- Email: [email protected]
Special Section: The UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) 2012 Conference. Innovating Information Systems
International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Information Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt
Editorial
Special Section: The UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) 2012 Conference. Innovating Information Systems
The 17th annual UKAIS International Conference (including PhD consortium) was held at New College, University of Oxford, on 26th–28th March 2012. Over 100 international delegates participated in the event, which saw the presentation of over 50 academic papers. The PhD event was sponsored by SAS, the leaders in business analytics software and services and the largest independent vendor in the global business intelligence market (www.sas.com). This was the fourth conference that the UKAIS www.ukais.org has organised using the superb facilities of the University of Oxford – this year matched by glorious early Spring sunshine and a beautiful ancient venue popular for the filming of ‘Harry Potter’. Many of the leading international IS academics and senior Professors participated in the conference. Keynote speakers included: Professor Leslie Willcocks (Information Systems and Innovation Group, London School of Economics); Professor Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford); Dr Charles Randall (Solutions Marketing Manager, SAS) and Professor Bob Wood (Manchester Business School, University of Manchester). The conference event and programme was chaired and organised by Dr Ann Latham (Wolverhampton University) and Dr Gill Green (Bolton University) and the main conference coordinator Abi Redmond. The PhD consortium was chaired and organised by Dr Diana Limburg (Oxford Brookes University) and Dr Rachel Mclean (Bolton University). The conference theme ‘Innovating Information Systems’ was chosen as an opportunity for academics and practitioners to present, showcase, debate, critique and propose actions to address important issues facing individuals, organisations, government and society who are developing, adopting and assimilating new IT innovations and complex systems with a corresponding information proliferation. This is exemplified by ubiquitous information systems, social media, cloud and Internet technologies. Information Systems (IS) as an academic discipline has never been more relevant and potentially is now entering its most exciting and challenging era. This was certainly the most predominant view of the leading IS academics and industry practitioners within the conference. The keynote presentations, special tracks and panel sessions were organised to provide a platform for this current debate and also to build a new foundation to continue across the next series of UKAIS conferences. Our first keynote presenter, Professor Bob Wood addressed the PhD consortium. His talk ‘From informed CURIOSITY to INFORMED Curiosity’ was motivational and based on many decades of successful PhD supervision, the joint development of the Multiview 0268-4012/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2012.05.007
systems development methodology and developing 5* research departments. He postulated that the problem with IS development methodologies was not that they were neither relevant nor highly useful but that practitioners did not use them. The problem was therefore sociotechnical, cultural and organisational. The UKAIS PhD consortium has been running for over 15 years and is a highly regarded and valuable international event aimed at inspiring and facilitating the next generation of IS researchers, academics and practitioners. 12 leading IS academics who are all experienced PhD supervisors and examiners voluntarily facilitated at the event – working with small groups of PhD students (there were 20 in total) to provide an independent view of their research topics, progress and emerging contributions to knowledge. For the first time this included a sponsored field trip (organised by Dr Diana Limburg and Geoffrey Taylor the SAS Academic Programme Manager) to the state of the art European headquarters of SAS in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. A highly stimulating and enjoyable afternoon session included presentations by Dr John Morton (Chief Technology Officer), Dr Charles Randall (Solutions Marketing Manager), Senior SAS Analyst Nigel Law and also recent PhD graduate Analyst, Dr Iain Brown. This was followed by a refreshing walk around the beautiful grounds down to the River Thames – a benchmark for how to develop a creative and rewarding organisational workplace culture. Professor Leslie Willcocks launched the main conference programme with the second keynote talk entitled: ‘The Case of the Strange Bedfellows: Innovation and Outsourcing’. Professor Willcocks is internationally acclaimed as a leader in the field of outsourcing information technology, systems and services. Leslie gave a highly informative and interesting presentation highlighting the latest trends in global sourcing and illustrating this with a ‘Global Sourcing learning Curve’. He emphasised the need for collaboration and innovation – especially focusing on the role of building relationships and partnerships between suppliers and clients to engender; sustainable partnering behaviours, high trust, flexibility, reciprocity and informed risk sharing. He then moved on to illustrate various types of innovation (IT operational, business process, product and service) and mapping performance impact against collaboration and innovation focus. Examples, such as the Terminal 5 agreement approach at Heathrow Airport, were provided to demonstrate a process of collaborative innovation where ‘leadership shapes the context for collaboration, innovation and high performance’. The role of contracting was explored in the context of collaborative innovation for sourcing in the London financial markets. Leslie finished by focusing on a set of ‘new rules’ for
304
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
