Axiomatic Theories and Improving the Relevance of Information Systems Research

Axiomatic Theories and Improving the Relevance of Information Systems Research This paper examines the fact that a significant number of empirical information systems (IS) studies engage in confirmative testing of self-evident axiomatic theories without yielding highly relevant knowledge for the IS community. The authors conduct both a horizontal analysis of 72 representative IS theories and an in-depth vertical analysis of 3 well-known theories (i.e., technology acceptance model, diffusion of innovation theory, and institutional theory) in order to measure how pervasive such testing of axiomatic theories is. The authors discovered that more than 60% of 666 hypotheses from the horizontal analysis could be regarded as axiomatic theory elements. In the vertical analysis, 68.1% of 1,301 hypotheses from 148 articles were axiomatic. Based on these findings, the authors propose four complementary IS research approaches: (1) identifying disconfirming boundary conditions, (2) measuring the relative importance of axiomatic causal factors, (3) measuring the stage of progression toward visionary goals when the nature of the axiomatic theory can be extended to future visions, and (4) engaging in the conceptual design of visionary axiomatic goals. They argue that these complementary IS research approaches can enhance the relevance of IS research outcomes without sacrificing methodological rigor.

A qualitative longitudinal study of the first UK Dual Diagnosis Anonymous (DDA), an integrated peer-support programme for concurrent disorders

Purpose

Dual Diagnosis Anonymous (DDA) is a peer-led programme developed in the USA, which aims to address mental and addictive disorders in an integrated manner. This study is part of a mixed-methods evaluation of the first DDA pilot in the UK, and the purpose of this study is to explore the impact and mechanism of change of the programme through the perspective of DDA attendees, facilitators and the funding commissioners.

Design/methodology/approach

Six DDA members were interviewed three times over a period of 12 months, the facilitators were interviewed twice and the commissioner was interviewed once. The qualitative longitudinal data were analysed using a trajectory thematic analysis.

Findings

DDA attendance was perceived to have had a positive impact on five main areas: acceptance of self, of others and from others; social functioning; self-development; recovery progression; and feeling of hope. The possibility of addressing both mental health and addiction at the same time was a key factor in the recovery process. The facilitators observed that DDA had contributed to integrate members into employment and education, while the commissioner stressed the importance of joint commissioning and sustainability.

Originality/value

The longitudinal approach provided a unique insight into the recovery process of DDA members. Being able to address the mental health as well as the substance use problems was considered to be a fundamental strength of DDA in comparison to the single purpose peer-support fellowships.

The Association Between Willingness of Frontline Care Providers' to Adaptively Use Telehealth Technology and Virtual Service Performance in Provider-to-Provider Communication: Quantitative Study

Background

Telehealth technology can create a disruptive communication environment for frontline care providers who mediate virtual communication with specialists in electronic consultations. As providers are dealing with various technology features when communicating with specialists, their flexible attitude and behaviors to use various telehealth-related technology features can change the outcome of virtual care service.

Objective

The objective of this study is to examine frontline care providers’ technology adaptation behaviors in the electronic consultation context. From the perspective of frontline care providers, we reapply and retest a theoretical model, reflecting a mechanism through which technology users’ personal characteristics and technology adaptation behavior enhance virtual service performance, which is an important performance enabler in this online meeting context. In provider-to-provider communication, particularly, we explore the association among providers’ information technology (IT)–related personal characteristics, adaptive telehealth technology use, and virtual service performance.

Methods

An online survey was administered to collect individual providers’ personal traits, IT adaptation, and perception on virtual service performance. Partial least squares-structural equation modeling was used to estimate our predictive model of personal traits—IT adaptation, such as exploitative use (use the telehealth technology in a standard way), and exploratory use (use the telehealth technology as innovative way)—and virtual service performance.

Results

We collected 147 responses from graduate nursing students who were training to be nurse practitioners in their master’s program, resulting in 121 valid responses from the cross-section online survey. Our theoretical model explained 60.0% of the variance in exploitative use of telehealth technology, 44% of the variance in exploratory use of telehealth technology, and 66% of the variance in virtual service performance. We found that exploitative IT use is an important driver to increase virtual service performance (β=0.762, P<.001), and personal characteristics such as habit are positively associated with both exploitative (β=0.293, P=.008) and exploratory use behaviors (β=0.414, P=.006), while computer self-efficacy is positively associated with exploitative use of telehealth technology (β=0.311, P=.047).

