The Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) has just published 4 new articles in its Volume 28 Research Article section
The Australasian Journal of Information Systems (AJIS) has just published four new articles in its Research Article section of its volume 28:
Robodebt: A Socio-Technical Case Study of Public Sector Information Systems Failure
Roger Clarke, Katina Michael, Roba Abbas
Roger.Clarke@anu.edu.au
doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.4681
Large-scale public sector information systems (PSIS) that administer social welfare payments face considerable challenges. Between 2014 and 2023, an Australian government agency conceived and implemented the Online Compliance Intervention (OCI) scheme, widely referred to as Robodebt. The scheme's primary purpose was to apply digital transformation in order to reduce labour costs and increase recovery of overpayments. Among its key features were a simplified, but inherently erroneous, estimation method called income averaging, and a new requirement that welfare recipients produce documentation for income earned years earlier. Failure by welfare recipients to comply with mandates resulted in the agency recovering what it asserted to be overpayments. This article presents a case study of Robodebt and its effects on over 1 million of its clients. The detailed case study relies on primary data through Senate and other government hearings and commissions, and secondary data, such as media reports, supplemented by academic sources. Relevant technical features include (1) the reliance on the digital persona that the agency maintains for each client, (2) computer-performed inferencing from client data, and (3) automated decision-making and subsequent action. This article employs a socio-technical systems approach to understanding the factors underlying a major PSIS project failure, by focusing on the system's political and public service sponsors; its participants (users); the people affected by it (usees); and the broader economic, social, and political context. Practical and theoretical insights are presented, with the intention of highlighting major practical lessons for PSIS, and the relevance of an articulated socio-technical frame for PSIS.
Requirements Risk Management for Continuous Development: Organisational Needs
Sanna Kainulainen, Tuure Tuunanen, Tero Vartiainen
tuure.t.tuunanen@jyu.fi
doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.4441
Information systems development has recently evolved from traditional to agile and continuous forms. Continuous development (CD) methods, such as development and operations (DevOps), integrate many well-regarded parts of agile development and add collaboration among an organisation’s development, operations and quality assessment departments. We argue that requirements risk management (RRM) poses additional challenges to projects where development work is carried out quickly and continuously. However, in the literature, most methods for prioritising requirements and managing risks are more suited to traditional development. This raises the need for new tools and methodologies to meet CD challenges. As these challenges constantly evolve, project management must be able to control CD, changes in the determination of requirements and the accompanying risks. Based on a systematic literature review, we define the key features of CD and develop a conceptual three-dimensional framework that can be used to understand the organisational needs of RRM for CD.
Researcher-Practitioner Collaboration in Action Design Research
Stefan Cronholm, Hannes Göbel, Anup Shrestha
stefan.cronholm@hb.se
doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.4281
Action Design Research (ADR) is a well-known research method within Design Science Research (DSR). An essential characteristic of the ADR method is the need for researcher-practitioner collaboration (RPC). While there is abundant research on RPC regarding information systems projects in general concerning explanatory and normative knowledge, there is very limited prescriptive knowledge on how to execute RPC in ADR projects. Successful collaboration in ADR projects is imperative since the development of socio-technical IT artefacts requires frequent interaction in organisational contexts. However, RPC can be hard to manage due to competing interests. Therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present prescriptive knowledge for how to manage RPC. We have analysed a collaborative ADR project consisting of several researchers and practitioners. Based on a grounded theory approach, we have developed theoretical models based on challenges identified in an ADR project. The models provide prescriptive knowledge regarding: shape the IT artefact based on organisational intervention, exploit the mutual dependency between developing design principles and IT artefacts, and contextualise and generalise learning. Each model involves logical relationships between: conditions for the challenges, actions taken to address the challenges and consequences of the actions taken. The guidelines were deducted from the models and consist of recommendations that could be considered in future ADR projects.
Digital Transformation: An Enterprise Transformation Theory Perspective
Rahul Kumar, Rahul Thakurta
rahulk@iimcal.ac.in
doi: https://doi.org/10.3127/ajis.v28.4259
Digital Transformation (DT) has emerged as one of the most talked-about phenomena of the decade. The rush of things around DT also exposes its challenges towards effectively integrating digital technologies into the scheme of things. The proliferating literature on DT offers a fragmented understanding and is unclear about the constituents and configuration of the phenomena. The above concerns primarily arise from insufficient theoretical grounding and deficiencies in the extant conceptualizations. To address these concerns, the article posits an over-arching research question to examine the phenomena while theoretically uncovering its foundational elements. Accordingly, the study resorts to the enterprise transformation framework to explicate the transformative aspects based on a two-phase analysis. The first phase adopts a text-mining approach for uncovering the latent themes underlying the DT scholarship, followed by a qualitative approach involving content analysis. We finally propose a theoretically motivated conceptualization of the tenets of DT. We specifically investigate the phenomenon's scope, ways, means, and ends. The proposed framework is further validated following a multi-case analysis. Our conceptualization grounds and establishes the significance of foundational elements having a theoretical basis for identifying DT. Our examination offers an implementation guide for the practice, which we delineate subsequently.
