Stephen McCarthy

University College Cork | UCC · Department of Business Information Systems

This article provides a systematic review of existing research on problematic smartphone use (PSU) to guide other researchers in search of relevant studies, and to propose areas for future research. In total, 293 studies were analyzed leading to the development of an overview model in the field of PSU, presenting findings on demographic factors, ex...

Information Systems (IS) research is often conducted under the assumption that technology use leads to positive outcomes for different stakeholders. However, many IS studies demonstrate limited evidence of having engaged with the stakeholders that they claim benefit and speak on behalf of. It is therefore not surprising that examples abound of wher...

Shared understanding is essential in interorganizational projects to integrate the divergent knowledge of individual team members and support collaborative knowledge building. This can nevertheless be a challenging undertaking in interorganizational projects as team members must continuously negotiate differences in their organizational and profess...

Purpose The dropout rates of open e-learning platforms are often cited as high as 97%, with many users discontinuing their use after initial acceptance. This study aims to explore this anomaly through the lens of affordances theory, revealing design–reality gaps between users' diverse goals and the possibilities for action provided by an open IT ar...

Social media platforms are a pervasive technology that continue to define our modern world. While social media has no doubt brought many benefits to society in terms of connection and content sharing, numerous concerns remain for the governance of social media platforms going forward; including (but not limited to) the spread of misinformation, hat...

Control is necessary for aligning the actions of management (i.e., controllers) and subordinates (i.e., controlees) around common goals. The enactment of control often fails in practice; however, as controlee perceptions may not match those of controllers, leading to a myriad of possible outcomes. Through an interpretive case study of two inter-org...

IS research often seeks to deliver practical impact, in addition to the traditional requirement for theoretical contribution. While an admirable goal, it is nevertheless a challenging prospect, as key questions remain around how to best facilitate a relationship between IS academic and practitioner communities. To explore this question, our paper i...

Current literature has increased our knowledge of particular aspects of Workforce Transformation (WT), yet we need a comprehensive picture of its characteristics within a Digital Transformation (DT) context. Therefore, the objective of this review paper is to present the defining characteristics of WT. We fulfil this objective through a systematic...

Patient-held Health Information Technologies (HIT) can reduce medical error by improving communication between patients and the healthcare team. Despite the proposed benefits, the roll-out of patient-held HIT solutions remains nascent, leaving considerable gaps in our understanding of the adoption challenges inherent. This paper adopts Normalisatio...

Technical Debt (TD) is a widely discussed metaphor in IT practice focused on increased short-term benefit in exchange for long-term ‘debt’. While it is primarily individuals or groups inside IT departments who make the decisions to take on TD, we find that the effects of TD stretch across the entire organisation. Decisions to take on TD should ther...

This is the list of papers reviewed in the paper "A Triple Bottom-line Typology of Technical Debt: Supporting Decision-Making in Cross-Functional Teams"

Advancements in data storage and computation have brought new opportunities for corporations to better understand consumer behaviour online. Principal among this is the widespread adoption of ‘surveillance capitalism’ practices, where data analytics are utilised to profile users and promote desired outcomes for commercial gain. Nevertheless, the et...

Recorded usage rates of open e-learning platforms are often low, with many users discontinuing their use after initial acceptance. One often cited reason for this acceptance-discontinuance anomaly is the design-reality gap between users’ diverse needs and the designed features of an open e-learning platform. To explore the challenges of user contin...

The internet is a disruptive technology that continues to define our modern world. However, numerous ethical challenges remain for internet governance going forward, e.g. surveillance capitalism, terrorism and radicalisation. The ‘pragmatic’ school of thought in open science advocates for collaboration between diverse stakeholder groups (e.g. citiz...

The diverse backgrounds of distributed team members can pose unique challenges during decision-making processes. Notable of these is the gradual emergence of social identities, where individuals seek to form new social groupings within the temporal context of a project. However, our understanding of social identity within distributed teams remains...

The internet is a disruptive technology that continues to define our modern world. However, numerous ethical challenges remain for internet governance going forward, e.g. surveillance capitalism, terrorism and radicalisation. The ‘pragmatic’ school of thought in open science advocates for collaboration between diverse stakeholder groups (e.g. citiz...

Hear our voice! The digitalization of life has transformed what we believe, how we think, feel and act. Much of this digitalization of life has been brought to citizens by large companies focused on connecting us via internet platforms. But, what do citizens need or wish for from the internet? Questions have been raised around the privacy, securit...

Objectives: To explore and reflect on the current anticoagulation therapy offered to patients with atrial fibrillation (AF), potential challenges and the future vision for oral anticoagulants for patients with AF and healthcare professionals in Ireland. Design: A multistakeholder focus group using a World Café approach. Participants: Nine part...

