[AISWorld] JITTA Vol 12 Issue 4: Contemporary Issues in IS Development

[Tuure Tuunanen]

Read the latest issue of JITTA: http://www.jitta.org

Editorial: Contemporary Issues in IS Development - http://aisel.aisnet.org/jitta/vol12/iss4/1

Introducing Usability Activities into Open Source Software Development Projects – Searching for a Suitable Approach.
Mikko Rajanen, Netta Iivari, and Kaisa Anttila - http://aisel.aisnet.org/jitta/vol12/iss4/2

Development of IT-enabled Chronic Care Management for the Medically Underserved: A Contextualist Framework
Darryl S. Romanow, Lars Mathiassen, Glenn Landers, and Chris Parker - http://aisel.aisnet.org/jitta/vol12/iss4/3

EDITORIAL NEWS

This issue completes our 12th volume and our third volume as a journal of the Association for Information Systems (AIS). It is also our pleasure to announce the co-operation agreements with two AIS Special Interest Groups, the AIS SIG for Services and the AIS SIG Adoption and Diffusion of Information Technology, as well as the IFIP Working Group 8.2 for Information Systems and Organizations, and Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST). Our goal is to publish a special section or a special issue for each of these communities. In the future, we look forward to welcoming other interested research communities, and thus further developing the journal.

THE CURRENT ISSUE

In this issue, we publish two articles that address contemporary issues in information systems development. Rajanen et al. (2011) have addressed two important themes in their research. Open source software (OSS) development has been changing the way we currently conceptualize development work. Rajanen et al. present four case studies that have applied the OSS approach to software development in different settings. The focus of their study has, however, been the usability issues in OSS development. The paper contributes to the literature by experimenting with different approaches for introducing usability activities into the OSS development context. Rajanen et al. use a consultative approach in two of the reported case studies and find that the consultative approach did not have an impact. The two latter case studies use a participative approach, which has a greater impact. These findings are important, not only in terms of the OSS development, but  for the practice of information systems development in general.
 
The second article addresses a similarly important theme in information systems development. Romanov et al. (2011) take a contextualist view to the development of IT-enabled chronic care management. They apply the principles of contextual design and contextual inquiry (Holtzblatt and Beyer 1993) for context inferred health information systems development and propose a framework for the purpose. Romanov et al. (2011) demonstrate the use of the framework through a case study. The case study illustrates how IT-enabled support for chronic care management was designed and implemented in a community clinic in the Southeast U.S. The article applies the Chronic Care Model (Wagner et al. 2001) as the theoretical foundation for the development of the framework. The article also provides interesting methodological insights to the academic audience. Finally, the paper depicts how to apply Collaborative Practice Research (Mathiassen 2002) in a case study setting over the length of three years.

REFERENCES

Holtzblatt, K., and H. Beyer, “Making customer-centered design work for teams,” Communications of the ACM, 1993, 36:10, pp. 92–103.

Mathiassen, L., “Collaborative practice research,” IT & People, 2002, 15:4, pp. 321–345.
Rajanen, M., N. Iivari, and K. Anttila, “Introducing Usability Activities into Open Source Software Development Projects – Searching for a Suitable Approach,” Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), 2011, 12:4, Article 2, pp. 5–26.

Romanov, D., L. Mathiassen, G. Landers, and C. Parker, “Development of IT-enabled Chronic Care Management for the Medically Underserved: A Contextual Framework,” Journal of Information Technology Theory and Application (JITTA), 2011, 12:4, Article 3,pp. 27–50.

Wagner, E.H., B.T. Austin, C. Davis, M. Hindmarsh, J. Schaeffer, and A. Bonomi, “Improving chronic illness care: Translating evidence into action,” Health Affairs, 2001, 20:6, pp. 64–78.

Best regards,

Tuure Tuunanen, D.Sc. (Econ.)
Professor 
University of Oulu
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CSL Global Faculty, The Center for Services Leadership,
Arizona State University, http://wpcarey.asu.edu/csl/
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Editor-in-Chief, Journal of Information Technology Theory 
and Application (JITTA), http://www.jitta.org
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