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Full-Text Articles in Business
The Concept Of “It Artifact” Has Outlived Its Usefulness And Should Be Retired Now, Steven Alter
The Concept Of “It Artifact” Has Outlived Its Usefulness And Should Be Retired Now, Steven Alter
Business Analytics and Information Systems
Vastly inconsistent definitions of the term “the IT artifact” in leading journals and conferences demonstrate why it no longer means anything in particular and should be retired from the active IS lexicon. Examples from the literature show why artifact-cousins, such as the IS artifact, sociotechnical artifact, social artifact, and ensemble artifact should be used with great care, if not retired as well. Any void created by these retirements could be filled through the following approaches: 1) relabeling with simple terms that are immediately understandable, 2) adopting guidelines for making sense of the whole X-artifact family, and 3) sidestepping the IT …
Defining Information Systems As Work Systems: Implications For The Is Field, Steven Alter
Defining Information Systems As Work Systems: Implications For The Is Field, Steven Alter
Business Analytics and Information Systems
The lack of an agreed upon definition of information system is one of many obstacles troubling the academic information systems discipline. After listing a number of definitions of IS, this paper defines information system as a special case of work system as defined in Alter (1999a). This definition has many desirable characteristics: It is easy to understand; differentiates IS from IT; covers totally manual, partially automated, and totally automated information systems; links to a life cycle model that generates many insights about development and implementation problems; provides a simple guideline that helps in interpreting common IS/IT jargon; and has other …
Defining Information Systems As Work Systems: Implications For The Is Field, Steven Alter
Defining Information Systems As Work Systems: Implications For The Is Field, Steven Alter
Steven Alter
The lack of an agreed upon definition of information system is one of many obstacles troubling the academic information systems discipline. After listing a number of definitions of IS, this paper defines information system as a special case of work system as defined in Alter (1999a). This definition has many desirable characteristics: It is easy to understand; differentiates IS from IT; covers totally manual, partially automated, and totally automated information systems; links to a life cycle model that generates many insights about development and implementation problems; provides a simple guideline that helps in interpreting common IS/IT jargon; and has other …
Work Systems And It Artifacts: Does The Definition Matter?, Steven Alter
Work Systems And It Artifacts: Does The Definition Matter?, Steven Alter
Business Analytics and Information Systems
Lurking just under the surface of longstanding debates about rigor versus relevance and about the core and scope of the IS field is the question of whether inadequate definitions of basic terms is an obstacle to progress. This article focuses on whether the definition of IT artifact or work system really matters. It identifies five definitions of IT artifact and IT-enabled work system, and then looks in detail at whether the definition of work system mattered in Jasperson, Carter, and Zmud’s [2005] article in MIS Quarterly about post-adoptive behaviors. It argues that their definition perhaps affected their conceptualization of post-adoptive …
The Is Core - Xi: Sorting Out Issues About The Core, Scope, And Identity Of The Is Field, Steven Alter
The Is Core - Xi: Sorting Out Issues About The Core, Scope, And Identity Of The Is Field, Steven Alter
Business Analytics and Information Systems
Debates about the core and the scope of the IS field and about whether the core and scope are related to a crisis in the field have smoldered for many years. This article is a response to ten articles submitted by members of the CAIS Editorial Board who accepted an invitation to contribute to a debate about the core and scope of the IS field. Those articles were written as responses to Benbasat and Zmud’s [2003] article “The Identity Crisis Within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties” and my rebuttal [Alter 2003b] entitled “Sidestepping the IT …
Sidestepping The It Artifact, Scrapping The Is Silo, And Laying Claim To 'Systems In Organizations, Steven Alter
Sidestepping The It Artifact, Scrapping The Is Silo, And Laying Claim To 'Systems In Organizations, Steven Alter
Business Analytics and Information Systems
The “IT artifact” and debates about the core of the IS field received a lot of attention in the last several years. This paper is a response to Benbasat and Zmud’s June 2003 MISQ paper “The Identity Crisis within the IS Discipline: Defining and Communicating the Discipline’s Core Properties,” which argues that “the IT artifact and its immediate nomological net”1 constitutes “a natural ensemble of entities, structures, and processes” that “serves to bind together the IS subdisciplines and to communicate the distinctive nature of the IS discipline.” This paper starts by examining the meaning of “IT artifact” and concluding that …