collaborative innovation arguing the case for more co-managed governance structure, multi-functional teams that extend across organisations and people and teaming which provides the ability to collaborate ‘within a client organisation, between client and supplier, and between suppliers in multi-vendor environments’. Behaviour and trust was seen as key to developing innovation and managing power relations and partnering-based relationships. These summary lessons are encapsulated in Professor Willcock’s latest serious of books on outsourcing practice; the IT outsourcing landscape and the handbook of global outsourcing and offshoring; for further information see www.outsourcingunit.org. The third keynote talk was presented by Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute: ‘Big Data in the Future of Government’. Professor Margetts started by giving a brief history of government and information systems critiquing the rather ‘chequered past’ of large scale government IT projects where there have been many large scale IT project failures (many of these are documented in official government National Audit Office reports as well as being the topic of many academic research papers and studies). The 1990s were seen as heralding the rise of electronic government whilst in the 2000s post-austerity governments are moving to what is termed ‘digital by default’ in an attempt to drive costs down, provide more efficient services and to be more creative and innovative in using the large scale data and information that is now collected routinely at source. This is described in detail in her co-authored book ‘Digital Era Governance’ where themes relating to New Public Management (disaggregation, competition, incentivization) have been seen to give way to Digital-Era Governance (DEG) with the emphasis on reintegration, needs based holism and digitilization. Professor Margetts argues that DEG2 is being seen as a way to cope with austerity but the government lacks ‘intelligent centre/devolved delivery architecture’. This is where more and more citizens are moving online, governments are moving to ‘digital by default’ and ‘Big Data’ is generated as the natural byproduct with characteristics of being transactional, real-time and comprised of whole population demographics (complete census type data and not sample or survey based). The challenges centre on understanding how to make this vast data resource, useful, relevant and meaningful to effectively inform policy and decision making. Innovative visualisation techniques and technologies are being used along with creative use of Business Intelligence and Analytics technologies. Professor Margetts provided examples such as: administrative trends/edits in Wikipedia, structures (nodality) for the government online, citizen-sourced information for election monitoring and disaster coordination, and police and citizen reporting of violence (using location information and content). Helen concluded by outlining how significant cost savings could be achieved from big data use and also pointed to the challenges of big data; ethical issues including privacy, consistency and representativeness. The need for new information skills relating to visualization, incentivization and dealing with blurred organizational boundaries was then highlighted, if the potential for big data in government is to be achieved. The two academic keynotes were complemented by an invited industry/practitioner keynote from the conference sponsors, SAS. Dr Charles Randall, a senior solutions marketing manager, made a fascinating presentation entitled “Rhino Footprints: managing innovation in analytical software development”. Charles is an expert in analytics, performance management, and customer profitability analysis and has experience across a wide selection of industries from telecommunication to wholesale distribution. His role encompasses developing solutions to apply SAS’s various technologies to business problems. Charles provided many state of the art examples of how SAS analytic solutions are being used innovatively within organisations and business. A not so obvious application was related to the use of SAS software by volunteers for monitoring
endangered wildlife species. In this case the Wildtrack non-invasive wildlife monitoring project centred on capturing images of tiger footprints in a sanctuary in order to create an algorithm for identification in the wild. Dr Randall identified four ways that innovation happens in SAS. The first route is through learnt experience of applying SAS applications within organisations. This helps develop mature applications such as intelligent workforce analytics. The second way is based on emergence of new applications based on current needs leading to solutions for customer experience analytics (using graphical ad hoc reporting, OLAP and dynamic real time data collection). A third way is more formal and developed through heavy investment (over 25% of turnover) in research and development for new tools, analytics software and solutions for new sectors and markets. The fourth way is reactive; an example provided was based on developing mobile business intelligence applications for the Apple iPad or Android equivalent technologies. This enabled BI ‘on the go’ and the ability to access and analyse data anywhere with advanced visualization capabilities. This led to questions related to what skills and expertise were needed in organisations to harness BI and analytics power. A blend of technical (enterprise architecture) skills, people and presentation skills and enthusiasm to develop innovative solutions were seen as the ideal mix for the next generation of graduates. A new and innovative development for the 2012 conference was provided through the active participation of senior IS Professors (the Council of IS Professors, CISP). Professor David Wainwright from the Information Management Innovation research group at Northumbria University (and also the Acting President for UKAIS) organised and chaired this fascinating event, “Leadership in IS” which provided an opportunity to debate current challenges and issues facing IS academics and practitioners. Panel Members included: Professor Ray Paul, Dept of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University Professor Bob Wood, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester Professor Zahir Irani, Head of School, Brunel Business School, Brunel University Professor Neil Doherty, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University Professor David Wastell, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham Professor Irani commenced the panel session with the provocative title “Is Information Systems Dead?” He then cleverly illustrated the grand challenges facing IS through the acronym ISISDE. I represented innovation (discipline of IS and pedagogy); S was seen as safety (IS in health, energy etc.); I again for information (business intelligence, data visualization, the post knowledge economy); S for security (desktop, transnational movements and population mobility, cyber terrorism); D represented delivery (innovations like Amazon or new forms of services and products with e-supply chains) and finally E was for environment (developing sustainable government policies for our future). He concluded with a definite statement that “IS was not Dead!” and we should mobilise and be extremely positive about the future. Professor Wood followed this theme taking a very reflective and historical view of IS. This in part was inspired by reading a book by George Dyson “Turin’s Cathedral”, about the history of computing. Bob made a strong point that computing applications excelled in a world of predictability and therefore gave scope for massive improvements in automation and efficiency. However, IS was more in the domain where systems were complex or impossible to computerise making them more interesting and challenging.