Conclusions

This study discusses the unique role of frontline care providers in a virtual care service context and highlights the importance of their telehealth adaptation behavior in provider-to-provider communication. We showed that providers perceive that telehealth technologies should function as intended, otherwise it may create frustration or avoidance of the telehealth technology. Moreover, providers’ habitual use of various technologies in daily lives also motivates them to adaptively use telehealth technology for improving virtual care service. Understanding providers’ technology habit and adaptation can inform health care policy and further provide a better view of the design of telehealth technology for online communication.

Decision Support in Participatory Contexts

Organizing the participation of multiple stakeholders in decision processes is now a widespread request with a visible consequence being the expansion of the analyst's role from problem solver to facilitator of stakeholder interactions. Within this evolutionary movement, this article claims that an analyst creates the organisation through which the set of stakeholders involved in the decision process interact. This article also claims that the ability of this organisation to fit contextual requirements is of utmost importance for the success of an analyst's intervention. This article is organised to support these two claims. Firstly, it describes the terms of organisational design and the mechanisms through which it may influence the decision processes. Secondly, the authors review how these aspects are already discussed within OR/MS literature so as to highlight current limitations and future possibilities for greater investigation of the place and role of organizational design in OR/MS research and practice.

Does IS0 9001 quality management system support product innovation? An analysis from the sociotechnical systems theory

Purpose

Building on the sociotechnical systems theory (STS), the purpose of this paper is to investigate the direct impacts of the social and technical QMs (ISO 9001) practices on both incremental and radical product innovation and the direct relationships relaying QMs (ISO 9001) as a sociotechnical system with incremental and radical product innovation.

Design/methodology/approach

The paper opted for a survey instrument to collect quantitative data from 82 Moroccan certified ISO 9001 firm. A partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the research hypotheses.

Findings

Results show that the social and technical QMs (ISO 9001) practices do not have a significant relationship with incremental and radical product innovation when they are taken in isolation. However, when ranged together to constitute a whole sociotechnical system of QMs (ISO 9001), QMs (ISO 9001) prove to have a strong positive and significant impact on incremental product innovation and a weak positive and significant impact on radical product innovation.

Research limitations/implications

Because of the small sample size that might weaken the significance of the results and the use of cross-sectional data, this research may lack a large statistical generalizability vis-à-vis the analytical generalization.

Practical implications

The results provide useful implications for managers, suggesting that in order to develop their product innovation, they must ensure that both QMs (ISO 9001) social and technical practices achieve a high level of integration without allowing some quality practices to take over.

Originality/value

Based on the STS, this study is the first to focus primarily on the role of the multi-dimensional structure of QMs (ISO 9001), i.e. social and technical practices, in incremental and radical product innovation.

Beyond Brainstorming: Exploring Convergence in Teams

Collaborative brainstorming is often followed by a convergence activity where teams extract the most promising ideas on a useful level of detail from the brainstorming results. Contrary to the wealth of research on electronic brainstorming, there is a dearth of research on convergence. We used experimental methods for an in-depth exploration of two facilitation-based interventions in a convergence activity: attention guidance (focusing participants on procedures to execute a convergence task) and discussion encouragement (engaging participants in conversations to combine knowledge on ideas). Our findings show that both attention guidance and discussion encouragement are correlated with higher convergence quality. We argue that attention guidance's contribution is in its support of coordination, information processing, and goal specification. Similar, we argue that discussion encouragement's contribution is in its stimulation of idea clarification and idea combination. Contrary to past research, our findings further show that satisfaction was higher after convergence than after brainstorming.

Lee J. Developing strategies for communities of practice

Purpose

– The purpose of this paper is to explore strategies to develop communities of practice (CoP) to improve teaching in a school context.

