Knowledge that Transforms

Information Systems (IS) is, and by definition must be, in part, an engineering research discipline. The unique purpose that defines IS as a discipline, and distinguishes us from our reference disc...

OES

During an online session, a user may visit a number of websites, often following hyperlinks from one website to the next or using a search results page to find and visit pages of interest. In doing so, the user can lose track of which sites were visited and which were helpful in meeting the objective. Thus, sites that may have provided value to the user may not receive expected positive effects such as loyalty and intention to return. It is thus crucial to understand if and how an individual website is perceived by users within the context of multi-website online sessions—particularly in predicting desired outcomes, such as user loyalty, trust, brand image, and revisit intentions. To address this problem, we conceptualize the Web as a geography traversed by users who cross digital borders as they move from one website location to another. We introduce the concept of border strength, or the degree to which digital media artifacts mark a transition to a website, and propose a positive effect of border strength on users’ recognition of their locations. We then consider users’ attribution of credit for assistance in successfully completing an online task to those websites and their owners that supported the task. This attribution is a function of border strength and location recognition. We test these hypotheses using experimental data, which show that, indeed, some websites go unrecognized and that stronger borders increase users’ recognition of having visited a website and users’ credit attribution for their experience to the site. Our findings demonstrate the usefulness of the geography metaphor, suggest the need to further study dynamics regarding individual sites within the context of multi-site sessions and show the usefulness of erecting stronger borders to mark the entry into digital locations.

Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM) aims to deal with the complexities of information technology (IT) solutions and to achieve more organizational agility. EAM is a holistic approach to IT architecture, but the results of the approach have been variable. An under-researched aspect of EAM is how different organizational units respond to the call for a holistic approach. In this study, we investigate how different stakeholders in a large governmental agency connected to three on-going projects and their response to EAM initiatives. With a qualitative approach, we identify three options of response to EAM initiatives: (1) active compliance with the EAM strategy, (2) loyal but passive response, and (3) rebel solutions. We argue for the need of a more nuanced repertoire of actions for dealing with EAM and show how these responses are useful for understanding and managing successful EAM.

The instant access to gambling anytime, anywhere, has made online gambling highly habitual for some people. As a result, some online gamblers choose to volitionally enable the website-provided disruptive information technology (IT) features to control their gambling routines. The objective of this study is to examine the role of these features in regulating online gambling behavior. It is worthwhile to note that in this research, we do not make the assumption that habitual or regular online gambling is a bad thing; nor does the development of our conceptual framework — which focuses on the effect of disruptive IT features and moderating roles of individual regularity and game type in modifying gambling routines — depend on such an assumption.Drawing on theories of habitual automaticity and habit disruption, the conceptual framework theorizes the efficacy and mechanism of disruptive features while taking into account heterogeneity in individual regularity and game type. We tested the model using data collected over 10 years from 3,526 users of a gambling website. First, we found that individuals’ repetitive gambling patterns weakened as the duration of exposure to disruptive features increased. Second, the behavior of more regular gamblers was more resistant to the disruptive features, because more regular gamblers exhibited a stronger habitual pattern. Third, disruptive features were less effective on sports games compared with casino games, because sports gamblers tended to exhibit stronger gambling routines. Overall, the present study contributes to the information systems (IS) literature by clarifying how simple IT features may disrupt unwanted and difficult-to-break online gambling habits as judged by the gamblers. Our findings are likeliest to apply to broader areas of online services in which the application in question is integrated into everyday life and the system can offer a disruptive mechanism.

To investigate the societal value of digital peer groups in the context of youth unemployment, one of society’s most pressing problems, we developed a novel mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach. Following a design-oriented methodology, we constructed an intervention in which we supplement offline one-on-one counseling sessions between youths and career counselors with mobile peer groups where youths can support one another in a trusting environment, independent of time and place. We evaluated the career counseling intervention, implemented on a WhatsApp platform, in a randomized field experiment conducted at the German Federal Employment Agency. Results suggest that the mobile peer-group-based career counseling approach offers substantial added value compared with traditional career counseling. It significantly increases a youth’s chances of finding employment while improving his or her attitude towards career choice, career maturity, and career search intensity. Our study contributes to literature on the societal impacts of information and communication technologies and to research in design science. The proposed mobile intervention has important policy implications for addressing youth unemployment.

This paper examines joint vendor performance in multi-sourcing arrangements. Using an Information Processing View, we argue that managing interdependencies between multiple vendors imposes substantial information processing (IP) requirements on clients. To achieve high joint performance, clients therefore need to possess sufficient IP capacity. We examine how three sources of IP capacity, two internal (i.e., the client’s inter-vendor governance and the client’s architectural knowledge) and one external (i.e., the guardian vendor), work together in realizing joint performance. Our results show that formal governance and architectural knowledge contribute to joint performance. The guardian vendor contributes to joint performance in settings where the client deploys strong governance but lacks architectural knowledge. This suggests that, contrary to common views in the literature, guardian vendors should not be understood as mediators (or single points of contact) who relieve clients from governance efforts. Instead, guardian vendors are more fruitfully understood as architects, who complement the client’s governance efforts by compensating for knowledge gaps. Put simply, client firms should consider using a guardian vendor to compensate for weak architectural knowledge while still maintaining strong formal and informal governance of all vendors.

Developing creative solutions to problems is often a key element of organizational decision making. Much research has been done on systems to support individual creativity, called Creativity Support Systems (CSS). Commercially available CSS and past CSS research have offered either a structured approach to the problem or provided stimuli to help the user think about the problem in a different way. We conducted two experiments testing an approach that builds on priming research by providing stimuli related to achievement on the screen as users worked, as what we call visual background music. Our findings show that this approach increased an individual’s creative output by 10–40% depending upon the experiment and outcome measure. Under the conditions of our studies, the priming stimuli we used had the strongest effect on the flexibility pathway by broadening the user’s consideration of the solution space, rather than the persistence pathway of encouraging more ideas within a topic category. A key implication of this study for CSS design is to add a banner that has rotating pictures about achievement to existing CSS.

Online platforms, such as App Store and Kindle, are facing a common dilemma: while the implementation of technology-based protection impedes piracy and hence boosts demand from legal users (positive effect), the resulting restriction meanwhile imposes some level of disutility on the same due to inconvenience (negative effect). This paper investigates a monopolistic platform’s optimal protection level and pricing strategy under an agency business model (content agency model or advertising agency model). We find that the platform’s protection strategy hinges on the relative magnitude of the two opposing effects of protection. When the negative effect dominates, the minimal protection is optimal. However, as the positive effect becomes more salient, the platform has an incentive to increase the protection level. We also find that although the demand of non-pure platform users always increases as the level of content substitutability rises under the minimal and maximal protection regions, it is not necessarily the case under the medium protection region. The study advances our understanding of the content protection against piracy from a platform’s perspective. Our findings also provide insights into business model decision when platform protection is endogenously determined.

Mobile technologies, with their seamless integration into people’s everyday life, are said to enable “perpetual contact” with the users always accompanied by their mobile devices. This creates unprecedented opportunity to better understand the relationship between time and information technologies (ITs), in particular, how time of day may influence users’ IT behavior. With this understanding, companies may also be able to promote IT products by highlighting their value that appeals to users in a particular time segment of a day. Building primarily on the ego depletion theory and through conducting a combination of field experiment and survey, we show that matching IT product value appeal to people’s psychological state during different times of day can lead to more optimal outcome (higher adoption). The findings advance our understanding of how IT behavior, as a behavior embedded in time, is affected by time of day, and provide actionable guidance to practitioners in performing mobile time-based targeting.