Tag: Digital

ISChannel Published- Volume 13.

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

I’m pleased to promote the newly published ISChannel journal. The journal is wholly produced by MSc and PhD students and accepts articles concerned with socio-technical issues of information systems. I am reproducing the editorial written by Sophie Altrock, this year’s associate editor. 

To get your free copy of the journal click here.

EDITORIAL – From the Associate Editor

Currently in its 13th year of publication, the iSCHANNEL team is proud to contribute yet another series of insightful research of aspiring academics, current students, and those hungry for sharing ideas and findings with the Information Systems community. Out of a wide selection of submissions this year we agreed on a great mixture of quantitative findings and theoretical explorations of topics surrounding challenges and opportunities of our digital age.

With contributions from my fellow Associate Editors, we are happy to present five thought-provoking papers:

Alexandra Gencheva studies friction in the context of Open Banking solutions. Using the case of an Open Banking consent journey, the author explores how users perceive friction and how these perceptions and behaviours are impacted by preferences and expectations about privacy and convenience. The analysis shows that friction is perceived as a more positive encounter by participants that value privacy while it is perceived as a more negative encounter by participants that value convenience.

Pauline A. Chin, Clotilde de Maricourt, Nicolas, A. Feil, Terry L. X. Zhen, and Krittika Ray, a group of undergraduate students, explore the impact of automation in different industries looking at current and future professionals. Using a mixed method approach, the findings reveal that all participants are concerned about the automation of jobs in the near future. Students however were showing a willingness to adapt to those arising challenges by learning how to code in comparison to no willingness on the side of professionals. Findings further indicate that e.g. job security also affects concerns with the automation of jobs.

Juan Felipe Forero offers an anthropological perspective on understanding the nature of digital innovation. Deploying the concept of migration, including departing, arriving and crossing borders, the author outlines how digital innovation is a product of moves, changes and different modes of travelling. Drawing from a range of anthropological concepts and contributions, the author argues that innovation emerges as a far messier and improvised process than previously thought. To an Information Systems audience, this paper presents a fascinating insight into contributions from digital anthropology and adjacent fields.

Kadriann Pikkat provides an interesting analysis of filter bubbles enabled by social media platforms. Through an examination of this phenomenon, where the mechanisms exposing content to a user prioritise ideas that reinforce his or her own beliefs, she raises awareness of the ways users of these platforms may be unwittingly subjected to a narrowing subset of information disguised as personalisation. Kadriann reveals the ways these platforms may simplify and manipulate the complexities of social interaction and raises questions around how this reinforcement may shape users’ identities.

Maria V. Santarelli examines from a political point of view the way users give consent within social networking sites (SNS) using Facebook as a case study. By showing the analogies between a state and Facebook, she argues that consent given on a SNS resembles John Locke’s tacit consent as derived from “take it all or take nothing” Hobson’s choice. Such “tacit online consent” goes beyond the consent given to governments, calling into question the contemporary legislative means in place.

We have assembled a rich set of contributions this year and we want to thank all our authors and reviewers. Taking part in the journey from the first call for papers to the final printed journal has shown us that research is not just about counting online submissions. iSCHANNEL has brought people together, challenged reviewers to change their perspectives but, most of it all, it has offered yet another breadth of topics on all kinds of technological developments that affect us equally, now and tomorrow.

When I came to the LSE a year ago, my background in digital media studies in the field of cultural science provided me with a healthy scepticism about technologies, and the way they affect our daily lives. In the past months, however, I have come to realise the opportunities and the potential of this digital landscape for individuals and businesses if only we aspire this comprehensive view. The papers selected in this volume offer rich insights into the privacy concerns in the open banking sector and perspectives on social media platforms, accompanied by explorations of the automation of jobs and the ever narrowing information flow we are exposed to online. Adding an anthropological perspective to our selection further shows us that these topics of digital innovation should not just be addressed in the field of Information Systems alone, but rather across different areas of research. With this variety of perspectives and the growing body of knowledge that we take part in, I now see that we can continue to evolve and revolutionise our technologies with the potential to bring about more of rewarding disruptions.

In the name of iSCHANNEL, I am happy to have joined the team that has brought about another journal with intriguing findings and captivating thoughts. We now like to invite your reflections and challenge new ideas while reading through our 13th edition.

With many thanks to my fellow Associate Editors and their contributions,

Katharina B. Rohr, Jerome Retzlaff, and Kaitlyn Clark.

Special thanks goes to our Senior Editor Marta Stelmaszak who has invested a considerable amount of time and effort to make this journal possible over the past years and Dr. Will Venters, the Faculty Editor, who has once more supported us with his academic expertise and experience.

Sincerely,

Sophie Altrock

Associate Editor

 

 

Academic Workshop: Platformization in the Public Sector

Dr Will VentersLeave a comment

I am pleased to be on the programme committee of the following workshop!

Platformization in the Public Sector

Organizers

Margunn Aanestad, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Miria Grisot, Department of Informatics, University of Oslo, Norway
Tomas Lindroth, Department of Applied IT, University of Gothenburg, Sweden

This workshop targets digital infrastructures in the public sector and focuses on the emergence of platforms as a distinct technological and organizational form. The platform ecosystem has emerged as a dominant technological form for global innovative organizations (Baldwin and Woodward, 2009; Tiwana, 2013). It represents the current “best practice” to deal with the complexity of digital infrastructures as well as to leverage dynamics of multi-sided markets and exploit network effects. Platforms are adaptable, scalable and extensible to many other parties and represent an alternative to an integrated collection of “silo systems”.

