Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects

Authors

Laurie J. Kirsch, University of PittsburghFollow
Sandra A. Slaughter, Georgia Institute of TechnologyFollow

Abstract

Cyber projects are large-scale efforts to implement computer, information, and communication technologies in scientific communities. These projects seek to build scientific cyberinfrastructure that will promote new scientific collaborations and transform science in novel and unimagined ways. Their scope and complexity, the number and diversity of stakeholders, and their transformational goals make cyber projects extremely challenging to understand and manage. Consequently, scholars from multiple disciplines, including computer science, information science, sociology, and information systems, have begun to study cyber projects and their impacts. As IS scholars, our goal is to contribute to this growing body of inter-disciplinary knowledge by considering three areas of IS research that are particularly germane to this class of project, given their characteristics: development approaches, conflict, and success factors. After describing cyber projects, we explore how IS research findings in these three areas are relevant for cyber projects, and suggest promising avenues of future research. We conclude by discussing the importance and unique challenges of cyber projects and propose that, given our expertise and knowledge of project management, IS researchers are particularly well suited to contribute to the inter-disciplinary study of these projects.

Recommended Citation

Kirsch, Laurie J. and Slaughter, Sandra A. (2013) "Managing the Unmanageable: How IS Research Can Contribute to the Scholarship of Cyber Projects," Journal of the Association for Information Systems, 14(4), .
DOI: 10.17705/1jais.00328
Available at: https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol14/iss4/2

DOI

10.17705/1jais.00328