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
Hence there was a need to set (perhaps 5) new grand challenges for the IS Discipline. Future conferences will debate and define these. Professor Doherty focused on issues around career routes for the aspiring IS academic. His view was that current developments in academia (Research Excellence Framework (REF), high personal tuition fees, new managerialism) were distorting what we recognise as the collegial university. Mixed messages were being delivered whereby academics have to be excellent researchers (high level REF outputs), excellent teachers (high National Student Survey (NSS) scores) and demonstrate high professional engagement with industry (Impact and Enterprise). Achieving this balance is increasingly difficult, and allied to the problem of where IS is situated and taught within universities (Business Schools, Computing or others). However – a positive conclusion was that REF, even though it is damaging and distorting, would not survive in its present form and there would be a new emphasis on developing a better balance between teaching, research and enterprise (away from what is termed ‘REFbots’ – academics who only write publications and do not engage with the wider impact agenda or in mainstream academic citizenship – teaching students!). Professor David Wastell continued to play ‘devil’s advocate’ and provided examples of IS failures in society and industry thereby illustrating the need for a strong, innovative and vibrant IS discipline to research and develop new ways for dealing with important problems. A powerful illustration was taken from his work with Sue White on the tragic ‘Baby P’ case for social services. This represented a systemic failure – but was a classic situation where IT systems, if properly designed and implemented, could have prevented this occurring. David’s focus on researching and learning the lessons from this failure has both academic and popular streams of dissemination. Impact is achieved by publishing the lessons about the dangers of poorly designed IT systems (he terms it an ‘iron cage’ resulting from an overly prescriptive workflow system) in media such as the Guardian newspaper. This then had an influence on new government policy – demonstrating the importance and relevance of good IS research. The final speaker was Professor Ray Paul. Ray, in his own words, is seen as a ‘discombobulator’. He controversially made the proposition that it was time to seriously rethink university organisation (focusing on teaching IS as an example). This was where undergraduate students, postgraduate students, researchers and academics should be seen as a general resource – not put into silos under a traditional pedagogic model. We should offer our services to industry and organisations on a fully charged out basis to solve serious and relevant world problems. Learning would take place through these activities which would focus on innovation and teamwork. This should also be enjoyable, fun and lead to worthwhile results. This provoked many comments from the workshop participants reinforcing the need to rethink what we do in the IS discipline in terms of teaching and perhaps more action centred research. A need for an identified body of theory was also seen as important – but more impactful and practical application of IS knowledge would lead to this. Professor Guy Fitzgerald, the outgoing UKAIS President, stated that he agreed in principle and that this was not an issue in industry where IS was seen as integral and vitally important creating a growing demand for talented IS graduates. Papers from the UKAIS 2012 Conference selected for this Special Section After a further review process, three papers have been selected to represent the theme of the conference “Innovating Information Systems”. The first paper by Ashurst, Freer, Ekdahl and Gibbons “Exploring IT-Enabled Innovation: A New Paradigm?” represents exploratory collaborative research work (academia and industry) that focuses on the role of IT within innovation processes and strategy. Ashurst, best known for his work on benefits-led approaches to IT, examines
305
this within the context of 10 case studies of what were perceived as successful IT-enabled innovations. The research identifies a number of practices that contribute to IT-enabled innovations highlighting a new practice termed ‘ideation’ that draws on ‘crowdsourcing’ to exploit social media technologies. A brief review of the key strategic innovation literature is conducted which leads to a focus on insights gained from a dynamic capability perspective (the resource based view of the firm). This is related to IT adoption and how value is realised from the development of new substantive capabilities. A case study research approach is adopted to explore IT innovation from a number of research perspectives. This also involved workshops with a local IT Directors forum in order to identify key examples of innovation as well as barriers and enablers. Their conclusions point toward the identification of what they consider to be a ‘third IT paradigm’ that focuses more on innovation culture, discovery-led innovations, agility and emergence, as opposed to traditional paradigms of technology implementation and formal planned strategic approaches to innovation. IT is seen in some cases as an ‘intellectual technology’ and guidelines and new questions for effective practice are presented. The second paper by Stefanidis, Fitzgerald and Counsell focuses on innovation in Information Systems undergraduate programme design for teaching and learning within the Higher Education sector. While the first paper had an industry and practitioner focus which was research led, this paper has an academic focus that is teaching led. They are very much related however as with the new higher tuition fees policy within the HE sector, IS programmes will have to be re-scoped and re-designed to demonstrate a focus on relevant skills and knowledge for the information age. A prime requirement will be to instil employability skills within prospective graduates to compete in what is a turbulent and highly competitive jobs market. This paper is highly relevant to the IS academic community in terms of highlighting the need for new accreditation schemes that are directly orientated towards the requirements for innovative IS taught programmes – both undergraduate and postgraduate. In a timely fashion, Professor Simon Rogerson launched the new joint IMIS/UKAIS and SFIA accreditation framework and process at the UKAIS 2012 Conference, where the first Business Information Systems and Technology undergraduate programmes to be accredited were from Northumbria University (School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences) and Wolverhampton University (School of Computing and IT). The paper by Stefanidis, Fitzgerald and Counsell, “A Comprehensive Survey of IS Undergraduate Courses in the UK”, starts with the premise that there is little