Sandeep Purao

Bentley University · Department of Information and Process Management

Scholars acknowledge that achieving societal impact should be a key aim of research. However, societal impact usually becomes tangible only long after research completion, so that scholars can hardly report its evidence in a research article, if it is to be published in a timely manner. Interventionist research methods that involve engagement with...

We develop principles that facilitate socially inclusive design-oriented research with marginalized groups. Building on the recognition that the research process must be informed by theoretical perspectives about social inclusion, our effort begins with an empirical investigation of a multiyear research project that designed several IT-based soluti...

Postpartum depression (PPD) for men is a significant but little-understood public health concern that affects ~14% of men in the US. It has not received adequate attention from society, researchers or health practitioners. This paper describes results from problem space exploration for this concern as the first step in a design science research pro...

While ethics are recognized as an integral part of information systems (IS) research, many questions about the role of ethics in research practice remain unanswered. Our report responds to this emerging set of concerns with a broad and integrative account of five perspectives on ethics in IS research and design science research (DSR) in particular....

Objective: To identify determinants that contribute to the length of homeless shelter stay. Methods: We utilized a unique dataset from the Homeless Management Information Systems from Boston, Massachusetts, United States, which contains 44,197 shelter stays for 17,070 adults between Jan. 2014 and May 2018. Results: Our statistical analyses and regr...

(https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais_preprints/37) This paper investigates how information systems design professionals use design principles (extracted from a prior design science research project) in a new design situation. We do this by capturing think-aloud protocols from experienced design professionals who are given access to potentially useful des...

Effective and impactful design science research requires appropriate research conduct, and an appropriate research problem. Scholars in the DSR community continue to clarify the foundations for appropriate research conduct. In contrast, few guidelines or guardrails have been proposed to identify and develop research problems. Without such guidance,...

BACKGROUND According to the World health organization (WHO), more than one million sexually transmitted infections are acquired each day across the world. The incidence rates of STDs in the US are at a record high for the fourth consecutive year. Due to the stigma associated with the incidence of STD, there is a general reluctance to seek informati...

Background According to the World health organization (WHO), more than 1 million sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are acquired each day across the world. The incidence rates of STIs in the United States are at a record high for the fourth consecutive year. Owing to the stigma associated with the incidence of STI, there is a general reluctance...

This article examines breakdowns that occur when readers at partisan news websites attempt to understand a challenging news event. We conduct the work with the 2017 Alabama senate race as the empirical context marked by the nomination of Republican Roy Moore (a challenging news event for the left-leaning readers), and the story of his alleged sexua...

Contemporary smart home speakers (Amazon Echo™, Google Nest™) represent an opportunity to capture streams of big data that represent user interactions. Once captured, these data streams may be analyzed to understand use patterns for different demographics. In this research, we focus on one demographic, the aging-at-home elderly. We describe how suc...

This essay reports the results of a reflective study to explore the question: where do… design principles come from? While a consensus is slowly emerging about the structure and content of design principles, the origins of design principles remain open to scholarly explorations and debates. Scholars have suggested, and speculated about several path...

This essay reports the results of a reflective study to explore the question: where do… design principles come from? While a consensus is slowly emerging about the structure and content of design principles, the origins of design principles remain open to scholarly explorations and debates. Scholars have suggested, and speculated about several path...

This is a story of a design science research project that started in one domain, petrochemical refineries, before extending into another, technology consulting. Across the two domains, the problem was scoped, defined and refined as one of supporting knowledge-intensive work that takes place over time and across locations with teams of specialists....

Conversational devices such as Amazon Echo and Google Home represent more than a way to tap into the behavioral surplus of consumers. They provide an opportunity to address societal problems by examining data streams produced by these devices. In this paper, we describe usage patterns and problems related to the use of Amazon Echo devices at home b...

This paper develops a model of conflicts that relies on extracting text and argument features from traces of interactions in collaborative work. Much prior research about collaborative work is aimed at improving the support for virtual work. In contrast, we are interested in detecting conflicts in collaborative work because conflict undetected can...

