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Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems

Editorial

Welcome to the Summer issue of the 37th volume of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS)! Following the usual rotation in the journal’s editorial team, Elena Parmiggiani, from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) in Norway, takes over as Editor-in-Chief for 2025. She follows after Henri Pirkkalainen, who concluded his term in December 2024. Thank you, Henri, for your excellent work in bringing SJIS forward! We also welcome Jonna Järveläinen from the University of Jyväskylä as the editor from Finland: Welcome to the team, Jonna!

Before introducing the articles included in this issue, we would like to share a couple of updates with you.

First, we are delighted to announce that SJIS now offers an Online First option for authors! This means that you can request that we upload the final formatted version to our new SJIS Preprints section (https://aisel.aisnet.org/sjis_preprints/). Final formatting will happen only before the article is uploaded to an issue, but we hope that this opportunity will help all authors increase the visibility of their research!

Second, SJIS’s outstanding production editor, Jacob Nørbjerg, is working on introducing DOIs for all articles published in SJIS as a result of our dialogue with the Association for Information Systems (AIS). This will take some time to finalize, as our human labor resources are limited. However, DOIs will be important to permanently and reliably locate articles published in this journal.

And now, the articles! This issue includes 9 research articles. Taken together, these works paint a vivid picture of the mutual shaping of information systems and organizational dynamics, human experiences, and societal contexts. The topics addressed range from digital innovation and transformation within organizations to the complexities of collaborative processes and from participatory design in inter-agency settings to role-specific risk perceptions in agile environments. On the societal level, this issue sheds light on the human and ethical dimensions of technology by problematizing the gendering of AI, the digital mediation of critical societal information, and the impact of digitalization on human flourishing from an empirical and philosophical standpoint. We believe that collectively, these papers demonstrate the richness of applying diverse theoretical lenses and philosophies to contemporary IS challenges.

We start with "The Motivation Behind Employee-driven Digital Innovation" by Leif Erik Opland, Katja Bley, and Ilias O. Pappas. This study investigates the factors that ignite employee-driven digital innovation (EDDI). Employing a mixed-methodology that marries structural equation modelling (SEM) with fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA), the authors analyze how intrinsic, social, and internalized extrinsic motivations shape EDDI. Their SEM results indicate that intrinsic and social motivations are key positive drivers, while internalized extrinsic motivation shows no significant direct impact. Notably, organizational strategy emerges as a direct positive influence on all motivation types and on EDDI itself. While organizational culture also directly fosters EDDI, it does not appear to moderate the motivation-EDDI nexus. The fsQCA further enriches these findings by identifying six distinct configurations, revealing that a robust organizational strategy and culture can foster EDDI even when individual motivational factors are less prominent. This research offers a novel application of self-determination theory to the EDDI context, providing valuable insights for organizations seeking to cultivate innovation from within.

The second article explores the challenges of collaborative design in "Participatory Design for Inter-Agency Collaboration: Requirements Elicitation from Heterogeneous Stakeholders" by Jaziar Radianti and Sofie Pilemalm. This paper introduces a stakeholder theory-driven Participatory Design (PD) framework tailored for eliciting requirements in complex inter-agency collaboration (IAC) scenarios, exemplified by emergency management. The authors contend that conventional PD approaches often fall short in addressing the unique hurdles of IAC, such as identifying and engaging diverse stakeholders and navigating varied organizational roles and interests. Their proposed method leverages stakeholder theory for systematic stakeholder mapping and to structure workshop processes. By integrating a stakeholder ecosystem perspective with stakeholder salience and management-oriented theories, the study provides a practical pathway from high-level needs to actionable operational requirements, offering valuable lessons for managing heterogeneous groups in synchronous PD settings.

The third article, "Reassessing the Gender Script Concept: The Case of Feminised Conversational Agents" by Joni Jaakola, offers a much-needed examination of the gendering of information systems, focusing on feminized conversational agents, like Amazon’s Alexa. The paper discusses the dualities of this feminization—its potential to enhance usability and trust versus its risk of perpetuating harmful gender stereotypes and biases through the concepts of “gender cue” and “gender script”. The core contribution lies in the proposed conceptual distinction between the designer’s gender script and the user’s gender script. This distinction, the author argues, allows for a more nuanced understanding of gendering as a flexible, ongoing process, rather than a deterministic outcome of design. By highlighting the user’s role in interpreting, resisting, or reconfiguring gender scripts, the paper opens avenues for incorporating anti-determinist, anti-essentialist, queer, and intersectional perspectives into the study of human-like information systems, moving beyond a simple benefits-versus-harms dichotomy.

Following this, Justin D. Cochran, Clay K. Williams, and Saurabh Gupta, in "Business-Driven Information Systems Change: Understanding the Change Process", investigate the often-ill-defined process of how organizational information systems change. Moving beyond a purely technical or systems development focus, the authors argue that the change process itself, with its inherent negotiations, should be the central unit of analysis. Based on interviews with information systems professionals across five organizations, the study employs thematic analysis to unpack this process. Their findings reveal a model centered on three types of negotiations: between business staff and IT staff (“What is really needed?”), between IT staff and the IT systems (“What can be done?”), and again between business and IT staff (“What will be done?”). This research provides empirical support for applying concepts of weak sociomateriality and conjoined agency to understand information systems change, emphasizing the dynamic interactions between business needs, system characteristics, and human interpretations.

