Dear colleagues,
The June 2020 issue of the Journal of Information Technology (JIT) has been published. This is the TOC:
Julia Kotlarsky, Bart van den Hooff, Leonie Geerts
In an era when technologies have become a backbone of most organizations, IT support functions are under immense pressure not only to ensure provision and reliability of IS and technologies but also to resolve IS incidents of different severity when they disrupt organizations' "business-as-usual." This article addresses this challenge by investigating how organizational IT functions coordinate their work under different degrees of uncertainty in order to provide reliable IT services. We conceptualize coordination in IT support functions as a process that unfolds over time through interactions between four underlying coordination practices employed to provide reliable IT services: prioritizing tasks, following procedures, using roles and responsibilities, and utilizing networks. Furthermore, we show how these coordination practices change when IT incidents cause a shift from normal (i.e. "business-as-usual") to emergency conditions. Our empirical research in two IT functions supporting two types of organizations (traditional and fast-response) demonstrate that IT functions in these two types of organizations respond to emergencies differently. Specifically, in emergencies, an IT function supporting a fast-response organization shifts to emergency coordination practices momentarily, as it abandons "normal" coordination practices to rely on an extensive set of formal practices specifically designed for such situations. In contrast, an IT function supporting a traditional organization is unprepared for emergencies-coordinating under emergency conditions involves improvisation, because coordination practices designed to support business-as-usual are not suitable for dealing with emergency situations.
pp. 123–142
High failure rates of information systems development (ISD) projects continue to trouble organizations and information systems practices. Such a state of affairs has been of great concern for the information systems discipline for decades, motivating information systems researchers to focus on and extensively study ISD project failure. However, the increasing complexity and uncertainty of ISD projects and contemporary system development processes are challenging ISD project failure scholarship. In this article, we ask the questions: What are the contributions and weaknesses of the extant ISD project failure/success literature? What are potential avenues to move the ISD literature forward? To answer these questions, first, we present a literature review that assesses research contributions within the major perspectives on ISD failure (i.e. rationalist, process and narrative). While the extant research within all perspectives make significant contributions to knowledge, we find that researchers remain preoccupied with 'project failure' as an end state of an ISD project. They pay little attention to problematic situations arising during ISD projects before they become failed projects. Based on the review and critique of the literature, we then argue that there is a significant benefit in extending research focus from ISD project failure to 'ISD project distress', which we define as a harmful project condition involving dynamic and fluid constellation of critical problems that are difficult to identify, understand and resolve. While ISD project distress is an increasingly perilous and consequential phenomenon, little is known about its nature and potential responses. Drawing from the sensemaking literature, we propose a multilevel theoretical framework for understanding the nature and sources of ISD project distress that provides a foundation for exploring early detection and timely response. We demonstrate the theoretical and practical relevance of the concept of ISD project distress and propose a corresponding research agenda.
pp. 143–160
Free/open source software users were previously responsible for managing the challenges associated with their software themselves. Recently, a new generation of entrepreneurs seized this emerging market opportunity by positioning themselves as service providers for free/open source software users. Conceptualizing such providers as "institutional entrepreneurs," we find that due to the nature of the free/open source software context, they exhibit a different set of legitimation actions compared with similar efforts in other contexts. Based on our empirical analysis of free/open source software service providers and drawing on prior theory, we identify two entrepreneurial actions aimed at gaining legitimacy specific to the free/open source software context, namely, product-based theorization actions and evangelization actions. We also demonstrate that institutional entrepreneurship is shaped by the nature of free/open source software products and the openness values at the core of the free/open source software movement. Our work hence underscores the importance of the context of institutional entrepreneurship.
pp. 161–178
Maturity models can be seen as support tools for an organization. Their importance is increasing in the scientific community and IT (information technology) organizations are starting to implement them. The main objective of maturity models is to evaluate and improve the organization's practices by creating an improvement roadmap. However, the utilization of the methodologies and methods by this community for the development of this kind of tools is not consensual. Several investigators have created guidelines for the development of maturity models, but the authors are not adopting them; they prefer to adopt their own methodologies. In this research, with the objective of reviewing the methodologies, methods, and guidelines used by the scientific community to develop IT maturity models, a systematic literature review and a critical analysis were made in order to realize a comparison between IT maturity models and non-IT maturity models. In total, 109 articles of maturity models' development were analyzed. A discussion of the articles' results was realized.
Special Issue Call for Papers:
Editors: Danny Gozman, Kalle Lyytinen, Tom Butler
Editors: Julia Kotlarsky, Ilan Oshri, Oliver Krancher, Rajiv Sabherwal
Subscribe to receive JIT's special issue call for papers and online-first publications alerts:
JIT homepage (note, we are publishing now with SAGE, not Palgrave/Springer as previously)
Best wishes,
Daniel