Systems integration—connecting software systems for cross-functional work—is a significant concern in many large organizations, which continue to maintain hundreds, if not thousands, of independently evolving software systems. Current approaches in this space remain ad hoc, and closely tied to technology platforms. Following a design science approa...

This paper reports on the results of a study of how scholars engage with and use the action design research (ADR) approach. Since its publication, ADR has been acknowledged as an important variant of DSR, and has been adopted by a number of researchers. It has been the methodological basis for doctoral dissertations as well as research projects in...

The era of big data provides many opportunities for conducting impactful research from both data-driven and theory-driven perspectives. However, data-driven and theory-driven research have progressed somewhat independently. In this paper, we develop a framework that articulates important differences between these two perspectives and proposes a rol...

The era of big data provides many opportunities for conducting impactful research from both data-driven and theory-driven perspectives. However, data-driven and theory-driven research have progressed somewhat independently. In this paper, we develop a framework that articulates important differences between these two perspectives and proposes a rol...

This paper reports on the results of a study to investigate how scholars engage with and use the action design research (ADR) approach. ADR has been acknowledged as an important variant of the Design Science Research approach , and has been adopted by a number of scholars, as the methodological basis for doctoral dissertations as well as multidisci...

Developing standards is a social practice wherein experts engage in discussions to evaluate design solutions. In this paper, we analyze processes followed to develop SOAP standard from the theory of communicative action perspective, which argues that individuals engaged in social discourse would exhibit five possible actions: instrumental, strategi...

The ideal of self-paced learning, which was introduced nearly 50 years ago by Keller in his Personalized System of Instruction (PSI), has not yet been widely adopted. In spite of its perceived promise of helping students to learn at the speed aligned to their individual backgrounds, motivation, and skills, PSI has been challenging to implement. Uni...

This paper reports on the results of a study that investigates how design principles are used in design practice. Design principles have become the predominant way to capture abstract knowledge about the design of information systems (IS) artifacts—and as design science researchers, we expect that practitioners will use these outcomes of our work....

This essay investigates the ontology question in design science research. Writings on the philosophy of science do not fully address this concern for design science research because of the traditional emphasis on discovering truthful laws. In contrast, design science research dares to create novel IT artifacts with a view to realizing alternative f...

In the context of smart cities, the design of services requires something more than an understanding of functional requirements. It requires an appreciation of basic human values. Based on interviews with citizens in a large city, and an intensive text analysis – the authors describe how such values may be inferred. The authors find that this proce...

IT platforms are a foundation, a base on which designers can build other things. They are primarily defined by their properties, which can be simultaneously enabling and constraining. IT platforms can be hardware–software bundles as well as primarily software platforms. Over time, they have evolved to become more open although exceptions such as th...

Advanced information technologies and government policies provide the foundational substrate for smart cities. Translating this substrate into appropriate citizen services requires something more: an express recognition of citizen values and a projection of value that these services can generate for the citizens. We devise a method to design such c...

This research analyzes patterns of artifact generation and knowledge contribution of design science researchers based on a meta-analysis of contemporary work. We derive these analyses based on prior classifications of design science artifacts and knowledge outcomes. Our analyses reveal a complex picture of what is produced and how by scholars in th...

This paper presents the design of CM2: a case-based conflict management system. We envision the system as an aid to understand and manage conflict situations by referring to past conflict situations, which are stored as Vignettes - vivid yet analytical, theory-laden descriptions. A meta-model, developed on basis of prior kernel theories, is used to...

This is a first person account and a reflection. The chapter presents a preliminary outline of what I call an egalitarian pedagogy for the millennial generation (emulating Freire). The attempt is based on an ongoing reflection on the practice of teaching organizational informatics for about two decades, first in a business school and then, in an in...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2014, held in Atlanta, GA, USA. The 23 full and 15 short papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 80 submissions. Topics of interest presented and discussed in the conference span the entire spectrum of conceptual modelin...

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of workshops, held at the 33rd International Conference on Conceptual Modeling, ER 2014, in Atlanta, GA, USA in October 2014. The 24 revised full and 6 short papers were carefully reviewed and selected out of 59 submissions and are presented together with 4 demonstrations. The papers are organized in s...

