Communications of the Association for Information Systems

The primary role of a professional society is to facilitate communication among its members. <em>Communications of the Association for Information Systems</em> carries out this role by publishing articles on a wide range of subjects of interest to the membership, including but not limited to research results, debates, panel discussions, and other topics of interest to the global community.

List of Papers (Total 1,467)

The Relationship between Information Systems (IS) Assets, Organizational Capabilities, and IS-enabled Absorptive Capacity in U.S. State Information Technology Departments

Despite the recognition that information is a strategic asset for any state government, we lack research on the deployment and use of information systems in the U.S. state government context. Information systems are central for state agencies’ efforts to develop optimal responses to demands from their internal and external constituents. We examine how a specific IS asset combines...

Understanding Information Privacy Assimilation in IT Organizations using Multi-site Case Studies

We develop a framework for understanding the mechanisms of information privacy assimilation in information technology (IT) organizations. Following neo-institutional theory, we develop a broad conceptual model and further build a detailed theory based on a multi-site, multi-case study of 18 organizations. We treat information privacy as a distinct dimension separate from...

Personal Health Record Systems as Boundary Objects

Personal health record systems are widely available and regarded as a key element in the push for electronic health records and the meaningful use of technology in medicine. However, the adoption and use of these systems has been much lower than anticipated. While research has investigated the reasons for this lack of adoption, we have no satisfactory answers. As such, we...

An Empirical Assessment of the CIO Role Expectations Instrument Using PLS Path Modelling

The validation of information systems research instruments has not received the attention that it deserves. Based on data obtained from 174 Australian CIOs, we use component-based structural equation modelling (PLS/SEM) to investigate the psychometric properties and possible modeling of the highly regarded CIO role expectations instrument that Smaltz, Sambamurthy, and Agarwal...

How Can Universities Best Encourage Women to Major in Information Systems?

Despite both government and industry initiatives, the under-representation of women in information systems (IS) continues. Can academia help right this imbalance by helping fill the pipeline for technically qualified female employees? We analyze the results of four experimental interventions based on empirical studies and prior surveys designed to address this issue. We conducted...

An Experimental Investigation of the Individual and Joint Effects of Financial and Non-financial Incentives on Knowledge Sharing Using Enterprise Social Media

Many organizations implement enterprise social media (ESM) in an effort to capture and store valuable knowledge that employees possess. Unfortunately, more often than not, employees do not make a large number of knowledge contributions. Using agency theory and contingency theory as foundations, we examine managerial interventions that can improve knowledge contribution rates in...

A Guide to Text Analysis with Latent Semantic Analysis in R with Annotated Code: Studying Online Reviews and the Stack Exchange Community

In this guide, we introduce researchers in the behavioral sciences in general and MIS in particular to text analysis as done with latent semantic analysis (LSA). The guide contains hands-on annotated code samples in R that walk the reader through a typical process of acquiring relevant texts, creating a semantic space out of them, and then projecting words, phrase, or documents...

Contemporary Issues of Open Data in Information Systems Research: Considerations and Recommendations

Researchers, governments, and funding agencies are calling on research disciplines to embrace open data—data that anyone can access and use. They have done so based on the premise that research efforts can draw and generate several benefits from open data because it might provide further insight and enable individuals to replicate and extend current knowledge in different...

Analyzing Crisis Response through Actor-network Theory: The Case of Kathmandu Living Labs

Crisis response is the most critical stage in crisis management during which actors make important decisions on mitigating a crisis. However, the decision making in such situations is a complex sociotechnical phenomenon. The literature specifies crisis response to include four steps (i.e., observation, interpretation, choice, and dissemination) and suggests a sociotechnical...

The World IT Project: History, Trials, Tribulations, Lessons, and Recommendations

We conceived The World IT Project, the largest study of its kind in the IS field, more than a decade ago. This ambitious mega project with an enormous global scale was formally launched in 2013 and is expected to finish by 2017. Major publications on the project should appear through 2019. The project responded to the pervasive bias in IS research towards American and Western...

Using Mechanical Turk Data in IS Research: Risks, Rewards, and Recommendations

With the increasing use of crowdsourced data in behavioral research fields, it is important to examine their appropriateness and desirability for IS research. Extending recent work in the IS literature, this tutorial discusses the risks and rewards of using data gathered on Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. We examine the characteristics of MTurk workers and the resulting method biases...

Persevere or Exit: What is the Right Strategy?

The teaching case describes India’s telecommunications market as it went through a major transformation due to its adopting mobile telephony. The country’s huge market size and low teledensity have provided an attractive opportunity for foreign multinationals. Telenor entered the Indian market through a joint venture with Unitech Wireless under the brand name of Uninor and...

