Richard Baskerville

• Georgia State University

Evaluation of design artefacts and design theories is a key activity in Design Science Research (DSR), as it provides feedback for further development and (if done correctly) assures the rigour of the research. However, the extant DSR literature provides insufficient guidance on evaluation to enable Design Science Researchers to effectively design...

Recognizing that design is at the core of information systems development, has led to a design-science research paradigm where differing kinds of knowledge goals give form to differing kinds of knowledge processes within a single study. This paper analyzes knowledge production in design-science research to explain how an endogenous form of pluralis...

Until recently, most ethnographic research in information systems has been based on the traditional anthropological model of ethnography. In this traditional model of ethnography, one of the most important data-gathering techniques is participant observation. The ethnographer observes and participates but does not actively seek to change the situat...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to develop and evaluate an integrated computer abuse model that incorporates both organizational abuse settings and the psychological processes of the abuser. Design/methodology/approach – The paper developed an emote opportunity (EO) model through a comprehensive literature review and conducted a case study...

Design science research has traditionally been applied to complex real-world problems to produce an artifact to address such problems. Although design science research efforts have been applied traditionally to business or related problems, there is a large set of problems in the area of digital science that also require important, digital artifact...

The close relationship between the concepts of information systems and information technology creates issues for researchers. Usefully distinguishing between the concepts is problematic. We investigate the use of the systems concept in practice, finding a pragmatic distinction between an information system (IS) and an information technology system...

This paper contributes to the literature on cybersecurity governance by suggesting an approach based on pragmatism. As Jeffrey Sachs in his The Age of Sustainable Development, 2015, reminds us: “The essence of sustainable development in practice is scientifically and morally based problem solving”. Cybersecurity deals with problem solving in comple...

Individual online community (OC)users sometimes withdraw their OC membership in destructive ways. In our study, we observe an interesting phenomenon in which many OC highly respected users delete all their posts when leaving the OC. Why do online community users self-destruct upon departure? In this research-in-progress paper, we propose a theoreti...

Two-factor authentication uses any combination of an authentication modality or the combination of multiple features of different authentication modalities, and it has been argued for many years that it can protect against the pitfalls of the password and PIN only authentication system, however, there is no empirical evidence to support such argume...

The importance of creativity is widely acknowledged in design science research, yet there is a lack of understanding of how this creativity is manifested throughout the design science lifecycle. This research examines the effects of the boundaries that are placed on creativity by the particular design science research method used throughout the des...

Online support communities are popular for consumers of information technology products who might need help identifying or resolving a problem. Information technology products, in general, have their own needs and requirements. Prior research has focused on the intermediate benefits of online support communities to companies, such as knowledge cont...

Because ‘going digital’ regards using digital technologies to fundamentally change the way things get done, information security is necessarily engaged in going digital. Society and science are going digital. For the sciences, this digitalization process invokes an emerging model of the science of design that incorporates the assembly of informatio...

This paper uses the organizational genetics metaphor as a vehicle to understand the essential role of information systems in organizations. As with biological organisms, we can think of organizational information as being encoded in genetic material. Organizationally this material contains information about the essential organizational structures....

Recognizing that information systems (IS) can have an effect on the environment, research concerned with the design and development of innovative organizational and technical artifacts has started to focus on the development of 'sustainable IS'. Much of this work implicitly assumes a focus on the natural environment-our planet. In this paper we pro...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop and empirically test a process model (comprising of seven dimensions), for identifying online customer engagement patterns leading to recommendation. These seven dimensions are 1) Communication, 2) Interaction, 3) Experience, 4) Satisfaction, 5) Continued Involvement, 6) Bonding, and 7) Recommendatio...

This paper investigates the relationship between Information Systems (IS) integration and the use of cybersecurity countermeasures using an adapted exposure to risk perspective which considers both the probability of a risk through vulnerability points theory and the impact of the risk if it occurs. Based on an econometric analysis of a survey samp...

