Design research (DR) positions information technology artifacts at the core of the Information Systems discipline. However, dominant DR thinking takes a technological view of the IT artifact, paying scant attention to its shaping by the organizational context. Consequently, existing DR methods focus on building the artifact and relegate evaluation to a subsequent and separate phase. They value technological rigor at the cost of organizational relevance, and fail to recognize that the artifact emerges from interaction with the organizational context even when its initial design is guided by the researchers’ intent. We propose action design research (ADR) as a new DR method to address this problem. ADR reflects the premise that IT artifacts are ensembles shaped by the organizational context during development and use. The method conceptualizes the research process as containing the inseparable and inherently interwoven activities of building the IT artifact, intervening in the organization, and evaluating it concurrently. The essay describes the stages of ADR and associated principles that encapsulate its underlying beliefs and values. We illustrate ADR through a case of competence management at Volvo IT.
A major impediment to accurate information retrieval from the World Wide Web is the inability of search engines to incorporate semantics in the search process. This research presents a methodology, CONQUER (CONtext-aware QUERy processing), that enhances the semantic content of Web queries using two complementary knowledge sources: lexicons and ontologies. The methodology constructs a semantic net using the original query as a seed, and refines the net with terms from the two knowledge sources. The enhanced query, represented by the refined semantic net, can be executed by search engines. This paper describes the methodology and its implementation in a prototype. An empirical evaluation shows that queries suggested by the prototype produce more relevant results than those obtained by the original queries. The research, thus, provides a successful demonstration of the use of existing knowledge sources to enhance the semantic content of Web queries. The paper concludes by identifying potential uses of such enhancements of search technology in organizational contexts.
Conceptual design is an important, but difficult, phase of systems development. Analysis patterns can greatly benefit this phase because they capture abstractions of situations that occur frequently in conceptual modeling. Naïve approaches to automate conceptual design with reuse of analysis patterns have had limited success because they do not emulate the learning that occurs over time. This research develops learning mechanisms for improving analysis pattern reuse in conceptual design. The learning mechanisms employ supervised learning techniques to support the generic reuse tasks of retrieval, adaptation, and integration, and emulate expert behaviors of analogy making and designing by assembly. They are added to a naïve approach and the augmented methodology implemented as an intelligent assistant to a designer for generating an initial conceptual design that a developer may refine. To assess the potential of the methodology to benefit practice, empirical testing is carried out on multiple domains and tasks of different sizes. The results suggest that the methodology has the potential to benefit practice.
With the move to distributed systems and an increasing emphasis on the use of object-orientation for new system design, effective distribution of object-oriented applications is becoming an important concern for designers. Early research in this area has focused on object-clustering schemes for shared memory configurations that have limited value to business applications, which must be distributed over loosely coupled networks. These applications also exhibit the properties of simpler structural relationships and a large number of instances, demanding approaches closer to fragmentation and allocation instead of clustering. This paper develops an approach to distribution of object-oriented applications over geographically dispersed sites in loosely coupled networks---taking account of concerns such as encapsulation, inheritance, messaging, and implicit joins. The approach consists of two phases. First, we develop a scheme for generating class fragments, which ensures that encapsulation is not violated and inheritance is not stretched across sites. Second, considering the message-intensive operation of object-oriented systems, we devise models for allocation of class fragments to sites that minimize inter-site traffic. A nonarbitrary procedure to compile traffic volume estimates exploiting the notion of implicit joins in object-oriented applications provides the natural linkage between the two phases. A research prototype was implemented to establish feasibility of the proposals. We demonstrate usefulness of the approach by its application for distribution of a real-world information system.