A survey of rural hospitals was conducted in the spring of 2012 to better understand their perspectives on health information technology (HIT) outsourcing and the role that hospital-to-hospital HIT partnerships (HHPs) can play as an outsourcing mechanism. The survey sought to understand how HHPs might be leveraged for HIT implementation, as well as...

Much research about large cities has focused on policy-level action for concerns such as infrastructure, basic amenities and education, treating the citizens as a collective of millions. We suggest an alternative, drawing on recent moves towards ‘digital era governance.’ We argue for and develop a foundation for the design and modeling of services...

We argue for and propose a design-way for Values-inspired Design. The context in which we develop our argument is Citizen-centric services in mega-cities. The work draws on and extends prior efforts related to values, value-conscious design and valuesensitive design. Our efforts are motivated by the significant trends towards mega-cities, and an ac...

In information-rich environments, participants can, and often must, access and use diverse sources of data to support their decision-making tasks. Modeling such environments is important, but cannot be done without effective conceptual models. A problem in information-rich environments is a disconnect between the control-flow across tasks and the i...

Conceptual modeling for systems integration is challenging because of two reasons. First, it must deal with a universe of discourse that includes human creations: software applications and interactions among them. Second, the knowledge needed to create appropriate conceptual models must be obtained from several users who can only possess partial vi...

The processes followed for developing anticipatory standards such as those for web services are still not well-understood. In spite of the openness of the process, there are few analyses that shed light on the roles that different participants play or the actions they engage in during the development of these standards. We analyze archival document...

Process design remains an important yet difficult concern for postindustrial organizations. We posit that processes ‘become' processes in these organizations only via their anchoring in concrete artifacts. Consequently, we identify and refine two design principles: processes as anchored in concrete material artifacts (not abstract process represent...

Local perspectives are important in designing effective enterprise integration solutions because they provide deep understanding of how each system may interact with others. Combining these local perspectives into a global solution is, however, equally important to develop a coherent enterprise integration blueprint. The participants in this exerci...

We describe results from historical analysis of the IRS Business Systems Modernization (BSM) as an example of large-scale, public sector projects. The project has already spanned a decade and consumed more than 3 billion dollars. The paper suggests extracting stakeholder Sentiments and Confidence from documents, with a view to exploring how such me...

We describe ReKon, a platform that contains fine-granular templates, each describing a process knowledge chunk, which may be combined, as needed, to support ad hoc processes needed in large projects. The platform allows user-lead (re)-construction of a process to deal with the unique and emergent needs of a project by leveraging prior knowledge enc...

Design research (DR) positions information technology artifacts at the core of the Information Systems discipline. However, dominant DR thinking takes a technological view of the IT artifact, paying scant attention to its shaping by the organizational context. Consequently, existing DR methods focus on building the artifact and relegate evaluation...

Traditionally, IT projects have been conceptualized as efforts that must be managed and tracked to ensure that requirements are met and resource constraints are respected. We contend that for large IT projects, this conceptualization may be flawed because they occasion broad changes to the IT and work practice environment and can endanger the very...

The World Wide Web, the world’s largest resource for information, has evolved from organizing information using controlled, top-down taxonomies to a bottom up approach that emphasizes assigning meaning to data via mechanisms such as the Social Web (Web 2.0). Tagging adds meta-data, (weak semantics) to the content available on the web. This researc...

Enterprise Architecture (EA) is, by definition, an artificial construct. It includes conceptual objects and attributes created for human purposes. EA models, therefore, require an ontological foundation that goes beyond the ‘furniture of the world’ metaphor. We develop an argument that supports this premise, and demonstrate how the perspective can...

Procedures are a common knowledge form in process industries such as refineries. A typical refinery captures hundreds of procedures documenting actions that operators must follow. Maintaining the action-knowledge contained in these procedures is important because it represents a key organizational asset that can be leveraged to minimize the threat...

Some research papers devoted towards service-oriented architecture (SOA) and computing are presented. A paper by K. Vidyasankar and Gottfried Vossen, deals with multi-level modeling of web service compositions with transactional properties. Dickson K. W. Chiu et. al. propose a methodology to decompose complex process requirements into different typ...