Methods for assessing the reliability of natural science research must be redefined to address the assumptions underlying design science research. Challenges arise, especially when considering the issue of repeatability and the role of the design scientist. To address these challenges, this paper proposes a Design Science Reliability Framework that...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to use translation theory to develop a framework (called FTRA) that explains how companies adopt agile methods in a discourse of fragmentation and articulation. Design/methodology/approach A qualitative multiple case study of six firms using the Scrum agile methodology. Data were collected using mixed methods...

Much research has focused on understanding design science research and providing guidelines for its successful execution. However, there is still a need for more work on the raison d'être of design science research, which is the development of artifacts that can be applied to solve real world problems. The value of design science research thus far...

Erratum to: R. Baskerville et al. (Eds.) Organizational and Social Perspectives on Information Technology DOI: 10.1007/978-0-387-35505-4

Many information systems claim to be “green”, meaning in support of environmental sustainability. But at closer look we find that these claims are often unsubstantiated; in other words, many green systems are not making any environment more sustainable. We identify three main root causes. First, the ‘environment’ is often ill-defined. Second, syste...

Online social networks (OLSNs) are electronically-based social milieux where individuals gather virtually to socialize. The behavior and characteristics of these networks can provide evidence relevant for detecting and prosecuting policy violations, crimes, terrorist activities, subversive political movements, etc. Some existing forensics methods a...

This paper advances the concept of pre-theory design frameworks as a notable means of justifying early design experiences that form preliminaries to design theories. Design work situated in complex design problem settings can field artifacts that shift the entropy in the setting (i.e., relocate work and noise). Such shifts can trigger a progressive...

Identity protection is currently limited to preven-tative measures and monitoring. Recovery from identity theft is a difficult, protracted, and messy process. Much of the current work views individual identity as a singular, natural element. An in depth analysis of personal identity reveals a person’s iden-tity to be polymorphic and socially constr...

With the rising interest in Design Science Research (DSR), it has become crucial to understand what the acceptable components of a DSR paper are, in order to get published. Central to this is the ongoing debate on what constitutes an acceptable contribution in DSR-the artifact, the design theory or both? Two camps have emerged in this debate, and t...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest that translating a design theory (DT) into practice (e.g. creating an instance design artifact (IDA)) is hardly straight-forward and requires substantial creativity. Specifically the authors suggest that adopting a DT embodies a creativity passdown effect in which the creative thinking of a team of...

Design science research should be relevant, valuable, purposeful and prescriptive. Its value as a relevant source of prescriptions implies the practical usefulness of its results beyond a single expository instantiation. But propagation of such design science products as design principles and theories appears to be a key challenge. In this paper we...

Foreword I am a scholar in information systems: a frequent researcher, author, reviewer, conference program chair, and journal editor. In these roles I could complain that Vaishnavi and Kuechler have left tracks across my desk for many years now. These tracks are not only the traces they have themselves left through their influences on my own work,...

Internal computer abuse has received considerable research attention as a significant issue of IS security incidents in organizations. We examine the effects of both organizational and individual factors on individuals' computer abuse intent. A theoretical model is developed based on two theories: abuse opportunity structure and emotion process. We...

Knowledge management has emerged as an important field for practice and research in information systems. This field is building on theoretical foundations from information economics, strategic management, organizational culture, organizational behavior, organizational structure, artificial intelligence, quality management, and organizational perfor...

Technological knowledge has been characterized as having a scope that is specific to a particular problem. However, the information systems community is exploring forms of design science research that provide a promising avenue to technological knowledge with broader scope: design theories. Because design science research is materially prescriptive...

The concept of the ‘information technology (IT) artifact’ plays a central role in the information systems (IS) research community's discourse on design science. We pose the alternative concept of the ‘IS artifact’, unpacking what has been called the IT artifact into a separate ‘information artifact’, ‘technology artifact’ and ‘social artifact’. Tec...

A handbook of situated design methods, with analyses and cases that range from designing study processes to understanding customer experiences to developing interactive installations. All design is situated—carried out from an embedded position. Design involves many participants and encompasses a range of interactions and interdependencies among de...

The field of information systems (IS) has throughout its history experienced extensive changes in technology, research, and education. These renewals will continue into the foreseeable future [10]. It is recognized that IS is a key force in the ongoing societal and organizational renewal and change [2, 8, 14]. For example, in the US business sector...

