Virtual worlds (VWs) are powerful three-dimensional technologies where users can assume identitie... more Virtual worlds (VWs) are powerful three-dimensional technologies where users can assume identities and interact with others. While designed as open-platforms for creativity, expression, and experimentation by recreational users, VWs were once lauded for their potential applications to business. Today, much of the business community has either moved on from the hype of VWs or struggles to understand whether value can be obtained by using VWs. This paper attempts to provide an understanding of these outcomes through the analysis of assessments written by 59 business professionals, who each spent an extended period of time in a popular VW during the peak of the hype. From these assessments, four broad perspectives on the value of VWs to organizations (or lack thereof) were identified, along with challenges facing use of VWs if they are to become more widely used within business.
The productivity paradox in health information technology
Communications of the ACM
New York State healthcare providers increased their use of the technology but delivered only mixe... more New York State healthcare providers increased their use of the technology but delivered only mixed results for their patients.
With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make s... more With the rapid pace of technological development, individuals are frequently challenged to make sense of equivocal innovative technology while being given limited information. Virtual worlds are a prime example of such an equivocal innovative technology, and this affords researchers an opportunity to study sensemaking and the construction of perspectives about the organizational value of virtual worlds. This study reports on an analysis of the written assessments of 59 business professionals who spent an extended period of time in Second Life, a popular virtual world, and discursively made sense of the organizational value of virtual worlds. Through a Toulminian analysis of the claims, grounds, and warrants used in the texts they generated, we identify 12 common patterns of sensemaking and indicate that themes of confirmation, open-ended rhetoric, demographics, and control are evident in the different types of claims that were addressed. Further, we assert that the Toulminian approach we employ is a useful methodology for the study of sensemaking and one that is not bound to any particular theoretical perspective.
Leadership, Trust, and Effectivemess in Virtual Teams
Many organizations are using virtual teams to meet the increasing time and quality expectations o... more Many organizations are using virtual teams to meet the increasing time and quality expectations of contemporary marketplaces. While virtual teams present advantages for cost control, access to expertise, and serving markets, they also engender practical challenges as a result of the geographic and temporal distribution of members. Previous research has suggested several factors that are critical for the functioning of
When investigating the use of information systems within organizations, researchers inevitably ma... more When investigating the use of information systems within organizations, researchers inevitably make decisions relating to the classification, or 'stratification', of information technology users. Most commonly, users are stratified along functional boundaries or by their membership in various communities of practice. It is important to note, however, that any such method of social stratification necessarily focuses the attention of a researcher on certain issues while unavoidably downplaying or neglecting other concerns. Individuals whose interests, values or identification align with these neglected issues may be inadvertently marginalized by the research approach. This observation suggests a range of ethical concerns related to the methods of social stratification used by researchers. In this paper, we argue that the method by which information systems researchers stratify organizational actors in their research has significant ethical implications. We propose a framework that maps stratification strategies that researchers bring to their analyses using Weber's theory of stratification and the dimensions of class, status and party, in conjunction with his distinction between heterogeneous and homogenous forms of work. We offer illustrative theoretical lenses for each category in the framework and demonstrate how each lens favours certain issues and potentially neglects others.
‘Computing’ Requirements in Open Source Software Projects
Due to high dissimilarity with traditional software development, Requirements Engineering (RE) in... more Due to high dissimilarity with traditional software development, Requirements Engineering (RE) in Open Source Software (OSS) remains poorly understood, despite the visible success of many OSS projects. In this study, we approach OSS RE as a sociotechnical and distributed cognitive activity where multiple actors deploy heterogeneous artifacts to ‘compute’ requirements as to reach a collectively-held understanding of what the software is going to do. We conduct a case study of a popular OSS project, Rubinius (a Ruby programming language runtime environment). Specifically, we investigate the ways in which this project exhibits distribution of cognitive efforts along social, structural, and temporal dimensions and how its requirements computation takes place accordingly. In particular, we seek to generalize to a theoretical framework that explains how three temporally-ordered processes of distributed cognition in OSS projects, denoted excavation, instantiation, and testing-in-the-wild, ...
In 2006, Case Western Reserve University (Case) initiated the acquisition, customization, and imp... more In 2006, Case Western Reserve University (Case) initiated the acquisition, customization, and implementation of a new student information system (SIS). The Case SIS Project was intended to integrate the capture and management of all student information and student-facing administrative functions across the universitys distinct schools. Key functions supported by the platform include admissions, financial aid, course selection and enrollment, grading, degree tracking, and transcript management. The initial roll-out of the system was completed in the Fall 2008 semester, and additional phases will be rolled out over the course of the 2008 - 2009 academic year. @InProceedings{hansen_et_al:DSP:2009:1986, author = {Sean Hansen and Kalle Lyytinen}, title = {The Case SIS Project: An Enterprise System in Higher Education}, booktitle = {Perspectives Workshop: Science of Design: High-Impact Requirements for Software-Intensive Systems}, year = {2009}, editor = {Matthias Jarke and Kalle Lyytine...
Uploads
Papers by Sean Hansen