Using Perspective-Taking to De-escalate Launch Date Commitment for Products with Known Software Defects

Competence transfer in virtual realities: Can virtual reality bring products and services together?

BACKGROUND: The virtual and real worlds of work are increasingly merging through digital transformation. This also applies to products and services. Virtual Reality (VR) with all its learning opportunities is a promising technology to improve workflows and enable transparency between different departments and organizations. This transparency is particularly important when it comes to preventing potentially dangerous work situations. OBJECTIVE: We investigate weaknesses in competence transfer processes between computer-aided designers and service employees connected in a hybrid value chain. On the one hand, designers receive only little feedback, hence are missing necessary evaluation to adjust their designs to empirical specifications. On the other hand, service employees, therefore, work with sometimes impractical machine designs which makes their work on-site unergonomic, dangerous, and more difficult. METHODS: We present a design science-driven, empirical approach to provide enhanced competence transfer with the help of VR. Thereby, we evaluate a self-developed VR demonstrator with an iterative approach consisting of 60 qualitative interviews. RESULTS: The developed VR demonstrator supports interorganizational sharing of (tacit) knowledge by enabling designers to take the service perspective and ensuring collaboration across organizational boundaries. By intentionally using VR technology as an interruption to the work, the design can be viewed from a service perspective and evaluated for occupational safety and health issues. CONCLUSIONS: The work process improvements achieved by the VR demonstrator enable early consideration of design issues that are particularly relevant to safety, thus ensuring greater occupational safety and health protection in the processes for service employees.

Time is of the essence: a systematic literature review of temporality in information systems development research

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to identify, classify and analyse temporality in information systems development (ISD) literature.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors address the temporality and ISD research gap by using a framework – which classifies time into three categories: conceptions of time, mapping activities to time and actors relating to time. The authors conduct a systematic literature review which investigates time in ISD within the Senior Scholars' Basket, Information Technology & People (IT&P), and top two information systems conferences over the past 20 years. The search strategy resulted in 9,850 studies of which 47 were identified as primary papers.

Findings

The results reveal that ISD research is ill equipped for contemporary thinking around time. This systematic literature review (SLR) contributes to ISD by finding the following gaps in the literature: (1) clock time is dominant and all other types of time are under-researched; (2) contributions to mapping activities to time is lacking and existing studies focus on single ISD projects rather multiple complex ISD projects; (3) research on actors relating to time is lacking; (4) existing ISD studies which contribute to temporal characteristics are fragmented and lack integration with other categories of time and (5) ISD methodology papers lack contributions to temporal characteristics and fail to acknowledge and contribute to time as a multifaceted interrelated concept.

Originality/value

This work has developed the first SLR on temporality in ISD. This study provides a starting point for ISD researchers and ISD practitioners to test commonly held temporal assumptions of ISD researchers and practitioners.

Organizing for permanent beta: performance measurement before vs performance monitoring after release of digital services

Purpose

Due to the complexity of digital services, companies are increasingly forced to offer their services “in permanent beta”, requiring continuous fine-tuning and updating. Complexity makes it extremely difficult to predict when and where the next service disruption will occur. The authors examine what this means for performance measurement in digital service supply chains.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors use a mixed-method research design that combines a longitudinal case study of a European digital TV service provider and a system dynamics simulation analysis of that service provider's digital service supply chain.

Findings

With increased levels of complexity, traditional performance measurement methods, focused on detection of software bugs before release, become fragile or futile. The authors find that monitoring the performance of the service after release, with fast mitigation when service incidents are discovered, appears to be superior. This involves organizational change when traditional methods, like quality assurance, become less important.

Research limitations/implications

The performance of digital services needs to be monitored by combining automated data collection about the status of the service with data interpretation using human expertise. Investing in human expertise is equally important as investing in automated processes.

Originality/value

The authors draw on unique empirical data collected from a digital service provider's struggle with performance measurement of its service over a period of nine years. The authors use simulations to show the impact of complexity on staff allocation.

Behavioral Economics in Information Systems Research: Critical Analysis and Research Strategies

Theories of decision-making have long been important foundations for information systems (IS) research and much of IS is concerned with information processing for decision making. The discipline of behavioral economics (BE) provides the dominant contemporary approach for understanding human decision-making. Therefore, it is logical that IS research that involves decision making should consider BE as foundation or reference theory. Surprisingly, and despite calls for greater use of BE in IS research, it seems that IS has been slow to adopt contemporary BE as reference theory. This paper reports a critical analysis of BE in all fields of IS based on an intensive investigation of quality IS research using bibliometric content analysis. The analysis shows that IS researchers have a general understanding of BE, but their use of the theories has an ad hoc feel where only a narrow range of BE concepts and theories tend to form the foundation of IS research. The factors constraining the adoption of BE theories in IS are discussed and strategies for the use of this influential foundation theory are proposed. Guidance is provided on how BE could be used in various aspects of IS. The paper concludes with the view that BE reference theory has the potential to transform significant areas of IS research.