Both the practice and the research literature on information systems attach great value to the identification and dissemination of information on “best practices”. In the philosophy of science, this type of knowledge is regarded as technological knowledge because it becomes manifest in the successful techniques in one context. While the value for o...

This book is dedicated to the memory of Professor Alessandro (Sandro) D'Atri, who passed away in April 2011. Professor D'Atri started his career as a brilliant scholar interested in theoretical computer science, databases and, more generally information processing systems. He journeyed far in various applications, such as human-computer interaction...

Agile methods continue their growth in popularity. This spreading usage increases the need for adapting agile approaches to specific organizations. Hence, we investigate how system developers engage in the evolution of both agile systems and agile methods in practice. We study adaptation of the agile method Scrum in six organizations. Based on this...

Information Security (InfoSec) research is far reaching and includes many approaches to deal with protecting and mitigating threats to the information assets and technical resources available within computer based systems. Although a predominant weakness in properly securing information assets is the individual user within an organization, much of...

Only a few studies have analyzed the indirect effect that different levels of requirements uncertainty have on the effects of established flexible development techniques. Whereas much of what we know relates to the development of commercial off-the-shelf software (COTS), in this empirical study, we investigate contract software development projects...

The intent of this research is to determine if the IAF can add value to the organization in other ways besides corporate governance. The proposed project will demonstrate through an interpretive process study using case study research how the internal audit function can be a strategic business partner by highlighting its contribution ability in a d...

Tsang and Williams offer some good and provocative ideas in their critique of our earlier article on generalizing and generalizability. In this essay we will advance some new ideas by building on those collected in both Tsang and Williams and our original article (Lee and Baskerville 2003). Because IS is a pluralist scientific discipline, one in wh...

Evaluation is a central and essential activity in conducting rigorous Design Science Research (DSR), yet there is surprisingly little guidance about designing the DSR evaluation activity beyond suggesting possible methods that could be used for evaluation. This paper extends the notable exception of the existing framework of Pries-Heje et al [11] t...

Design theory lies at the heart of information systems design science research. One concern in this area is the potential to limit the designer's creativity by over-specifying the meta-design or the design process. This paper explains how design research encapsulates a two-person design team consisting of the design theorist and the artifact instan...

Editor-in-ChiefEuropean Journal of Information Systemsadvance online publication,7 December 2010; doi:10.1057/ejis.2010.57In this issue, EJIS is publishing ‘Memorandum on Design OrientedInformation Systems Research’, an opinion that has engendered muchdebate in the German-speaking Information Systems (IS) community.Already published in German, we p...

In response to Österle et al.'s ‘Memorandum on Design Oriented Information Systems Research’, this commentary disputes, and expands the context of, several premises used to justify the main argument in the memorandum. These include: (1) claims about the evolution and role of design science research in the broader IS community and its position in th...

Theory is a central element in research. Due to the importance of theory in research, considerable efforts have been made to better understand the process of theorizing, i.e., development of a theory. A review of the literature in this area suggests that two dominant theorizing approaches are anchored to deductive and inductive reasoning respective...

ContextAgile information systems development (ISD) has received much attention from both the practitioner and researcher community over the last 10–15 years. However, it is still unclear what precisely constitutes agile ISD.ObjectiveBased on four empirical studies conducted over a 10-year time period from 1999 to 2008 the objective of this paper is...

Design Science Research (DSR) is a complex form of research that combines very heterogeneous activities requiring different skills with more elaborate areas of risk to manage. As yet, there is little experience with managing risk in DSR or even identification of types of risks to be managed. This paper analyses DSR research activities and elaborate...

An individual information system is an activity system in which individual persons, according to idiosyncratic needs and preferences, perform processes and activities using information, technology, and other resources to produce informational products and/or services for themselves or others. These small information systems have evolved with increa...

Much of the work within the information systems discipline has an implied focus on the science aspect of the area of research known as design science. However, the design aspect is often regarded as an obvious and straightforward activity. To the contrary, design is a complex and creative human activity that arises in many different disciplines, in...

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has helped to drive increasingly intense global competition. In turn, this intensity increases the need for flexibility and rapid changeability in ICT to support strategies that depend on organisational agility. We report a comparative, cross-cultural case study of the implementation of Service-Oriente...