conclusive evidence about the state of the IS curriculum in the UK. They take the newly developed (from the USA) 2010 IS curriculum as a basis from which to design and conduct a survey of IS programmes across the UK. The need for this survey is driven by the problem of designing academic IS programmes that will be relevant to employers, coupled with meeting the needs of a new generation of prospective IS and IT students that are already what might be considered to be ‘technologically savvy’. Stefanidis et al. provide an outline and a critique of the 2010 model IS curricula which was a collaboration between the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP), all based in the USA. The data collection was concluded in 2010 after a period of 6 months with 228 Information Systems courses indentified from 84 universities across the UK. This is indicative that the IS discipline is represented in most major universities and involves a large number of academic staff and students. Their analysis identifies the most common core modules as well as most popular option models in IS programmes. In terms of IS specific knowledge and skills, application development was seen as the most popular subject whereas IT audit and information search and
306
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
retrieval and business process management were surprisingly low down the list. They conclude that over 60% of the curriculum is actually covered by subjects that IS2010 describes as either core or option. If these results are taken together with emerging frameworks from UKAIS/IMIS/SFIA – a consensus is emerging in terms of what are considered to be relevant, useful, desirable and employable knowledge and skills requirements for graduates aiming for a career in IT, IS or business generally. It is very certain that accreditation of IS and IT programmes will be a particularly important new development over the next decade. The third paper by Hartnett, Daniel and Holti, “Client and Consultant Engagement in Public Sector IS Projects” represents an innovative approach to examining critical issues in what are often very high cost and high profile projects. The recent failure and abandonment of the Government NHS IT programme NPfIT or Connecting for Health CfH (often quoted as representing up to £12bn of public money investment) and other high profile projects are under researched for a variety of reasons – not least the highly sensitive and political nature of the return on investment. Official NAO reports have often pointed to a variety of reasons for these failures – but with little learning seeming to take place before the next failure occurs. A key finding, however, is that poor performance of these projects is often related to the way that stakeholders interact (or not) and the critical relationships that develop between client organisations, consultancy firms and software and technology vendors. Hartnett et al.’s paper is based on case study research that provides a rich insight into how the engagement process within public sector IS projects takes place. This involved five successful public sector case studies, totalling 28 interviews, and with projects ranging in size from very small to very large. Their findings report in depth on one of the cases, a two stage/phase shared business service for a central government department in the UK. Hartnett et al. propose a conceptual model of engagement, with two kinds of phenomena, conditions from which relationships may emerge (environment, participants and expertise) and the behaviours that may result (sharing, sense making and adapting). This model is then used as an analytical tool, with which to interpret the two phases of the specific case, leading to more refined and empirically grounded revised model of engagement. This shows a more iterative relationship between the emergent behaviours and a focus on informal approaches which are important for sharing (although this may contradict some of the public sector requirements for formal audit trail and accountability). Not only can this model be seen as a contribution to ideas about engagement as a dynamic and continual process, but it can also be used for more pragmatic support to managers and consultants for better understanding current situations and looking to prepare the ground for the next project. In summary, the UKAIS 2012 Conference succeeded in its aims to reinforce messages about Innovating Information Systems. The papers in this Special Section reflect this theme and in particular
demonstrate the flexibility of IS and its ability to be adopted and assimilated as new IT innovations and complex systems emerge, along with their parallel information proliferation. One thing that we can all agree on is that IS is certainly NOT dead, but alive and kicking and more central than ever before. However, our challenge as a community is to identify the big challenges ahead, both for the academic discipline in terms of teaching and research, as well as the industrial context with which we wish to engage. One question we have to first answer, again as a community, is whether we are leading or being led – are we really at the cutting edge of IS or are we following the lead set by key elements of the industry and government? Wherever we are, one certainty is that we are much stronger and more likely to survive and succeed, if we can move forwards together as a community. Professor David Wainwright is a Professor in Information Systems and Director of the Information, Management Innovation (IMI) research group (www.northumbria.ac.uk/imi) at the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. David has held previous lecturing posts at both Durham University and Newcastle Business Schools. His main area of research focuses on developing organizational approaches to information systems strategy, integration and implementation. David has published in many major international journals including the Journal of Information Technology, the International Journal of Operations and Production Management and the British Medical Journal. He is a past President (currently VP and Acting President) of the UK Academy for Information Systems. Dr Laurence Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Brunel University and a research fellow in the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Previously he was a lecturer in Computer Science, University of York and a research associate at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Laurence has a PhD in Industrial Management from the University of Liverpool. His research interests include: the role that social theory plays in our understanding of information systems in areas such as health information systems, CSCW, e-government and social media. He is a Past President of the UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS). He has published in the Information Systems Journal, The Information Society and the European Journal of Information Systems.