Design research (DR) positions information technology artifacts at the core of the Information Systems discipline. However, dominant DR thinking takes a technological view of the IT artifact, paying scant attention to its shaping by the organizational context. Consequently, existing DR methods focus on building the artifact and relegate evaluation...

'Templates' are pervasive within all the spheres of organizations. They are considered to represent, among other things, rules, routines and best practices accumulated from the past. Despite their ubiquity within many organizations, little is known about these templates. Through this research-in-progress study, we try to investigate why and how the...

We describe results from historical analysis of a large-scale, public sector effort: the IRS Modernization Project that has already spanned a decade and consumed more than 3 billion dollars. The results focus on analysis of Sentiments and Confidence expressed by different stakeholders, as found in various documents. We explore how such analyses may...

Business processes are increasingly distributed and open, making them prone to failure. Monitoring is, therefore, an important concern not only for the processes themselves but also for the services that comprise these processes. We present a framework for multilevel monitoring of these service systems. It formalizes interaction protocols, policies...

Anticipatory standards such as Web service standards are artifacts ‘designed’ by consortium-based standards development organizations. Intricate processes followed to develop anticipatory standards are not well-understood. Recently, the D-S-N model was developed to explain these processes, and suggested that these processes contain cycles of design...

The Internal Revenue Service Business Modernization Project undertaken by the Tax Agency of the US Government has been singled out as an example of a massive failure. As envisioned, the project was intended as an Enterprise-wide intervention that would provide modern services and effective data access to citizenry and several government agencies. A...

Despite several outstanding issues, Web services technology is ideal for solving systems integration problems. Systems integration refers to the seamless interconnection of data and control flows among legacy and other applications to support transaction-intensive processes. This is a significant issue for organizations as they attempt to reduce cy...

Large IT projects, such as the US Government's Internal Revenue Service Business Modernization Effort, can take a decade or more and consume billions of dollars. Traditional approaches to the study of such projects emphasize concerns such as monitoring requirements and tracking progress. We propose an alternative approach guided by a digital ecosys...

With the ceaseless development of new and more advanced technologies, along with their growing influence and control over business and commerce, it is no surprise that the educational community is struggling to come up with programs to educate students to adequately handle these developments. Textbooks are becoming a thing of the past, for informat...

We describe the development of a multi-faceted metric for assessing soft skills of aspiring information systems developers who may become involved in team efforts to design, build or extend complex software-intensive solutions in organizational settings. The development involved a combination of meta-analysis of prior work, analysis of data gathere...

Our case will describe two small to medium enterprises which are located within the same region and sharing the broad industry sector but at a different 'growth stage' perceive the role of Information Systems differently. We describe how these two firms, at different growth stages and at different levels of maturity with respect to their informatio...

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) in legacy industrial era regions face unique challenges that vary from the challenges faced by SMEs in other regions. Especially, SMEs in legacy industrial regions face problems with respect to the access to knowledge networks. The authors discuss an approach that focuses on enabling the SMEs in legacy regions to...

Evaluating collaborative systems remains a significant challenge. Most evaluation methods approach the problem from one of two extremes: focused evaluation of specific system features, or broad ethnographic investigations of system use in context. In this paper, we develop and demonstrate a middle ground for evaluation: explicit reflections on scen...

Business processes are increasingly complex and open because they rely on services that are distributed geographically and across organizations. So, they're prone to several points of failure. Monitoring, therefore, remains an important concern. A new approach specifies and monitors interactions among heterogeneous services by tracking their commit...

We argue that a failure to consider real-world artifacts which are involved in day-to-day 'Information Systems Development' activities as a key reason which renders approaches like method engineering inadequate to practice. We aim to reduce the abstraction and granularity of "method fragments" by re-envisioning them as 'knowledge units'. By doing s...

This paper describes the outcomes of a case study aimed at surfacing and analyzing decision making criteria used to prioritize process automation initiatives with a view toward engendering a process-centric organization and eventually exposing these processes as services. The study used structured interviews, content analysis, and enterprise proces...

