Linnaeus University Informatics Programme: Master of Information systems

October 13th 2013

Assignment 3 Presentation of an Article and Comments to an Article

Walsham, Geoff(2012) Are we making a better world with ICTs? Reflections on a future agenda for the IS field. Journal of information Technology, 27, pp. 8793. (7)

(Group 6a) Authors: Jaruphan Olsson, Claudia Halas, Ioannis Sidiropoulos E-mails: jo22ge@student.lnu.se, ch222mf@student.lnu.se, is222fx@student.lnu.se

Course: 4IK003 Teacher / tutor: Christina Mrtberg / Thomas Ivarsson

Article review
Back in the 1980s teaching syllabuses were focusing mainly on the implementation of IS in business area and on government organizations. Later on the focus was more interlinked to the businesses strategies, design and methodologies; yet nowadays only a few years later, the ICT changed extremely, from its integrated role within organizations, business sectors from countries all over the world to its implications within the major political activities. The question arises as to what are the ISs roles and how well can it cope to the multi-disciplinary world of ICT which is no longer drawing a clear line between its role within the businesses or the organizations. What are the implications? Where can we foresee the changes? Do the recent changes to the IS community lead to growth or stagnation? All these matters are the main issues that the author wants to take forward for a debate using as support the need for a core, a methodology. The authors debate is based on the work and research papers that argue pro and against setting boundaries due to the inter-disciplinary nature of the IS. Yet he is shaping his work mainly focusing on defining closer the main subject matters. He supports the idea that IS could and will most definitely have a major impact on health and education, production systems and ERP, financial services and marketing so that in order to cope with future developments we need to specialize. As an example of clear involvement, he points out the use of mobile phones and the capability of the technologies to improve our lives, community and world, in general. In order to achieve better results one should consider a more critical and more open approach to the IS field. The authors intention is to remain an interpretive researcher remaining opposant to a dominant paradigm, whether shaped by positivism, interpretivism or other alternatives. The author is pointing out the clear problems and the fact that no dominant methodology appears to be appropriate, he suggests the necessity to build methodological pluralism into curricula and that it should be compulsory for doctoral students. He points out for instance that most of the specialized journals in the IS field are inclined against design science research which is a real problem with respect to publication. A closer look into the IS matter would also mean that we should get more disciplines like anthropology, economics, development studies and computer science to look closer into this issue. Ethical and cultural issues as well as a more critical agenda are a reality to be considered for the future agenda for ICT (ICT4D) that is not only to be involved in development but also for other IS subfields as well such as: IT in health care, global, international and cultural issues in IS, project management, outsourcing and IS development etc. The author emphasizes on the need to use more focused methodological approaches to research questions but also that we should remain open to all areas especially not excluding many nontraditional settings outside business and government but he is also supporting the idea of discarding a methodological paradigm.

Critical Assessment
The paper as a whole is a welcome research article that outlines the IS field with its recent transformations and in order to avoid stagnation it comes with suggestions for future design and for the new technologies, methodologies and contexts of the current era, for the need to be proactive and come with flexible approaches to address them. As a group we have found the article very interesting, it was a short article but supported by past research articles it presented to us some important facts and problems and it also tried to raise important questions that were looked more closely; questions that followed the main approach issue of the article. The discussions were rather general but the concerns are obvious and interesting to look more closely.