David Wainwright ∗ School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 1XE, UK Laurence Brooks 1 Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +44 0191 243 7634; fax: +44 0191 227 3662. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (D. Wainwright), [email protected] (L. Brooks)
1
Tel.: +44 01895 266010; fax: +44 01895 251686. Available online 24 May 2012
Contents lists available at SciVerse ScienceDirect
International Journal of Information Management journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/ijinfomgt
Editorial
Special Section: The UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS) 2012 Conference. Innovating Information Systems
The 17th annual UKAIS International Conference (including PhD consortium) was held at New College, University of Oxford, on 26th–28th March 2012. Over 100 international delegates participated in the event, which saw the presentation of over 50 academic papers. The PhD event was sponsored by SAS, the leaders in business analytics software and services and the largest independent vendor in the global business intelligence market (www.sas.com). This was the fourth conference that the UKAIS www.ukais.org has organised using the superb facilities of the University of Oxford – this year matched by glorious early Spring sunshine and a beautiful ancient venue popular for the filming of ‘Harry Potter’. Many of the leading international IS academics and senior Professors participated in the conference. Keynote speakers included: Professor Leslie Willcocks (Information Systems and Innovation Group, London School of Economics); Professor Helen Margetts (Oxford Internet Institute, University of Oxford); Dr Charles Randall (Solutions Marketing Manager, SAS) and Professor Bob Wood (Manchester Business School, University of Manchester). The conference event and programme was chaired and organised by Dr Ann Latham (Wolverhampton University) and Dr Gill Green (Bolton University) and the main conference coordinator Abi Redmond. The PhD consortium was chaired and organised by Dr Diana Limburg (Oxford Brookes University) and Dr Rachel Mclean (Bolton University). The conference theme ‘Innovating Information Systems’ was chosen as an opportunity for academics and practitioners to present, showcase, debate, critique and propose actions to address important issues facing individuals, organisations, government and society who are developing, adopting and assimilating new IT innovations and complex systems with a corresponding information proliferation. This is exemplified by ubiquitous information systems, social media, cloud and Internet technologies. Information Systems (IS) as an academic discipline has never been more relevant and potentially is now entering its most exciting and challenging era. This was certainly the most predominant view of the leading IS academics and industry practitioners within the conference. The keynote presentations, special tracks and panel sessions were organised to provide a platform for this current debate and also to build a new foundation to continue across the next series of UKAIS conferences. Our first keynote presenter, Professor Bob Wood addressed the PhD consortium. His talk ‘From informed CURIOSITY to INFORMED Curiosity’ was motivational and based on many decades of successful PhD supervision, the joint development of the Multiview 0268-4012/$ – see front matter © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijinfomgt.2012.05.007
systems development methodology and developing 5* research departments. He postulated that the problem with IS development methodologies was not that they were neither relevant nor highly useful but that practitioners did not use them. The problem was therefore sociotechnical, cultural and organisational. The UKAIS PhD consortium has been running for over 15 years and is a highly regarded and valuable international event aimed at inspiring and facilitating the next generation of IS researchers, academics and practitioners. 12 leading IS academics who are all experienced PhD supervisors and examiners voluntarily facilitated at the event – working with small groups of PhD students (there were 20 in total) to provide an independent view of their research topics, progress and emerging contributions to knowledge. For the first time this included a sponsored field trip (organised by Dr Diana Limburg and Geoffrey Taylor the SAS Academic Programme Manager) to the state of the art European headquarters of SAS in Marlow, Buckinghamshire. A highly stimulating and enjoyable afternoon session included presentations by Dr John Morton (Chief Technology Officer), Dr Charles Randall (Solutions Marketing Manager), Senior SAS Analyst Nigel Law and also recent PhD graduate Analyst, Dr Iain Brown. This was followed by a refreshing walk around the beautiful grounds down to the River Thames – a benchmark for how to develop a creative and rewarding organisational workplace culture. Professor Leslie Willcocks launched the main conference programme with the second keynote talk entitled: ‘The Case of the Strange Bedfellows: Innovation and Outsourcing’. Professor Willcocks is internationally acclaimed as a leader in the field of outsourcing information technology, systems and services. Leslie gave a highly informative and interesting presentation highlighting the latest trends in global sourcing and illustrating this with a ‘Global Sourcing learning Curve’. He emphasised the need for collaboration and innovation – especially focusing on the role of building relationships and partnerships between suppliers and clients to engender; sustainable partnering behaviours, high trust, flexibility, reciprocity and informed risk sharing. He then moved on to illustrate various types of innovation (IT operational, business process, product and service) and mapping performance impact against collaboration and innovation focus. Examples, such as the Terminal 5 agreement approach at Heathrow Airport, were provided to demonstrate a process of collaborative innovation where ‘leadership shapes the context for collaboration, innovation and high performance’. The role of contracting was explored in the context of collaborative innovation for sourcing in the London financial markets. Leslie finished by focusing on a set of ‘new rules’ for
304
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