Information system (IS) development methods pay little attention to security aspects. Consequently, several alternative approaches for designing and managing secure information systems (SIS) have been proposed. However, many of these approaches have shortcomings. These approaches lack fully comprehensive modeling schemes in terms of security, i.e....

This paper elaborates a design science approach for management planning anchored to the concept of a management design theory. Unlike the notions of design theories arising from information systems, management design theories can appear as a system of technological rules, much as a system of hypotheses or propositions can embody scientific theories...

Design, design research, and design science have received increasing attention lately. This has led to a more scientific focus on design that then has made it timely to reconsider our definitions of the design theory concept. Many scholars in Information Systems assume a design theory requires a complex and elaborate structure. While this structure...

Design, design research, and design science have received increasing attention lately. This has led to a more scientific focus on design that then has made it timely to reconsider our definitions of the design theory concept. Many scholars in Information Systems assume a design theory requires a complex and elaborate structure. While this structure...

Abstract This paper describes empirical research into agile requirements engineering (RE) practices. Based on an analysis of data collected in 16 US software development organizations, we identify six agile practices. We also identify seven challenges that are created by the use of these practices. We further analyse how this collection of practice...

Technological rules are one form of expressing management design activities like organizational design, decision design, and information systems design. However, the notion of a “rule” can imply an unintended over-specification of premises and outcomes. We propose a design logic using the concept of an ambiguity operator in the predicate logic form...

Based on four empirical studies conducted over a 10-year time period from 1999 to 2008 we investigate how local software processes interact with global changes in the software development context. In 1999 companies were developing software at high speed in a desperate rush to be first-to-market. In 2001 a new high speed/quick results development pr...

A new reflexive discourse is emerging in the IS research community concerning how we, as academic scholars in the Information Systems field, set and pursue our research agendas. How should we choose our research topics, how should we conduct our research, and how should we communicate our research results? This article is based on a panel discussio...

Partially due to increasing requirements uncertainty, flexibility has been in the focus of many software development activities for many years. Only few studies have analyzed the indirect effect that different levels of requirements uncertainty have on the effects of established flexible development techniques. This study analyzes how requirements...

Building on neo-institutional theory and theories of innovation and diffusion, recent work in the field of management has suggested that management research and practice is characterized by fashions. A management fashion is a relatively transitory belief that a certain management technique leads rational management progress. Using bibliographic res...

The work in this volume examines the real-world confluence of several concepts that are too often studied in isolation from each other. Research into creativity too rarely considers the presumed ability of smaller organisations to contribute a large proportion of the innovations introduced into the practical information systems field. There is also...

This paper proposes and evaluates a soft systems approach to design science research. Soft Design Science provides an approach to the development of new ways to improve human organizations, especially with consideration for social aspects, through the activities of design, development, instantiation, evaluation and evolution of a technological arti...

Prototyping is often presented as a universal solution to many intractable information systems project problems. Prototyping is known to offer at least three advantages (1) provide users with a concrete understanding, (2) eliminate the confusion, (3) cope with uncertainty. On the other hand, managing the explorative and iterative aspects of prototy...

We view the current state of reference discipline theory dominance in the MIS field as constituting a hegemony. This panel discussion will examine why this has potential harm. In counterpoint, we will present the argument that reference discipline theory use should continue. Aside from the fact that reference discipline theory is used, there are be...

This article summarizes a management design theory in the form of technological rules for software process improvement. A general model of the improvement recommendation process can include four elements: agenda, observation, analysis and synthesis. This model supports a design theory in the form of technological rules for each of the four elements...

This article develops an analytical framework for new forms of information warfare that may threaten commercial and government computing systems by using e-collaboration in new ways. The framework covers (1) strategic model, (2) strategic arena, (3) e-collaboration, and (4) ethics and law. The framework then is used to compare two recorded instance...

Managers frequently face ill-structured or "wicked" prob- lems. Such problems are characterized by a large degree of uncertainty with respect to how the problem should be approached and how to establish and evaluate the set of alternative solutions. A design theory nexus is a set of constructs and methods that enable the construction of models that...