In this paper we examine some pragmatic concepts that we believe have a potential in relation to three core activities of the IS-field; 1) description and understanding, 2) evaluation, and 3) design. The concepts that we will examine are “social activity”, “communicative act”, “sequences of communicative acts” or “exchange types”, “communicative feedback” and “turn management”. We describe the concepts and then exemplify how they can be used to analyze web services by examining e-mail and Wikipedia as two activities currently on the web. Our analysis leads to a partly new description of both phenomena. It also leads to a number of open questions concerning the functionalities of both phenomena.
Att säkerställa kvalitet i den service som en kommun erbjuder sina medborgare är en komplicerad uppgift. Olika analysinstrument och arbetsformer behöver tillämpas för att säkerställa tillräckligt tydligt medborgarfokus. I detta arbete har en metod utvecklats för att analysera kvalitet i det elektroniska servicemötet. Denna metod bygger på att betrakta organisationens ambitioner och de instrument som tillhandahålls för medborgarna i kontrast till den livssituation som medborgaren befinner sig i. Olika analysinstrument har tillämpats där resultaten pekar på att de tjänster som Marks kommun idag tillhandahåller för elektronisk kontakt inte i tillräckligt grad motsvarar medborgarnas förväntningar. I och med att arbetet i detta inledningsskede bara fokuserat på den elektroniska kontakten så är nästa steg att 1) bredda analysen till att också innefatta övriga sätt att ha kontakt med medborgaren och 2) studera samspelet mellan olika kontaktsätt samt 3) analysera processer och intern koordination hos Marks kommun för att säkerställa kvalitet i kontaktverksamheten.
Ett mera kunskapsintensivt arbetsliv och tilltagande utmaningar för välfärdssamhället samverkar till att öka behovet av forskarkompetenser inom den offentliga sektorn. Allt fler personer med kvalificerade befattningar kommer i en nära framtid att behöva utföra forskningsliknande arbetsuppgifter, och delta i olika former av utvecklingsarbete och problemlösning som förutsätter ett tillgodogörande av vetenskapliga och analytiska arbetssätt. Förvaltningsdoktorer skulle kunna fungera som brobyggare mellan den svenska högskolan och den offentliga sektorns professioner, och därmed bidra till ett ökat in- och utflöde mellan å ena sidan den högre utbildningen och forskningen och å den andra en central del av välfärdsektorn. I denna rapport presenterar forskarna Björn Brorström, Olov Forsgren, Mikael Lind och Mikael Löfström ett förslag till en nydanande och professionsinriktad doktorsutbildning som riktar sig till framtidens förvaltningsexpertis.
This paper addresses collaborative research as an action research approach. Many times action research is described as embracing one research organisation and one business organisation. We are challenging this view by introducing the concept of collaborative practice. A collaborative practice can be seen as a cluster of local practices and researchers working together. In this way, a collaborative practice should enable joint learning between, and joint development efforts for, several business practices as well as contributing to general practice and the scientific body of knowledge. Based on a case study within efficient IT Service Management (ITSM), the concept of collaborative practice and its relation to other adjacent concepts (such as local practice, general practice and scientific body of knowledge) have been characterized. Our results should be viewed as preliminary since they are gathered from an ongoing project.
A service encounter is conceived as an interactive process between a service provider and a service receiver. It has however largely been analyzed as a non-interactive phenomenon which lead to a superficial and incomplete understanding of the dynamics of service encounters as an interactive process. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether pragmatic concepts could form a foundation for the conception of service encounters as an interactive phenomenon. The results show that in order to capture the essence of interaction in service encounters from a pragmatic view researchers should turn to the concept of action. In order to avoid a one-side view (the customer or the company/company representative) of the service encounter the inter-related actions need to be taken into consideration.