collaborative innovation arguing the case for more co-managed governance structure, multi-functional teams that extend across organisations and people and teaming which provides the ability to collaborate ‘within a client organisation, between client and supplier, and between suppliers in multi-vendor environments’. Behaviour and trust was seen as key to developing innovation and managing power relations and partnering-based relationships. These summary lessons are encapsulated in Professor Willcock’s latest serious of books on outsourcing practice; the IT outsourcing landscape and the handbook of global outsourcing and offshoring; for further information see www.outsourcingunit.org. The third keynote talk was presented by Professor Helen Margetts from the Oxford Internet Institute: ‘Big Data in the Future of Government’. Professor Margetts started by giving a brief history of government and information systems critiquing the rather ‘chequered past’ of large scale government IT projects where there have been many large scale IT project failures (many of these are documented in official government National Audit Office reports as well as being the topic of many academic research papers and studies). The 1990s were seen as heralding the rise of electronic government whilst in the 2000s post-austerity governments are moving to what is termed ‘digital by default’ in an attempt to drive costs down, provide more efficient services and to be more creative and innovative in using the large scale data and information that is now collected routinely at source. This is described in detail in her co-authored book ‘Digital Era Governance’ where themes relating to New Public Management (disaggregation, competition, incentivization) have been seen to give way to Digital-Era Governance (DEG) with the emphasis on reintegration, needs based holism and digitilization. Professor Margetts argues that DEG2 is being seen as a way to cope with austerity but the government lacks ‘intelligent centre/devolved delivery architecture’. This is where more and more citizens are moving online, governments are moving to ‘digital by default’ and ‘Big Data’ is generated as the natural byproduct with characteristics of being transactional, real-time and comprised of whole population demographics (complete census type data and not sample or survey based). The challenges centre on understanding how to make this vast data resource, useful, relevant and meaningful to effectively inform policy and decision making. Innovative visualisation techniques and technologies are being used along with creative use of Business Intelligence and Analytics technologies. Professor Margetts provided examples such as: administrative trends/edits in Wikipedia, structures (nodality) for the government online, citizen-sourced information for election monitoring and disaster coordination, and police and citizen reporting of violence (using location information and content). Helen concluded by outlining how significant cost savings could be achieved from big data use and also pointed to the challenges of big data; ethical issues including privacy, consistency and representativeness. The need for new information skills relating to visualization, incentivization and dealing with blurred organizational boundaries was then highlighted, if the potential for big data in government is to be achieved. The two academic keynotes were complemented by an invited industry/practitioner keynote from the conference sponsors, SAS. Dr Charles Randall, a senior solutions marketing manager, made a fascinating presentation entitled “Rhino Footprints: managing innovation in analytical software development”. Charles is an expert in analytics, performance management, and customer profitability analysis and has experience across a wide selection of industries from telecommunication to wholesale distribution. His role encompasses developing solutions to apply SAS’s various technologies to business problems. Charles provided many state of the art examples of how SAS analytic solutions are being used innovatively within organisations and business. A not so obvious application was related to the use of SAS software by volunteers for monitoring
endangered wildlife species. In this case the Wildtrack non-invasive wildlife monitoring project centred on capturing images of tiger footprints in a sanctuary in order to create an algorithm for identification in the wild. Dr Randall identified four ways that innovation happens in SAS. The first route is through learnt experience of applying SAS applications within organisations. This helps develop mature applications such as intelligent workforce analytics. The second way is based on emergence of new applications based on current needs leading to solutions for customer experience analytics (using graphical ad hoc reporting, OLAP and dynamic real time data collection). A third way is more formal and developed through heavy investment (over 25% of turnover) in research and development for new tools, analytics software and solutions for new sectors and markets. The fourth way is reactive; an example provided was based on developing mobile business intelligence applications for the Apple iPad or Android equivalent technologies. This enabled BI ‘on the go’ and the ability to access and analyse data anywhere with advanced visualization capabilities. This led to questions related to what skills and expertise were needed in organisations to harness BI and analytics power. A blend of technical (enterprise architecture) skills, people and presentation skills and enthusiasm to develop innovative solutions were seen as the ideal mix for the next generation of graduates. A new and innovative development for the 2012 conference was provided through the active participation of senior IS Professors (the Council of IS Professors, CISP). Professor David Wainwright from the Information Management Innovation research group at Northumbria University (and also the Acting President for UKAIS) organised and chaired this fascinating event, “Leadership in IS” which provided an opportunity to debate current challenges and issues facing IS academics and practitioners. Panel Members included: Professor Ray Paul, Dept of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University Professor Bob Wood, Manchester Business School, University of Manchester Professor Zahir Irani, Head of School, Brunel Business School, Brunel University Professor Neil Doherty, School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University Professor David Wastell, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham Professor Irani commenced the panel session with the provocative title “Is Information Systems Dead?” He then cleverly illustrated the grand challenges facing IS through the acronym ISISDE. I represented innovation (discipline of IS and pedagogy); S was seen as safety (IS in health, energy etc.); I again for information (business intelligence, data visualization, the post knowledge economy); S for security (desktop, transnational movements and population mobility, cyber terrorism); D represented delivery (innovations like Amazon or new forms of services and products with e-supply chains) and finally E was for environment (developing sustainable government policies for our future). He concluded with a definite statement that “IS was not Dead!” and we should mobilise and be extremely positive about the future. Professor Wood followed this theme taking a very reflective and historical view of IS. This in part was inspired by reading a book by George Dyson “Turin’s Cathedral”, about the history of computing. Bob made a strong point that computing applications excelled in a world of predictability and therefore gave scope for massive improvements in automation and efficiency. However, IS was more in the domain where systems were complex or impossible to computerise making them more interesting and challenging.
