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Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Editorial

Welcome to the winter issue of the 31st volume of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems.

The Scandinavian IS community has a very long tradition of the IRIS workshop and the Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems (SCIS) in connection to the workshop. This year was the 42nd IRIS and the 10th anniversary of the SCIS. The events were hosted at the Nokia Eden Spa in Nokia, Finland. A venue with outstanding beauty in the middle of the Finnish nature. Spectacularly positioned at a lake surrounded by birch trees the Eden Spa created the ideal venue for IS researchers from Scandinavia and colleagues from the rest of the World interested in the Scandinavian flavor to IS research to meet and share their work and ideas. The theme of the IRIS/SCIS 2019 event was Smart Transformation; exploring how individuals, organizations, and society respond to emerging technologies. In all, 71 people attended the event; they shared 33 papers in the IRIS workshop sessions and 12 papers were presented at the SCIS. This year the community also sponsored two scholarships.

The Scandinavian IS research tradition is characterized by a contextual approach where Information Systems are studied and understood in their context. The participants of the IRIS/SCIS 2019 were the last group of guests at Nokia Eden Spa before a major renovation will take place. Similarly, to the Eden Spa, IS research is on a constant move, but the context often remains unchanged. That is the insight which Sune Dueholm Müller, Nikolaus Obwegeser, Jakob Vang Glud, and Gunnar Johildarson Aarhus University share in their study of innovation in a Danish media company. The study focuses on the relationship between organizational culture and digital innovation and aims at understanding firms’ abilities to achieve a balance between stability and flexibility. The conclusion is that organizational culture can be resistant to innovative practices. The second article in this volume is by Stefan Cronholm and Hannes Göbel who share their contribution on a further understanding of the empirical value of Action Design Research. The authors highlight how ADR supports the dual mission of developing both theory and practice-oriented knowledge and point to the need for more methodological guidance on how to identify evaluation strategies, how to identify abstraction mechanisms, and how to formulate design principles.

During the 2019 IRIS/SCIS conference, the Editors for SJIS met with the Executive Board for the IRIS Association to discuss the development of the community, its conferences and the journal. Similarly, to previous years we see a joint need to actively connect the journal to the IRIS and SCIS conferences, and to further develop the identity, mission and scope for the journal. This issue reflects this joint ambition by publishing one of the keynotes from the event. The invited keynote of Tuure Tuunanen focused on transformation from digital services to cybernized services and its implications for IS research. Based on the keynote, Tuure and his colleagues wrote a reflection note published within this issue. The reflection note is followed by commentaries from IS scholars who either attended to the conference or are working on the related topic.

Finally, we would like to thank all the authors, reviewers and readers of our journal. We also thank Jacob Nørbjerg who has been the production editor. We hope that the coming issues of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems will carry on and develop the vision of the first SJIS issue back in 1989 of “opening a window from the Scandinavian research community to information systems researchers in the rest of the world.”

Helle Zinner Henriksen, Arto Ojala, Polyxeni Vassilakopoulou, and Katrin Jonsson