[AISWorld] Sysiac special issue TOC – Design & Practice

[Göran Goldkuhl]

A special issue on “Design & Practice” has been published in Systems, Signs & Actions (www.sysiac.org<http://www.sysiac.org/>).



The following papers papers are published in this special issue (Vol 9, 2015):



Göran Goldkuhl

Editorial: The design of practice and the practice of design

This editorial investigates the common assumption that design science research is defined as the design of artifacts. A broader view – design of a practice with embedded artifacts – is contrasted to this common assumption. The editorial also investigates the views that DSR is mainly a design practice vs. a research practice. Arguments are presented for a combined view emphasising regular scientific activities, such as theorizing and empirical data collection.



Rob Gleasure:

When is a problem a design science problem?

This paper investigates the types of research problem for which Design Science Research is suitable. This requires that DSR approaches are compared and contrasted with intervention-free empirical approaches, in order to determine the strengths and weakness of each approach. From this distinction, three guidelines are presented to allow Information Systems researchers to identify appropriate research problems for DSR. These three guidelines are discussed in the context of the IS design literature, and illustrated using examples of existing DSR studies.



Patrick Brandtner, Markus Helfert, Andreas Auinger and Kurt Gaubinger:

Conducting focus group research in a design science project: Application in developing a process model for the front end of innovation

This paper applies and tests the focus group procedure by Tremblay et al. in the setting of a design science study on the Front End of Innovation. The main results of the paper are an empirical testing of the Tremblay et al. method and proposed modifications of this method based on said testing. These results confirm that focus groups, conducted in compliance with said method, can be of great use in design science projects to support refining and evaluating artifacts.



Christian Tornack, Björn Pilarski and Matthias Schumann:

Decision support for succession management – Results from a multi-grounded design science research project

This paper employs multi-grounded design science research to develop design principles for succession management systems. Design principles are deduced based on meta-requirements from principal agent theory and an interview study. Subsequently, these principles are tested by developing and empirically evaluating a mockup and a prototypical instantiation. In result, design principles are provided for succession management systems, which are verified through two empirical evaluations.



Jenny Lagsten and Malin Nordström:

Evaluating an IT Governance model-in-use

This paper suggests an evaluation method for comparing an ideal IT Governance model (the model-in-concept) with the corresponding use of the model in daily operations (the model-in-use). The concept of model rationale has been applied in order to express the logic of the model-in-concept as intended by the model developers. In an action research study it is shown how the ITG evaluation method was developed and tested as part of an evaluation of the deployment and use of an ITG model in a large healthcare organisation.





Systems, Signs & Actions (Sysiac) is a true open access journal; free for authors and free for readers. Sysiac is an IS journal devoted to the study of information technology, communication, action and workpractices. Submissions are welcome!



/Göran Goldkuhl

Editor Systems, Signs & Actions (www.sysiac.org)
Professor Information systems
Linköping University
Sweden
goran.goldkuhl at liu.se