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
Hence there was a need to set (perhaps 5) new grand challenges for the IS Discipline. Future conferences will debate and define these. Professor Doherty focused on issues around career routes for the aspiring IS academic. His view was that current developments in academia (Research Excellence Framework (REF), high personal tuition fees, new managerialism) were distorting what we recognise as the collegial university. Mixed messages were being delivered whereby academics have to be excellent researchers (high level REF outputs), excellent teachers (high National Student Survey (NSS) scores) and demonstrate high professional engagement with industry (Impact and Enterprise). Achieving this balance is increasingly difficult, and allied to the problem of where IS is situated and taught within universities (Business Schools, Computing or others). However – a positive conclusion was that REF, even though it is damaging and distorting, would not survive in its present form and there would be a new emphasis on developing a better balance between teaching, research and enterprise (away from what is termed ‘REFbots’ – academics who only write publications and do not engage with the wider impact agenda or in mainstream academic citizenship – teaching students!). Professor David Wastell continued to play ‘devil’s advocate’ and provided examples of IS failures in society and industry thereby illustrating the need for a strong, innovative and vibrant IS discipline to research and develop new ways for dealing with important problems. A powerful illustration was taken from his work with Sue White on the tragic ‘Baby P’ case for social services. This represented a systemic failure – but was a classic situation where IT systems, if properly designed and implemented, could have prevented this occurring. David’s focus on researching and learning the lessons from this failure has both academic and popular streams of dissemination. Impact is achieved by publishing the lessons about the dangers of poorly designed IT systems (he terms it an ‘iron cage’ resulting from an overly prescriptive workflow system) in media such as the Guardian newspaper. This then had an influence on new government policy – demonstrating the importance and relevance of good IS research. The final speaker was Professor Ray Paul. Ray, in his own words, is seen as a ‘discombobulator’. He controversially made the proposition that it was time to seriously rethink university organisation (focusing on teaching IS as an example). This was where undergraduate students, postgraduate students, researchers and academics should be seen as a general resource – not put into silos under a traditional pedagogic model. We should offer our services to industry and organisations on a fully charged out basis to solve serious and relevant world problems. Learning would take place through these activities which would focus on innovation and teamwork. This should also be enjoyable, fun and lead to worthwhile results. This provoked many comments from the workshop participants reinforcing the need to rethink what we do in the IS discipline in terms of teaching and perhaps more action centred research. A need for an identified body of theory was also seen as important – but more impactful and practical application of IS knowledge would lead to this. Professor Guy Fitzgerald, the outgoing UKAIS President, stated that he agreed in principle and that this was not an issue in industry where IS was seen as integral and vitally important creating a growing demand for talented IS graduates. Papers from the UKAIS 2012 Conference selected for this Special Section After a further review process, three papers have been selected to represent the theme of the conference “Innovating Information Systems”. The first paper by Ashurst, Freer, Ekdahl and Gibbons “Exploring IT-Enabled Innovation: A New Paradigm?” represents exploratory collaborative research work (academia and industry) that focuses on the role of IT within innovation processes and strategy. Ashurst, best known for his work on benefits-led approaches to IT, examines
305
this within the context of 10 case studies of what were perceived as successful IT-enabled innovations. The research identifies a number of practices that contribute to IT-enabled innovations highlighting a new practice termed ‘ideation’ that draws on ‘crowdsourcing’ to exploit social media technologies. A brief review of the key strategic innovation literature is conducted which leads to a focus on insights gained from a dynamic capability perspective (the resource based view of the firm). This is related to IT adoption and how value is realised from the development of new substantive capabilities. A case study research approach is adopted to explore IT innovation from a number of research perspectives. This also involved workshops with a local IT Directors forum in order to identify key examples of innovation as well as barriers and enablers. Their conclusions point toward the identification of what they consider to be a ‘third IT paradigm’ that focuses more on innovation culture, discovery-led innovations, agility and emergence, as opposed to traditional paradigms of technology implementation and formal planned strategic approaches to innovation. IT is seen in some cases as an ‘intellectual technology’ and guidelines and new questions for effective practice are presented. The second paper by Stefanidis, Fitzgerald and Counsell focuses on innovation in Information Systems undergraduate programme design for teaching and learning within the Higher Education sector. While the first paper had an industry and practitioner focus which was research led, this paper has an academic focus that is teaching led. They are very much related however as with the new higher tuition fees policy within the HE sector, IS programmes will have to be re-scoped and re-designed to demonstrate a focus on relevant skills and knowledge for the information age. A prime requirement will be to instil employability skills within prospective graduates to compete in what is a turbulent and highly competitive jobs market. This paper is highly relevant to the IS academic community in terms of highlighting the need for new accreditation schemes that are directly orientated towards the requirements for innovative IS taught programmes – both undergraduate and postgraduate. In a timely fashion, Professor Simon Rogerson launched the new joint IMIS/UKAIS and SFIA accreditation framework and process at the UKAIS 2012 Conference, where the first Business Information Systems and Technology undergraduate programmes to be accredited were from Northumbria University (School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences) and Wolverhampton University (School of Computing and IT). The paper by Stefanidis, Fitzgerald and Counsell, “A Comprehensive Survey of IS Undergraduate Courses in the UK”, starts with the premise that there is little conclusive evidence about the state of the IS curriculum in the UK. They take the newly developed (from the USA) 2010 IS curriculum as a basis from which to design and conduct a survey of IS programmes across the UK. The need for this survey is driven by the problem of designing academic IS programmes that will be relevant to employers, coupled with meeting the needs of a new generation of prospective IS and IT students that are already what might be considered to be ‘technologically savvy’. Stefanidis et al. provide an outline and a critique of the 2010 model IS curricula which was a collaboration between the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM), the Association for Information Systems (AIS) and the Association for Information Technology Professionals (AITP), all based in the USA. The data collection was concluded in 2010 after a period of 6 months with 228 Information Systems courses indentified from 84 universities across the UK. This is indicative that the IS discipline is represented in most major universities and involves a large number of academic staff and students. Their analysis identifies the most common core modules as well as most popular option models in IS programmes. In terms of IS specific knowledge and skills, application development was seen as the most popular subject whereas IT audit and information search and