Access to the right information is a significant contributor to success in many endeavors. It is, however, difficult to characterize what constitutes right information. This is an important question for systems development projects, which continue to exhibit a sub-par track record of success. This paper describes patterns of information seeking suc...

The Wo rld Wi de Web is ra pidly b ecoming t he tagg ed web a s citizen s t ag resou rces to fa cilitate retrieval. We argue t hat t hese t ags ca pture i ndividual, often i ncomplete, kn owledge ab out a domain. Aggregated across a large number of contributors, they contain the potential to id entify, in a bottom-up manner, key constructs in a dom...

This study questions the traditional view of software architecture as a specification that needs only be understood by software architects and engineers. Based on an intensive study of three software-producing organizations, we identify multiple metaphors (‘Blueprint,’ ‘Literature,’ ‘Language’ and ‘Decision’) that stakeholders use to understand the...

The design and construction of reusable artifacts is a labor-intensive and demands significant time and effort from expert designers. The up-front investment needed for constructing repositories of reusable artifacts is, therefore, often difficult to justify without immediate benefits. This research proposes a methodology, called the Domain Fragmen...

The boundaries and contours of design sciences continue to undergo definition and refinement. In many ways, the sciences of design defy disciplinary characterization. They demand multiple epistemologies, theoretical orientations (e.g. construction, analysis or intervention) and value considerations. As our understanding of this emerging field of st...

Business processes are increasingly complex and open because they rely on services that are distributed geographically and across organizations. As a result, they are prone to several points of failure. Monitoring, therefore, remains an important concern. We describe services monitoring support that integrates monitoring into common development act...

The design of large and complex enterprise integration solutions is a difficult task. It can require solutions that are unique because of constraints from the current set of legacy applications. Design knowledge for enterprise integration solutions is, therefore, difficult to articulate and reuse. In particular, the nature and form of knowledge for...

Process construction from existing services requires use of appropriate design knowledge. For services that are mapped to underlying legacy applications, this takes the form of enterprise integration solutions. Design knowledge in this domain is available in the form of enterprise integration patterns (EIP). These patterns are, however, difficult t...

Service-oriented computing and the ensuing science of services represent significant challenges to academia. As we come to grips with its many implications, we are slowly beginning to realize the challenges of introducing service-orientation in research. The change also requires a rethinking of strategies used for educating computing professionals....

Web service standards, like several other IT standards, are anticipatory, i.e., they are designed and codified in anticipation of actual adoption and use. As a result, the setting of Web service standards takes on properties that resemble the designing of software artifacts. In contrast, the traditional perspective on standards views them as law-li...

This article presents a study identifying benefits and challenges of a novel hospital-to-hospital information technology (IT) outsourcing partnership (HHP). The partnership is an innovative response to the problem that many smaller, rural hospitals face: to modernize their IT infrastructure in spite of a severe shortage of resources. The investigat...

Service-centric computing is one of the new IT paradigms that are transforming the way corporations organize their information resources. However, research and teaching activities in the IS community are lagging behind the recent advances in the corporate world. This paper investigates the impact of service-centric computing on business and educati...

A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and onto...

Improving information systems design outcomes requires not only innovations in tools and methodologies, which are design science efforts, but also willingness on the part of potential developers to incorporate these innovations into their design practice. This is particularly true for reuse-based design, because of developers' reluctance to stray f...

Enterprise integration refers to solutions that facilitate meaningful interactions among heterogeneous legacy applications. The scale, complexity and specificity of most enterprise integration efforts mean that design knowledge for enterprise integration has resisted codification. Important exceptions to this include: use of Business Process Model...

The prerequisites of success and reasons for failure for enterprise integration projects are still not well-understood as evidenced by large failure rates, including cost or schedule overruns, abandoned projects, and projects delivered with diminished functionality. These failures point to the inherently human activities of planning and overseeing...

The purpose of this paper is to stimulate a discourse and search for appropriate theoretical foundations for Web services. The complexity of Web services technology demands such a foundation. A theoretical foundation can provide adequate guidance not only to accelerate research related to Web services, but can also promote their acceptance. Based o...