Evaluating Enterprise Architecture Frameworks Using Essential Elements

Enterprise architecture (EA) frameworks offer principles, models, and guidance to help one develop an EA program. Due to EA’s flexible and abstract nature, there is a proliferation of EA frameworks in practice. Yet, comparison studies to make sense of them are far from satisfactory in that they lack a theoretical foundation for comparison criteria and do not meaningfully...

Shadow Systems, Risk, and Shifting Power Relations in Organizations

Drawing on notions of power and the social construction of risk, we build new theory to understand the persistence of shadow systems in organizations. From a single case study in a mid-sized savings bank, we derive two feedback cycles that concern shifting power relations between business units and central IT associated with shadow systems. A distant business-IT relationship and...

The Linkage between Conferences and Journals in the Information Systems Field: Observations and Recommendations

Younger scholars often receive advice to submit work to conferences for feedback and polishing in anticipation that they will later submit it to a journal for publication. But is this a normal practice? What do the IS scholars really think or do about the linkage between conferences and journals? What are IS journals’ policies and their editors-in-chiefs’ views on that linkage...

Strategic Alignment in SMEs: Strengthening Theoretical Foundations

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are a vital part of the global economy in that they compose the vast majority of all businesses worldwide. In spite of these firms’ importance, they remain understudied in strategic alignment research. In this paper, we consolidate and extend the IS literature on strategic alignment in SMEs. We develop a set of theoretical propositions...

The Light and Dark Side of the Black Box: Sensor-based Technology in the Automotive Industry

Diverse aspects of our everyday lives increasingly feature sensor-based technologies. Despite the importance of understanding how business and consumers exploit and adopt these technologies, the information systems (IS) community has thus far devoted relatively little attention to the topic. Accordingly, in this paper, we foster an exploration of the issue among IS scholars by...

Using Psycho-physiological Interaction Analysis with fMRI Data in IS Research: A Guideline

The integration of neuroscientific methods in Information Systems (IS) research to better understand how the brain interacts with IS-relevant context has gained in importance. Many papers that highlight the potential of neuroIS and that discuss methodological issues associated with using functional brain imaging already exist. However, neuroIS researchers have to keep in mind...

The Appreciative System, Learning, and Its Impact on Information Systems Design

Many researchers and practitioners recognize that there is a link between the failures of information system (IS) provision and flawed Information Requirements Definition (IRD). Misinformation arises from defective communication between clients and analysts and lead to situations where the actual requirements of clients are not identified and properly represented in the...

The Potential for Citizen Science in Information Systems Research

In this paper, we explicate citizen science in information systems research. Citizen science in IS research is a partnership between IS researchers and people in their everyday lives. Citizen science projects in the IS field are defined by phenomenon that interest both citizens and scientists and by the intervention of citizens in scientific processes for the purposes of...

IS Research and Policy: Notes From the 2015 ICIS Senior Scholar’s Forum

Based on the International Conference on Information Systems’ (ICIS) 2015 senior scholars’ forum, we provide insights on the role and opportunities of IS researchers in shaping policy.

TRIPBAM: Leveraging Digital Data Streams to Unleash Savings

TRIPBAM pioneered automated clustered rate monitoring in the hotel industry. After capturing a traveler’s reservation, TRIPBAM software scrutinized the digital data stream of changing room rates and notified users of any potential savings. While TRIPBAM could successfully discover savings for its many customers, its executives focused on the challenge of turning TRIPBAM into a...

Getting a Clean Shot on a Blurred Target: Improving Targeting for Strategic Scanning through Action Research in 10 French Organizations

Targeting comprises defining the part of the business environment that corresponds to organizations’ strategic objectives and priorities. Targeting is not an easy process because it includes the interaction of managers who come from different organizational units that might have a fragmentary and blurred understanding of the overall issue. Through an action research, we designed...

Conceptualizing Emerging Technology in Local Contexts: An Ethnographic Study of RFID in an Emirate’s Farming Industry

Situated in an emirate’s farming industry, this ethnographic study develops a framework to help bridge the existing knowledge gap about what and how local contexts interact with emerging technology, RFID in particular. Findings suggest that numerous local factors pertaining to the researched emirate’s unique environmental, project, cultural, and societal/political contexts shape...

Exploring ERP-enabled Technology Adoption: A Real Options Perspective

For decades, practitioners and scholars have focused on achieving optimal values in and benefits from enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. Given that scholars have identified ERP systems as having option-like characteristics such as the capacity to create an information technology (IT) platform that enables the adoption of subsequent function-specific applications, we face...