Pragmatism as theoretical foundation and research approach has been applied in different practical settings by a number of different scholars. One approach, addressing the need for considering different stakeholder's views associated with actions being performed, has been coined as co-design by Olov Forsgren. In this short paper we revisit some of the philosophical roots of co-design in an knowledge endeavour of regarding co-design as social constructive pragmatism. By doing that we try to strengthen the theoretical base for co-design as well as getting inspiration for new development of the co-design movement. Social constructive pragmatism is conceived as a social constructive process in which observations by inquirers are essential. The basic categories in co-design are the viewer often described as the actor, the viewing often described as the action and the target of the viewing, often described as the object. The meta-viewer is also an important part of co-design in viewing the whole scene of actors, actions and objects. In this paper a framework that relates co-design to an action cycle constituted by three steps (conditions, action, and result) as well as the notion of inquiry is presented.
The need for alignment between business strategies and business processes is today manifested in many different ways. This chapter presents experiences from a collaborative process modeling and process design effort performed at Intersport Sweden. The main purpose with the process modelling and process design was to serve, as a solid base for the transformation of Intersport Sweden into the future. In this effort an important part was that the new process design was in clear alignment with the new strategic business model. By a collaborative co-design approach for deriving and designing business process models diverse stakeholders’ knowledge and interest were captured in the development of tangible process descriptions of the future. The new strategic business plan has through collaborative process design been given a meaning and participating actors have become committed to implement this new business strategy.
Business strategies need to be aligned with business process models. In this chap-ter experiences from a collaborative process modeling effort performed at Inter-sport, Sweden, for the purpose of creating a solid base for taking a business into the future will be elaborated on. In this effort the new process design is aligned with strategic goals. By a co-design approach for deriving business process mod-els diverse stakeholders’ knowledge and interest are captured in the development of tangible descriptions of the future. Business plans are given a meaning and par-ticipating actors become committed to implement business strategies.
In information systems research, significant attention has been paid to the discrepancy between organizational context and technology. In the IS discourse this is, among other initiatives, expressed as the need to create alignment between business and IT. Translated into the domain of business process management (BPM), this will put demand on achieving alignment between used models in process modeling. An action research approach has been adopted to explore a multi-layered thinking in process modeling, which has been validated through the development and application of a multi-layered framework with a consultancy firm. Applying the multi-layered framework has addressed three areas of concern related to managing alignment 1) focal areas, 2) abstraction levels, and 3) degree of formalism. In this setting, a multi-layered thinking during process modeling and design has facilitated managing alignment of business and IS/IT. Further research however concerns the application of the framework in other settings.
The deregulation of the energy sector has led to a need to study service encounters between energy companies and customers. Due to that a continuous development of energy companies’ services will be even more important in the future this paper reports upon key values of energy customers of today and tomorrow. Based on the characteristics of the MeWe-generation together with attitudes and behaviour of customers of today seven different scenarios about future service encounters has been generated. An important characteristic of these scenarios are that customers of tomorrow are interpersonal individualists in the sense that they have an increased focus in self-reliance, self-realization and self-expression. They also participate actively in different physical and virtual communities and value friends as well as authenticity. Key values expressed by customers related to the services provided by energy companies are environmentally friendliness, cost efficiency, and technology intensive.
Significant attention has been paid to the improvement of system development practices. There are theories and methods that are to be used for such improvement purposes. The criticism towards these theories and methods is that many of them have a narrow focus on the system development process, methods, and tools. Too little attention is paid to business orientation, organisational aspects and social factors. In this paper we present a framework that goes beyond this narrow focus in order to serve as a support for directing focus during improvement of system development practices. The development of the framework has been driven by experiences derived from four action research projects focusing on the improvement of system development practices. Generated categories from these experiences have been validated theoretically and internally through a multi-grounded theory development process in order to arrive at a practical theory.
Because of globalization and the rise of Internet, the competitive environment of firms is undergoing a fundamental change. Firms are increasingly forced to collaborate in networks. At the same time, social networks are growing tremendously in use and in functionality. In this paper, the current network era is perceived from a communication perspective. How do people communicate in a network? How could the communication be improved? For the analysis we draw on the Language Action Perspective (LAP). Central to this analysis is the question what people try to achieve by communication in social terms. At its inception, LAP was used in an intra-organizational context. The question is whether the same analysis and the same models are also applicable in a network context.