Design/methodology/approach

– A cross-sectional questionnaire is developed to collect data from participants in a project that aims to cultivate a CoP to improve their small class teaching skills. A total of 125 teachers from 35 primary schools participated in the survey. A structural equation model is used to explore the predictive power of the strategies on all three of the CoP elements.

Findings

– Content strategy is confirmed as the predictor of all the CoP elements, while process strategy is a predictor only for joint enterprise and shared repertoire.

Practical implications

– The application of these strategies to develop a CoP in schools involves designing a reflective and collaborative learning content, as well as monitoring, regulating and streamlining the learning process.

Originality/value

– The study contributes an empirical framework to the research of CoP and practical guides for school leaders to facilitate knowledge sharing in CoPs.

Approach of decision making based on the analytic hierarchy process for urban landscape management

This paper proposes a two-stage group decision making approach to urban landscape management and planning supported by the analytic hierarchy process. The proposed approach combines an application of the consensus convergence model and the weighted geometric mean method. The application of the proposed approach is shown on a real urban landscape planning problem with a park-forest in Belgrade, Serbia. Decision makers were policy makers, i.e., representatives of several key national and municipal institutions, and experts coming from different scientific fields. As a result, the most suitable management plan from the set of plans is recognized. It includes both native vegetation renewal in degraded areas of park-forest and continued maintenance of its dominant tourism function. Decision makers included in this research consider the approach to be transparent and useful for addressing landscape management tasks. The central idea of this paper can be understood in a broader sense and easily applied to other decision making problems in various scientific fields.

A COLLABORATIVE SOFTWARE CODE INSPECTION: THE DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A REPEATABLE COLLABORATION PROCESS IN THE FIELD

The use of software products in today's world has increased dramatically making quality an important aspect of software development. There is a continuous need to develop processes to control and increase software quality. Software code inspection is one way to pursue this goal. This paper presents a collaborative code inspection process that was designed during an action research study using Collaboration Engineering principles and techniques. Our inspection process was implemented as a sequence of thinkLets, chunks of facilitation skill, that were subsequently field tested in a traditional paper-based and Group Support System (GSS)-based environment. Four inspections were performed on four different pieces of software code in two different organizations. Results show that regardless of the implementation, the process was found to be successful in uncovering many major, minor, and false-positive defects in inspected pieces of code. Overall observations and feedback suggest that the collaborative inspection process was considered to be productive and satisfactory. GSS inspections were more effective, especially in terms of major defects. GSS inspections were also found to be more efficient. Finally, the GSS inspections outperformed the paper inspections from a practical perspective: logging and managing defects in a GSS was far superior.

The relation of agenda creation and use to group support system experience

The meeting agenda is often recommended as a critical element for conducting successful meetings. However, assertions about the value of meeting agendas are rarely explained or empirically tested. This study surveyed 238 group facilitators, including 113 who reported facilitating at least one meeting using group support systems (GSS), to examine their views on the use of agendas in meetings.Analyses are based on overall responses by group facilitators and by responses of the subset of facilitators who have used GSS. In addition, correlation analyses between the amount of GSS experience and the responses of the full group of facilitators and the subset with GSS experience are reported. Frequency of agenda use and of evaluation of the "goodness of the agenda" both correlated with GSS experience. Pre-meeting sessions with the group sponsors correlated significantly with GSS experience as did the frequency of varying from the agenda. Finally, quality of meeting deliverables, satisfaction with outcomes, and satisfaction with process were viewed as most important benefits of using an agenda; but they did not correlate with GSS experience. Meeting efficiency as a benefit of agenda use was negatively correlated with GSS experience. The implications of these findings for GSS facilitation and for future research are discussed.

The facilitators perspective on meetings and implications for group support systems design

Based on research into group process facilitation, a meeting model is proposed that defines the many activities comprising group work and highlights the critical facilitator actions. Facilitating group work is a dynamic process that involves managing relationships among people, tasks and technology, as well as structuring the interactions contributing to an effective meeting. By examining existing group support systems (GSS), it is shown that assistance for facilitation is low. With this information, methods are proposed to improve facilitation support (and therefore the meeting process) in GSS for face-to-face or dispersed environments.