Background Health information technology (HIT) and associated data analytics offer significant opportunities for tackling some of the more complex challenges currently facing the health care sector. However, to deliver robust health care service improvements, it is essential that HIT solutions be designed by parallelly considering the 3 core pillar...

Participation is critical in information systems development (ISD) for promoting effective knowledge sharing among diverse stakeholder groups. However, the emergence of new, challenging project contexts has led to calls for the 'old, tired' concept of participation to be revisited. In particular, our understanding of intergroup participation within...

Background: Health information technology (HIT) and associated data analytics offer significant opportunities for tackling some of the more complex challenges currently facing the healthcare sector. However, in order to deliver robust healthcare service improvements, it is essential that the design of these solutions considers in parallel the three...

Boundary objects are physical and abstract artefacts which support team interactions across diverse knowledge domains. Despite their relevancy, research into the effectiveness of boundary objects in agile distributed ISD remains nascent. In this paper, we develop a framework to theorize their effectiveness in generating cohesion within distributed...

Background: Health information technology (HIT) and associated data analytics offer significant opportunities for tackling some of the more complex challenges currently facing the health care sector. However, to deliver robust health care service improvements, it is essential that HIT solutions be designed by parallelly considering the 3 core pill...

BACKGROUND Health information technology (HIT) and associated data analytics offer significant opportunities for tackling some of the more complex challenges currently facing the health care sector. However, to deliver robust health care service improvements, it is essential that HIT solutions be designed by parallelly considering the 3 core pillar...

Gamification has been successfully used to achieve desirable outcomes by influencing peoples’ behaviours in areas such as marketing [1] and health campaigns [2]. Open eLearning environments such as massive open online courses (MOOCs) have the potential to increase education for all. However, there is strong evidence that people can disengage and no...

Project Ireland 2040 is planning to invest heavily into upgrading Irish homes to renewable energy sources. From 2021, 45,000 homes per year will be using renewable heat via government driven support schemes. But how is the Irish landscape currently placed in terms of energy consumption and consumer energy consciousness? In this review, energy consu...

The use of technology is intimately linked to our social and psychological being. One the one hand, the rapid adoption of advanced technologies seems to suggest that we are progressing towards a new post-humanist era, where the lines between technology and the human race are becoming increasingly blurred. Yet, news streams continuously report on ca...

Agile distributed Information Systems Development (ISD) is an innately social process in which distributed team members must continuously interact to develop new IT solutions. Existing literature suggests that shared understanding and shared commitment are essential for the effective functioning of agile distributed ISD project teams; however, the...

A mixed methods study of using a digital prescription support to reduce the errors in prescriptions during transition between hospital and general practice

Background: Medication errors frequently occur as patients transition between hospital and the community, and may result in patient harm. Novel methods are required to address this issue. Aim: To assess the feasibility of introducing an electronic patient-held active record of medication status device (PHARMS) at the primary–secondary care interfa...

In recent years, we have witnessed an increasing trend towards the conduct of Information Systems Development (ISD) projects in distributed environments, whereby ISD team members are geographically, spatially and organizationally dispersed. This has been driven by the desire of organizations to expand their pool of development resources and to gain...

Distributed ISD projects are often typified by deep-seated differences between team members from diverse organizational and professional backgrounds. Consequently, literature suggests that cohesion is crucial for aligning the efforts of a distributed ISD team; however, a competing body of literature also asserts that conflict is essential for capit...

The effectiveness of distributed ISD teams is often inhibited by tensions between contextual (macro) and localised (micro) factors. In light of these challenges, literature suggests that cohesion is a key determinant of team performance; however, competing literature asserts that conflict is essential for exploiting diverse knowledge. This suggests...

The areas of Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) and innovation are under-explored in research generally, and specifically in sustainability-oriented research. In this paper we propose a practice-based concept of Compliance-Innovation and set out its significance for sustainability. Development of the concept is based on a literature review and e...

1. Purpose: Cohesion is essential to the success of multiparty Information System Development (ISD) projects that involve team members from different disciplinary and organisational backgrounds. In this paper, we investigate how participatory design tools can be used to facilitate cohesion between diverse stakeholders during the design of IT soluti...

Despite the proliferation of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) for Information Systems Development (ISD), the rate of ISD project failure continues to remain exorbitantly high. In particular, social complexity is increasingly seen as an innate feature of multiparty ISD projects which make them less amenable to being ‘tamed’. However, an understanding...

Information Systems Development (ISD) practice is an inherently challenging undertaking, as exemplified by the high rate of ISD project failures. The scale of the challenge is often heightened in distributed environments where ISD practitioners can face considerable complexity, uncertainty, and contention. The concept of 'wickedness' epitomizes suc...

Information Systems Development (ISD) research projects are those in which the conduction of research is not possible without the development of a tangible ICT solution. ISD research projects face inherent tensions between the need for exploration (i.e. radical innovation) and exploitation (i.e. incremental innovation). This requires varying degree...

