2007/12/18: And then there were three

Why have there been no posts on struct lately? Here's why:

My daughter Edith Clementine was born Nov 30! Mom and Dad are gladly surviving on little sleep to spend our love on this little one.

2007/11/02: The road to knowledge sharing is paved with good intentions

The article is about a model of motivational forces acting on an individual in relation to knowledge sharing, specifically in relation to the socialization and externalization parts of Nonaka and Konno's SECI model [1]. They gathered information via questionnaire, eventually collecting 154 responses from 27 companies in South Korea. They confirmed some unsurprising hypotheses, such as "people who think well of sharing knowledge profess a greater intention to do so" and "group cultures which value sharing knowledge influence people to profess a greater intention to do so also" [p. 100] They also found some things that surprised me, such as "individuals who feel that their self-worth is increased through knowledge sharing may not have a good attitute towards doing so" [p. 100].

I wonder how these different hypotheses interact -- the model proposed in the paper doesn't account for interactions between motivational factors. For instance, both organizational fairness and sense of self-worth are first order factors in the proposed research model [p. 92]. If an organization is not fair, this may also affect the sense of self worth factor as an individual may decline to share knowledge out of spite for the organization, even if they would feel better about themselves if they did. Similarly, the second order factors attitude towards knowledge sharing and subjective norm should be bi-directionally related: if individuals in a group have a poor attitude towards knowledge sharing, the subjective norm of the organization is likely to suffer.

1. Nonaka, I; Konno, N; "The Concept of "Ba": Building a Foundation for Knowledge Creation", California Management Review, Vol. 40, No. 3 (1998) pp. 40-54.

2007/10/06: Design science vs "routine design"

Design science suffers more from diffuse boundaries with practice than I think behavioral science does, and this makes it hard for me to wrap my mind around what exactly differentiates design science from innovative design performed outside the research community. I am very interested in using design research to propel my own research, and so knowing what characteristics it has so that I can increase the probability of that whatever I do will be accepted, insofar as the form of the research is concerned.

Hevner et. al. say that the goal of design science is to provide utility; to solve a real problem, but not to show why the solution works (p. 80). They differentiate design science from "routine design" like so: routine design applies existing IS knowledge to solve current organizational problems (e.g. implementing yet another web server using best design principles is "routine design"), while design science "addresses important unsolved problems in unique or innovative ways or solved problems in more effective or efficient ways" (p. 81). Design science is frequently applied to problems for which the necessary IS knowledge may not yet exist. Its purpose is to address what have been called wicked problems (all of the below from p. 81):

• unstable requirements and constraints based on poorly defined or understood contexts

• complex interactions among subcomponents of the problem and its solution

• malleable processes and artifacts

• a critical dependence on creativity ( intuitive knowledge processes) to provide good solutions

• a critical dependence on social abilities (teamwork) to provide good solutions

I think that are a lot of innovative solutions being proposed and implemented outside the IS research community (Yahoo Pipes and various google products, for example), so I feel like the emphasis on innovation is not an effective distinguishing characteristic.

It is, I believe, the focus on the IS research community it is Hevner et. al.'s guidelines 4, 5 and 7 (research contributions, research rigor and communication of research, p. 83) that distinguishes design science most from innovative design. Those guidelines are really saying that if we innovate with the intention of furthering the goals of science, and contextualize it within the IS knowledge base and community by writing it up and communicating it back to the IS research community, then we are doing design science.

2007/09/29: Social software as formalized autism

Danah Boyd is a Ph.D. student in Judith Donath's Social Media Group at the MIT Media Lab. Her argument is familiar: it's the agile software methodology manifesto from the perspective of social software, oriented towards explaining why current design thinking on social software does not work. It seemed, at first, like an indictment of positivist design of social software (design as an embodiment of scientific principles), but on second read I took it to be a recapitulation of what I was taught as an engineer: understanding the problem is 90% of the solution, and designers don't understand the problem. Namely, how people actually interact, socially.

The author's claim is that social software (Friendster, LinkedIn, etc.) is typically designed in a way that models how autistic people or people with Asperger's Syndrome are taught to engage in social interactions: programmatically. "Step by step, we dissect social affect and try to formalize it so that these kids can understand the world" (p. 3). Current social software codifies social interaction in much the same way, but this does not fit anyone's actual needs. In fact, people will typically try to find ways around the built in social interaction rituals (p. 4-5), if they do not abandon the product altogether.

The paper suggests that designers should design social software around how people actually interact (using a user-driven iterative design methodology (p. 6)) instead of rigidly modeling poorly understood behaviors and offering the resultant product to people to use.

2007/09/22: Persuasion with Data Visualization

Summary of:

In this paper, Viegas and Wattenberg argue for the incorporation of perspective in creating information visualizations. Traditionally, analytical visualization tools have been designed to minimize distortion; to remove the point of view of the designer so that the visualization can offer an objective view of the data to the user and leave them to make their own conclusions. They suggest instead that designers should seek to incorporate particular perspectives on data sets if such a perspective makes the visualization more appropriate to a given task, and then extend that by saying that in some cases, we must acknowledge that the goal of a visualization is not only to analyze, but to persuade: "there are often valid reasons to want to change the way people think and it may be that much of the value of visualization comes from its ability to change attitudes" (p. 10). [ Read More ... ]

2007/09/19: CommentPress

CommentPress is a WordPress theme that allows readers to add comments to each paragraph of a document. Comments made on a paragraph appear in a column to the right of the body of the text, aligned with the paragraph, so that the reader can read and see the comments relatively in situ. The makers of CommentPress intend authors to post long works (articles or books) in sections to a CommentPress site, and then invite people to comment much as an editor would, paragraph by paragraph in the context of the text. Alternatively, the author can invite commenters to give very targeted comments, and then readers to read the text less like the post and response of blogging and somewhat more like a conversation, or a text with related and well-situated sidebars.

As a collaborative editing paradigm, I think it would be interesting to see how effective this is compared with the Wikipedia :Talk pages (see also [1]), in which comments are closely associated with the text being written, but are not visible while one is reading the text.

1. Viegas, FB; Wattenberg, M; Kriss, J; van Ham, F; "Talk Before You Type: Coordination in Wikipedia", System Sciences, 2007. HICSS 2007. 40th Annual Hawaii International Conference on, (2007) pp. 78-78.

2007/09/11: What is IS research?

Summary of:

This is a well written plea to the IS community which reminds me of Webster & Watson's in that its goal is to strengthen the field of IS by focusing the attention of researchers on the needs of the field. Where Webster & Watson ask researchers to look at other, more mature fields, and to see and acknowledge the importance of literature reviews in propelling and focusing research, Benbasat & Zmud ask a more fundamental question: just what is it that we're doing here, anyway?

Their models for "What is IS research?" seem heavily based on socio-technical systems theory: the interaction between humans and organizations and technology. The crucial point they make is that the primary purpose of IS is to study IT as an enabling agent; what we study are the relationships between the IT artifact, the organization (possibly society) and the individuals within it, and how each of them can be changed to improve the others. [ Read More ... ]