Fifth, Karen S. Osmundsen and Jon Iden then address a critical aspect of organizational evolution in "Capabilities for Digital Transformation Competencies". This paper examines how organizations can effectively acquire and utilize the essential competencies that non-IT employees need to navigate the complexities of digital transformation. Through a longitudinal case study of GridCo, a large Norwegian grid company, the authors identify new competency demands in technology, data, and work practices spurred by digital transformation. Drawing from the knowledge-based view of the firm, the study analyzes GridCo’s strategies for obtaining and leveraging these competencies, such as mobile and drone technology proficiency, data processing and analysis skills, and competencies in process innovation and agile management. The research proposes four key organizational capabilities—transferring, aggregating, appropriating, and sourcing—as crucial for managing these evolving digital transformation competencies, thereby offering a valuable framework for both academics and practitioners focused on workforce readiness.

Sixth, in "Designing for Digital Mediation of the Volatile Electricity Prices in the European Energy Crisis: An Action Design Research Study", Victor Vadmand Jensen, Emmelie Christensen, Ida Christiansen, Kim Pham, Nicolai Brodersen Hansen, and John Stouby Persson tackle a pressing contemporary issue. Against the backdrop of the European energy crisis and highly volatile electricity prices, this action design research study, conducted with a large Danish energy provider, explores how electricity price overviews mediate this volatility for consumers and how such digital mediation can be effectively designed. Using postphenomenology as a theoretical lens, the research engaged consumers and provider employees in two iterative cycles to develop a design toolkit. The authors formalize four design principles that address the ontological, epistemological, practical, and ethical dimensions of postphenomenology. These principles aim to guide the development of digital artifacts that not only inform but also shape consumer understanding and engagement with fluctuating energy prices, contributing to the Green Information Systems (IS) agenda by focusing on belief formation and real-world applicability.

Our seventh paper, "Explaining Project Risks: A Case Study of Causal Mapping in An Agile Software Team" by David K. Hein, John S. Persson, and Peter A. Nielsen, delves into the critical area of risk management within agile software development. The study investigates how different roles in an agile team perceive and explain project risks, and how a shared understanding can be fostered. Using causal mapping in a case study of an agile team in the financial sector, the authors found that while the inability to meet deadlines was a common concern, the attributed causes varied significantly across roles like Scrum Master, Product Owner, Developer, and Business Analyst. The research highlights that project risks are often interconnected and that causal mapping is a valuable tool for surfacing and comparing these diverse, role-specific explanations. The study reveals a predominantly mechanistic ontology, an indwelling trajectory, and human-centered autonomy in the team’s risk reasoning, offering insights for improving risk communication and management in agile environments.

Finally, as part of our ongoing efforts to innovate and evolve the journal, we piloted a new editorial process by selecting the most promising papers from the Human Flourishing track at HICSS 2024. The rack chairs, Lena Hylving and Dina Koutsikouri invited authors of two papers to submit an extended and revised version for consideration at SJIS. Lena and Dina served as guest editors for these two papers. We are pleased to feature the two thought-provoking articles that bring philosophical depth and critical analysis to our understanding of the nature and consequences of digitalization for humans.

First, Edward J. Luca, Sebastian K. Boell, Bhuva Narayan, and Dirk Hovorka explore "The Impact of Metrics on Wellbeing, Meaning and Purpose in the Managerial University". This paper critically examines the influence of increasing metrification in academic research on the human flourishing of academics, focusing on their sense of meaning and purpose. Through in-depth interviews conducted at an Australian business school, the study uncovers a diverse spectrum of attitudes towards research metrics—from skepticism and distrust to indifference, and even appreciation and acceptance. The authors argue that the pervasive emphasis on quantifiable outputs within the “managerial university” tends to narrow the scope of academic work, potentially sidelining less measurable but vital aspects of scholarship that contribute to well-being. The research suggests that the digitalization of evaluation practices can reshape professional values and behaviors, sometimes leading to a disconnect between institutional goals and the intrinsic motivations that drive meaningful academic work, thereby impacting human flourishing.

Second, "Dear Schopenhauer: How can IS Artefacts Help Us Flourish? Wille, Vorstellung, Compassion, and Beauty in Social Media" by Raffaele F. Ciriello, offers a unique philosophical lens on the role of IS artifacts in human flourishing. This conceptual piece introduces Arthur Schopenhauer’s subjectivist philosophy as a complement to prevailing Aristotelian objectivist views. Ciriello argues that understanding subjective experience, driven by unconscious desires (Wille) and shaped by mental representations (Vorstellung), is crucial for assessing how IS artifacts like social media impact well-being. The paper reframes core IS concepts—such as causality in sociotechnical systems (proposing “Proportional Voluntarism”), affordance actualization, and ethical design—through Schopenhauer’s ideas on Wille, Vorstellung, compassion, and beauty. Using social media as a central example, the author demonstrates how a Schopenhauerian perspective can guide the design and governance of IS artifacts to alleviate suffering and foster genuine human flourishing, advocating for a more compassionate and aesthetically attuned approach to technology.

We trust that this collection of articles will provoke thoughts, inspire new research avenues, and contribute to the ongoing discourse in IS and beyond. Once again, we would like to thank every reviewer, contributor, author, and reader of the journal. Please remember that SJIS is an AIS-affiliated journal and welcomes submissions from around the world. We look forward to receiving your submissions that address and advance various phenomena related to IS!

Elena Parmiggiani, Olgerta Tona, Louise Harder Fischer, and Jonna Järveläinen