The healthcare sector represents a dynamic environment characterised by high levels of complexity and numerous constraints, such as medical protocol, medical device regulation, and data protection (Fichman, Kohli, & Krishnan, 2011; Weeger & Ott-Schwenk, 2017). Designing solutions to address identified problems in the healthcare sector is therefore...

Introduction LEANBH (Learning to Evaluate and manage ANtenatal Blood pressure at Home) is a prospective, observational, non-interventional cohort, pilot study of a novel connected health solution aimed at empowering women to self-manage blood pressure (BP) monitoring in pregnancy. Hypertension in pregnancy affects around 5–8% of all pregnancies and...

Introduction LEANBH (Learning to Evaluate and manage ANtenatal Blood pressure at Home) is a prospective, observational, non-interventional cohort, pilot study of a novel connected health solution aimed at empowering women to self-manage blood pressure (BP) monitoring in pregnancy. Hypertension in pregnancy affects around 5–8% of all pregnancies and...

The ideas presented in this paper have emerged from our curiosity about how technological objects might be leveraged as more than mere evidence in IS research. As constructions of a particular time and place, objects can tell us a great deal about the people, organisations and cultures that produced and used them. Objects reflect the values, belief...

Information Systems development in the healthcare domain presents practitioners with a set of unique and multifaceted challenges. For instance, the healthcare system is a complex and evolving socio-technical environment with multiple stakeholders and numerous constraints (Weeger & Ott-Schwenk, 2017). Consequently, the problems faced by Health Infor...

This paper sets out a typology for organizational ICT practice in order to derive a more holistic perspective of sociomateriality and its constituent elements (i.e. humans, objects, and practice). Seminal literature by Parsons and Bourdieu is combined with sociomateriality literature in order to offer insights into the factors that need to be inves...

As in many sectors of the economy, digital technologies are transforming retail financial services and non-life insurance. This digital transformation will probably continue to shape these two sectors in the coming years, and has already resulted in new products and processes that are developed and implemented by ‘traditional’ providers, such as ba...

Big Data promises benefits for society as well as business. Do policy makers know how best to use this scale of data driven decision-making in an effective way for citizens? Citizen participation is portrayed in literature as a key component in policy decision-making. Yet, this decision-making process to date is often driven by other stakeholders s...

The healthcare sector is a highly regulated environment that is subject to numerous constraints. Standards around medical protocol, medical device certification, and data protection ensure that the wellbeing and privacy of patients is protected during all encounters with the healthcare system. However, a gap has opened up between the need to meet t...

Digital solutions are intelligently and seamlessly wrapping themselves around the complex lives of consumers in a bid to deliver deeply personalized services as and when required. Consumer expectations of the digital world are heightened by the resulting experiences, which ultimately creates further demands on organizations. If we wish to take adva...

Introduction: CIMULACT stands for ‘Citizen and Multi-Actor Consultation on Horizon 2020’. The project engages more than 1000 citizens, and a variety of other actors, across 30 countries in Europe to shape a desirable and sustainable future. In a highly participatory process, the project will provide a unique contribution to European research and in...

Introduction: ‘LEANBH’ is a pilot research project providing remote healthcare monitoring to expectant mothers to improve the detection and treatment of hypertension during pregnancy, a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. Hypertensive disorders of pregnancy are a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mor...

If we are to take advantage of the transformative power of IoT, we need to gaze into the future and consider the complex systems of interactions that are likely to emerge between humans and ever smarter things. Inherent in the design of all future technologies is the need for a speculative story assumed by the designers about how the future will un...

To date there have been a remarkably low number of ethnographies and little or no autoethnographies published in the IS field, where their merits have remained poorly diffused and understood among the IS community. While many autoethnographies begin as journal entries, narratives, blogs, or other forms of personal writing, what is not clear is: (1)...

Abstract: 1. Background: ‘LEANBH’ is a pilot research project providing remote healthcare monitoring to expectant mothers to improve the detection and treatment of hypertension during pregnancy, a leading cause of maternal and perinatal morbidity and mortality. The project is supported by funding from Science Foundation Ireland and involves four pa...

Motivated by a gap in the literature linking compliance and innovation, this paper develops the novel concept of Compliance–Innovation (C–I). Based on a review of the literature and interviews with experienced practitioners, we characterise C–I as a transformational process to drive organisational improvements in sustainability and competitiveness....

A next major impetus for strategic growth can be funded through Compliance-Innovation a transformational process through which conformity with all requirements – compliance – drives innovations in quality. The current lack of integration of Governance Risk and Compliance (GRC), Innovation, IT and Strategy results in lost opportunities for growth. I...

Strategic growth can be delivered through Innovative Compliance a process through which conformity with requirements-compliance-drives improvements in quality, productivity and competitiveness. In this process GRC is an engine for growth by facilitating commercialisation of knowledge and business sustainability. The integration of Governance, R...