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Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Editorial

Welcome to the summer issue and the 34th volume of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS). The year 2022 has meant a number of changes. Not least, society has opened up more and more after the pandemic, and on our campuses we can once again welcome both students and employees. This time has been long-awaited. We look forward to meeting people in person but also deriving best practices from remote work, online teaching, digital meetings and coping with the lack of co-located interaction. Research and teaching in Information Systems have never been more relevant when society wants to explore future forms of working and learning.

A new year also means changes in the editorial team at SJIS. Elena Parmiggiani replaced Polyxeni Vassilakopoulou as the member representing Norway, and Katrin Jonsson from Sweden is now the editor-in-chief. We would like to thank Polyxeni for her services to the journal and welcome Elena to the team!

This issue of the journal includes six different research articles. In the paper “Becoming a Designer: The Value of Sensitive Design Situations for Teaching and Learning Ethical Design and Design Theory”, Anna Sigridur Islind and Sara Maria Josefin Willermark explore the issue of teaching design theory. They argue for the importance of engagement in sensitive design situations, an approach that entails a process of de-emphasizing objectivity and promoting subjectivity through real-life sensitive cases to learn from, to foster reflectiveness for the future designers. The main contribution is a teaching method for cultivating ethical design, which includes the application of sensitive design situations when teaching ethics to students.

The second paper “Effects-Driven IT Improvement: Pursuing Local Post-Implementation Opportunities”, by Jesper Simonsen and Morten Hertzum, explores the realization of benefits from IT usage. The realization depends on local efforts that cannot presume top-management support but must themselves generate the innovation potential necessary to improve system use. To facilitate such local efforts, they propose effects-driven IT improvement. Their overarching contribution is to provide a means of operationalizing and packaging improvement initiatives in a manner that combines local and lightweight experimentation with the data-driven realization of meaningful effects.

The third paper “Examining Technostress at Different Types of Data Scientists’ Workplaces” is written by Nicholas Daniel Derra, Christian Regal, Simon Henrik Rath, and Torsten M. Kühlmann. The paper focuses on technostress within the specific job class of data scientists. They classify different types of data scientists’ workplaces through performing latent class analysis using several workplace attributes, thereby revealing distinctions between these classes regarding the intensity of technostress creators, strains due to ICT use, and job performance.

The fourth paper “Can E-government Maturity Increase B2C E-Business Use? The Roles of Corruption and Virtual Social Networks Diffusion”, by Jithesh Arayankalam and Satish Krishnan, explores the link between e-government and e-business. The paper investigates the relationships between e-government maturity, corruption, VSN diffusion, and B2C e-business use using publicly available archival data and by drawing on the value framework for assessing e-government impact and Blumer’s theory of collective behavior.

The fifth paper “Designing Heuristics for Accessible Online Text Production”, written by Juho-Pekka Mäkipää and Suvi Isohella, explores web content within the public sector. The paper contributes improvements to the guidance of accessible text production by proposing heuristics with a design science approach. The authors do this by reviewing accessibility guidelines and determine improvement factors related to text accessibility, establish a design and evaluation workshop with students, and verify the feasibility of the proposal with content creators.

The final paper “Mutual Learning during Post-implementation”, by Caroline Ngoma investigates how mutual learning can be reached when there is a wide knowledge gap between designers and prospective users. This study presents an action research project carried out at a rural clinic in Tanzania to develop and implement an electronic medical record system. Large parts of the mutual learning took place during and after the system implementation when there was a real system to mutually learn from.

We hope that you find this issue interesting. We look forward to receiving your papers with a view to publishing them in the Scandinavian IS-community’s own journal—the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems. Hopefully we also meet at IRIS/SCIS in Denmark in August, the Scandinavian community’s own IS-conference.

Katrin Jonsson, Sune Dueholm Müller, Henri Pirkkalainen and Elena Parmiggiani