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Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Editorial

A new era of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems has begun! First, SJIS is now an official journal of the AIS – the Association for Information Systems. SJIS is thus available to the international IS community through the AIS digital library. This has increased the visibility of our journal remarkably. For example in April 2012 alone, there were 220 article downloads. This number has been quite steady over the past months. Second, we have moved to use a new publishing system, BEPress, which is widely used by the AIS. We can thus manage submissions more easily, and hopefully respond to authors’ desires for getting their papers published quicker. We will also ask all future authors to upload their papers directly to BEPress to speed up the process. The link can be accessed through the SJIS website at http://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis/.

We have also experienced some changes in our editorial team. Samuli Pekkola now serves as the coordinating editor for SJIS replacing Keld Bødker. We would like to take this opportunity to thank Keld for his service to the journal as well as to the community. The editorial board is happy to welcome Sabine Madsen as the new Danish representative on the board. We have already started working with her, and certainly do look forward to continue doing so for the coming four years.

The first issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems vol. 24 features three research articles.

The article by Daniel Boos and Gudela Grote presents the challenges that IS designers face when developing systems with high demand for accountability. They argue that three dimensions of accountability: visibility, responsibility, and liability, need to be considered. They study those issues in the context of Internet of Things applications in two Pharmacies. The paper thus addresses two issues that we believe would be of utmost importance in the future: the concept of accountability, and Internet of Things applications.

The article by Panos Constantinides continues the topic of accountability and health care. However, his study focuses on a hospital and how accountability is considered in cross-boundary work relationships. He utilizes Foucault’s notion of governmentality and questions the appropriateness of the IS designers’ abilities to steer the new IS towards certain type of accountability. According to Constantinides’s study, the relationships of accountability are historically rooted and are largely outside the reach of the IS designers.

The article by Rune Pedersen, Torbjørg Meum and Gunnar Ellingsen is also related to the healthcare domain. In this article the focus is on nursing terminologies and their slowly evolving nature of large-scale terminology-based information infrastructures. The authors examine this empirically by rich cases from three Norwegian university hospitals where also a reference terminology becomes part of the game. The article demonstrates how terminologies are complex phenomena requiring integration processes with adaptation, negotiations and maintenance.

We look forward to receiving your best papers with a view to publishing them in the Scandinavian IS community’s own journal – the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems.