George Kuk’s research while affiliated with Nottingham Trent University and other places

Most of the service innovation in e‐government initiatives has been initially focused on making a digital version of an equivalent physical service, followed by creating new services through either adopting new business models or overhauling existing infrastructures. The former approach uses variants of e‐commerce business models to drive service innovation whereas the latter entails changes to the backend for driving system efficiency and integration, which later serve for reorganising and improving service provision. Each approach presents a different way of assembling services, infrastructures, people and business models. The ramifications of each assemblage to service innovation are less understood. This paper seeks to examine the intended and unintended consequences of these two contrasting approaches inductively and deductively. Our findings show that a frontend approach enables quick improvements and enacts a variety of structures, with each structure inscribing a set of new path‐dependent routines in the infrastructures. In the backend approach it took longer to introduce new services. Yet the services were of a higher quality and required less modification in the long run. Quantitative analyses confirmed these findings. We attributed the alignment advantage of backend approach to better interdepartmental collaboration organised around a technology platform for system and service integration, concentrating resources on a coherent rather than a diverse set of business models. This approach realigns practices and routines and technology internally, whereas the explorative, diverse use of business models in the frontend approach for service innovation is less sustainable.

As firms increasingly sanction an open sourcing strategy, the question of which open source project to undertake remains tentative. The lack of established metrics makes it difficult to formulate such strategy. While many projects have been formed and created, only a few managed to remain active. With the majority of these projects failing, firms need a reliable set of criteria to assess what makes a project appealing not only to developers but also to visitors, users and commercial sponsors. In this paper, we develop a theoretical model to explore the contextual and causal factors of project attractiveness in inducing activities such as source code contribution, software maintenance, and usage. We test our model with data derived from more than 4000 projects spanning 4 years. Our main findings include that projects’ set of conditions such as license restrictiveness and their available resources provide the context that directly influence the amount of work activities observed in the projects. It was also found that indirect and unintended contributions such as recommending software, despite of being non-technical, cannot be ignored for project activeness, diffusion and sustainability. Finally, our analysis provide evidence that higher attractiveness leads to more code-related activities with the downside of slowing down responsiveness to address projects’ tasks, such as the implementation of new features and bug fixes. Our model underscores the significance of the reinforcing effects of attractiveness and work activities in open source projects, giving us the opportunity to discuss strategies to manage common traps such as the liability of newness. We conclude by discussing the applicability of the research model to other user-led initiatives.

Prior research has extended Giddens' (1984) structuration theory to incorporate material agency as part of a social-technical ensemble. Yet the ways in which physicaldigital spaces contextualise interactions and structure work practices is under explored. In our study, we extend concepts of locale and regionalisation from structuration theory to IS fields of research in digitally mediated communication, and define 'technical settings of interaction' constituted by human and material agencies. The case of gender segregated work in Saudi is used to illustrate the performativity of these digital spaces, and shows how workers use technical configurations in ICTs to create zones of interaction that can challenge existing cultural norms. Finally, we argue that attending to Giddens' focus on time-space not only adds an additional level of analysis to studying technology use, but also shows the potential of structurational research in contributing to discussions on materiality. © (2013) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office. All rights reserved.

Over the last decade, there has been a tremendous growth and exploitation of open source geospatial software and technologies. A combination of factors is driving this momentum, including the contributions made by hundreds of developers and the leading role played by the Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo), aiming primarily to support and promote the collaborative development of open source geospatial technologies and data. This article seeks to map out the social history of collaborative activities within the OSGeo ecosystem. We used the archival logs of developers' contributions, specifically looking for boundary spanning activities where contributions crossed multiple projects. The analysis and visualization of these activities allow us to have a better understanding of the role of boundary spanning in the resourcing of each project, the incubation mechanism advocated by OSGeo, and the significance of the social interrelatedness among projects. The data consisted of the subversion (SVN) commit history made by individual developers in the programming code repository. We applied several network analytical and visualization techniques to explore the data. Our findings indicate that more than one in seven developers spanned multiple projects which potentially had the effects of shaping the projects' directions, and increased knowledge flow and innovation. In addition, the OSGeo's incubation mechanism provided an important encouragement for boundary spanning and increased knowledge sharing. By studying the social history of contributions, further tools can be developed in future to assist tracking of the social history, and make developers mindful of the significance of the interdependence among projects and hence continuously contribute to the health of the OSGeo ecosystem.

Strong claims are made about the potential of opening government data to drive service innovation. Yet little is known about the detailed processes of how hackers create or reshape services out ofnew releases of public datasets, and the conditionsfor the move from data release to service innovation. We argue the utility of open data is accrued through the creation of new artifacts with enhanced performativity transformed by human and material agency. In a multimethod study of the open data hackers in the UK we identified a series of interlocking processes involved in the conversion of public data into services of public value. We found that few of the 'rapid prototypes' developed through hack day events are maintained or sustained as service innovations beyond those events. Five artifacts provided the value stack of complementarities: cleaned data available through APIs or bulk downloads, linkable data, shared source code and configuration, source code repositories, and web technologies. Our findings also suggest that only a few open datasets induce the process of change, and that initial contributions are driven by the use values but can only be sustained through an open innovative approach to induce further collaboration within a wider open data community. © (2011) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved.

In the Netherlands, there are two ways cities acquire the smart city status: one way has business models preceding information architecture and the other takes an opposite direction. We used two cities to examine the underlying differences of these two approaches in terms of service enhancement, resource implications, and the sustainability of service development. The first case focused on creating business value through the use of technology by enhancing existing services and/or bringing new services whereas the second case started with creating an infrastructure that served as a technology platform to induce changes in business practices. We found that the first case accumulated business value faster with more new services made available to the public. In contrast, the second case was more resource-intensive and relatively slower in bringing new services to the general public, yet the services were much improved and sustainable over time.

This paper aims to present a cultural analysis of collaboratiue technologies in the workplace. it examines gender-segregated work in Saudi-Arabia, and presents two contrasting cases of It usage that act either to enable or constrain cultural change. Using Structuration Theory, the study exemplifies the dynamic and detailed analysis this lens can prouide to cultural IS research. The study also examines Giddens' theorising on the regionalisation of social interactions in time-space. -By applying this in the iS context, the study attempts toprouide a better understanding of the contextuality ofelectronically mediated communication. © (2011) by the AIS/ICIS Administrative Office All rights reserved.