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