perceive as the most important barriers to conducting PMEs with insights from organizational learning theory. The results suggest that there are critical tensions between development practices and learning contexts in many organizations, and adopting PMEs in these cases is likely to reinforce organizational learning dysfunctions rather than improve current development practices. Based on these findings, we argue that the PME literature has underestimated the limits to learning in most IT organizations and we propose to explore paradoxical thinking to help researchers frame continued inquiry into PME and to help managers overcome learning dysfunctions as they push for more widespread use of PMEs.

The information-intensive nature of the healthcare industry and the potential of information technology (IT) to reduce costs and improve quality of services have increased the focus on IT-based innovations. Yet, our ability to understand and manage how IT-based innovations unfold in the context of healthcare is still limited. In this paper, we apply Van de Ven's industry infrastructure framework to investigate a telehealth innovation that provides remote medical assistance to stroke patients in a network of collaborating hospitals. The resulting multi-level analysis contributes to understanding the innovation by revealing a highly complex process of interactions between key stakeholders and healthcare industry infrastructure. Despite the innovation's strong potential, the process is mainly push-driven with minimal pull from potential adopters. Moreover, the push is created by a small group of medical innovators with limited technological and financial resources and little infrastructural support. The study contributes with contextual insights into the telehealth innovation, suggesting complementary explanations of why the healthcare industry despite considerable investments continues to lag behind other industries in adoption of IT-based innovations. The study also adapts Van de Ven's framework by applying it to a single case of innovation rather than as originally conceived to several instances of an innovation within an industry. The analysis shows how some of the components of the framework were adapted to and interpreted in the context of telehealth innovations.

While agility has recently attracted considerable attention in studies of systems development and management of information technology (IT), there is limited recognition within the information syst...

South Africa is undergoing a number of changes, which has an effect on every aspect of society from the workplace to everyday life. South Africans need to reflect on this situation and determine how to proceed. The purpose of this article is to consider the development and implementation of information technology, one particular problem area, in this broader context. The article draws an analogy between the trade unionist systems development tradition in Scandinavia and the possible application it might have in South Africa. The article describes the situation in South Africa, presents the trade unionist approach to systems development, and describes the underlying principles that have been identified by Scandinavian researchers. It then evaluates these principles from a South African perspective and discusses the possible uses they might have in the South African situation.