Special Issue: Information Systems Design—Theory and Methodology

摘要

Organizations exist to create value for their stakeholders that the stakeholders could not create for themselves as individuals. Information systems (IS) exist so organizations can better create value using their intellectual capital. The goal of an IS designer is to present timely, accurate, and complete information to decision-makers and knowledge workers while minimizing cognitive and economic costs. As such, IS is a broad, eclectic field that must address issues touching on hardware and software, politics, economics, psychology, engineering, and aesthetics. Designers and design methodologies for IS must embrace and address all of these dimensions. The papers in this special issue of JMIS all focus on topics of importance to IS designers and methodologists. The first and second papers in this issue address meta-methodological issues. One discusses the integration of quality assurance activities into all phases of design methodologies; the other integrates theoretical and methodological issues into a design approach for computer-supported learning. The third and fourth papers present field-tested design methodologies, one for requirements elicitation and one for collaborative business process reengineering. The fifth and sixth papers present theoretical arguments about phenomena that are mirror images of one another: trust and deception detection during online interactions. The importance of these topics grows with the rise of e-commerce. The seventh paper argues a cognitive model for creative problem solving that has implication both for the design of IS and for the design of design methodologies. The eighth and final paper describes a technical approach to designing IS to support simultaneous access to data across an extreme diversity of platforms, a design issue whose importance grows with the rise of ubiquitous mobile computing.