Public sector organizations around Europe are introducing platforms as part of their digital strategies, but we still have a limited understanding of the challenges associated with establishing platforms in the public sector (Fishenden & Thompson, 2013; Brown et al., 2017). Current research has mainly addressed platforms in the commercial sector (Parker et al., 2016). While the insights from this existing research are highly relevant, there are also important areas where the digital infrastructures can be expected to differ: The technical, regulatory and organisational complexity in the public sector is much higher than for commercial platforms. Multiple different public sector organisations at different government levels are involved in information flows and data custody. The development of national and regional solutions is usually undertaken as joint endeavour between public and private actors, to stimulate socio- economic benefits and innovation, involving a diverse portfolio of systems and registers. Furthermore, the role of the citizens not as mere service recipients but as contributors and co- creators is becoming more central while security concerns, government ́s responsibility for citizens ́ privacy and citizens ́ demand for transparent use of data are rising (Linders, 2012; Nam, 2012).

In addition, the business models of a public sector platform will be different (Bygstad & D’Silva, 2015). The network effects of platform ecosystems (i.e. the self-reinforcing process where more customers trigger more suppliers, which attracts more customers, and so on) may be facilitated in public sector platforms but towards different aims than the ones found in market situation. Monetising network effects is not a key interest for public sector platforms but rather, leveraging network effects for mobilising more resources from inside and outside public organisations and triggering decentralised innovation is a key interest (Vassilakopoulou et al., 2017). Network effects that can contribute to better synergizing rather than competing are of interest in the public sector domain and need to be better understood.

This workshop seeks to address this lack of theorizing specifically to these concerns. The themes include but are not limited to:

  • Business models of a public-sector platform
  • The network effects of public sector platforms
  • Network effects of synergizing rather than competing in the public sector domain
  • How platforms shift work practices of public sector professionals with the inclusion of citizens
  • Empirical studies of platformization, including the gradual process of establishing a platform
  • How technical and organizational structures and governance regimes shape and are shaped by thespecific public sector context
  • The role of the citizens not as mere service recipients but as contributors and co-creators
  • Security concerns, government ́s responsibility for citizens ́ privacy and citizens ́ demand fortransparent use of data
  • Identify core requirements for a platformization strategy that may increase sustainability of public sector platforms
  • Develop theory of public sector platforms that is attentive to the technical, regulatory and organizational specificity of this context
  • Develop process theory on “platformization” that describes key steps and core challenges in the building of platforms and surrounding eco-system
  • Develop theory on the interdependencies between architectural (technical) design, organizational forms, and governance regimes

We seek to contribute to the research as indicated above, and to formulate insights on how public sector platform and surrounding ecosystems develop, can be studied, designed, and theorized.

Plan for publications

In parallel with the consideration of this proposal we have anitiated an application to a relevant IS journal for a special issue on the topic of platforms in the public sector.

Target audience and expected attendance

The workshop aims to attract researchers and practitioners who are interested in the topics of digital infrastructures, public sector, platform ecosystems and e-government. In the workshop, participants will share their knowledge about cases of public sector platforms and digital infrastructures. We want to reach out in order to establish a community of researchers that can cooperate beyond the event itself. We seek to build on and extend the efforts of an ongoing, but not yet formalized, collaborative network of European researchers.

Deadline Dates: 

  • Call opens: 22nd of January.  Authors are invited to submit short papers, not exceeding seven pages (including all figures, tables and references.) using the ECIS Research In Progress template.
  • Submission Deadline: April 4th, 2018. Articles are submitted via e-mail.
  • Notification to Authors: May 4th, 2018.
  • Deadline for Final Papers: June 4th, 2018
  • Date of the workshop: 25th of June
  • Submit to:  submit@platformization.org

 

 

References

Baldwin, C., and Woodard, C. J. 2009. “The Architecture of Platforms: A Unified View,” in Platforms, Markets and Innovation, A. Gawer (ed.). Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Brown, A., Fishenden, J., Thompson, M., & Venters, W. (2017). Appraising the impact and role of platform models and Government as a Platform (GaaP) in UK Government public service reform: towards a Platform Assessment Framework (PAF). Government Information Quarterly.

Bygstad, B., & D’Silva, F. (2015). Government as a platform: a historical and architectural analysis. In NOKOBIT (Norsk konferanse for organisasjoners bruk av IT), 2015.

Fishenden, J and Thompson, M. (2013), Digital government, open architecture, and innovation: why public sector IT will never be the same again, Journal of public administration research and theory, 23 (4), 977-1004.

Linders, D. (2012), From E-Government to We-Government: Defining a Typology for Citizen Coproduction in the Age of Social Media, Government Information Quarterly, 29 (4), 446-454.

Nam, T. (2012), Suggesting frameworks of citizen-sourcing via Government 2.0, Government Information Quarterly, 29 (1), 12-20.

Parker, G. G., Van Alstyne, M. W., & Choudary, S. P. (2016). Platform revolution. How networked markets are transforming the economy and how to make them work for you. WW Norton & Company.

Tiwana, A. (2013), Platform ecosystems: aligning architecture, governance, and strategy. Morgan Kaufmann Publishers.

Vassilakopoulou P., Grisot M., Jensen TB., Sellberg N., Eltes J., Thorseng AA, and Aanestad M. (2017) Building National eHealth Platforms: the Challenge of Inclusiveness, Thirty Eighth International Conference on Information Systems, ICIS 2017, South Korea.

 

Image (cc) Gary Hatch3112 – with thanks!)