306
Editorial / International Journal of Information Management 32 (2012) 303–306
retrieval and business process management were surprisingly low down the list. They conclude that over 60% of the curriculum is actually covered by subjects that IS2010 describes as either core or option. If these results are taken together with emerging frameworks from UKAIS/IMIS/SFIA – a consensus is emerging in terms of what are considered to be relevant, useful, desirable and employable knowledge and skills requirements for graduates aiming for a career in IT, IS or business generally. It is very certain that accreditation of IS and IT programmes will be a particularly important new development over the next decade. The third paper by Hartnett, Daniel and Holti, “Client and Consultant Engagement in Public Sector IS Projects” represents an innovative approach to examining critical issues in what are often very high cost and high profile projects. The recent failure and abandonment of the Government NHS IT programme NPfIT or Connecting for Health CfH (often quoted as representing up to £12bn of public money investment) and other high profile projects are under researched for a variety of reasons – not least the highly sensitive and political nature of the return on investment. Official NAO reports have often pointed to a variety of reasons for these failures – but with little learning seeming to take place before the next failure occurs. A key finding, however, is that poor performance of these projects is often related to the way that stakeholders interact (or not) and the critical relationships that develop between client organisations, consultancy firms and software and technology vendors. Hartnett et al.’s paper is based on case study research that provides a rich insight into how the engagement process within public sector IS projects takes place. This involved five successful public sector case studies, totalling 28 interviews, and with projects ranging in size from very small to very large. Their findings report in depth on one of the cases, a two stage/phase shared business service for a central government department in the UK. Hartnett et al. propose a conceptual model of engagement, with two kinds of phenomena, conditions from which relationships may emerge (environment, participants and expertise) and the behaviours that may result (sharing, sense making and adapting). This model is then used as an analytical tool, with which to interpret the two phases of the specific case, leading to more refined and empirically grounded revised model of engagement. This shows a more iterative relationship between the emergent behaviours and a focus on informal approaches which are important for sharing (although this may contradict some of the public sector requirements for formal audit trail and accountability). Not only can this model be seen as a contribution to ideas about engagement as a dynamic and continual process, but it can also be used for more pragmatic support to managers and consultants for better understanding current situations and looking to prepare the ground for the next project. In summary, the UKAIS 2012 Conference succeeded in its aims to reinforce messages about Innovating Information Systems. The papers in this Special Section reflect this theme and in particular
demonstrate the flexibility of IS and its ability to be adopted and assimilated as new IT innovations and complex systems emerge, along with their parallel information proliferation. One thing that we can all agree on is that IS is certainly NOT dead, but alive and kicking and more central than ever before. However, our challenge as a community is to identify the big challenges ahead, both for the academic discipline in terms of teaching and research, as well as the industrial context with which we wish to engage. One question we have to first answer, again as a community, is whether we are leading or being led – are we really at the cutting edge of IS or are we following the lead set by key elements of the industry and government? Wherever we are, one certainty is that we are much stronger and more likely to survive and succeed, if we can move forwards together as a community. Professor David Wainwright is a Professor in Information Systems and Director of the Information, Management Innovation (IMI) research group (www.northumbria.ac.uk/imi) at the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne. David has held previous lecturing posts at both Durham University and Newcastle Business Schools. His main area of research focuses on developing organizational approaches to information systems strategy, integration and implementation. David has published in many major international journals including the Journal of Information Technology, the International Journal of Operations and Production Management and the British Medical Journal. He is a past President (currently VP and Acting President) of the UK Academy for Information Systems. Dr Laurence Brooks is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems at Brunel University and a research fellow in the School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University. Previously he was a lecturer in Computer Science, University of York and a research associate at the Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. Laurence has a PhD in Industrial Management from the University of Liverpool. His research interests include: the role that social theory plays in our understanding of information systems in areas such as health information systems, CSCW, e-government and social media. He is a Past President of the UK Academy for Information Systems (UKAIS). He has published in the Information Systems Journal, The Information Society and the European Journal of Information Systems.
David Wainwright ∗ School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences, Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne NE2 1XE, UK Laurence Brooks 1 Department of Information Systems and Computing, Brunel University, Uxbridge, Middlesex UB8 3PH, UK ∗ Corresponding
author. Tel.: +44 0191 243 7634; fax: +44 0191 227 3662. E-mail addresses: [email protected], [email protected] (D. Wainwright), [email protected] (L. Brooks)
1
Tel.: +44 01895 266010; fax: +44 01895 251686. Available online 24 May 2012