The Digital Innovation of everyday things: New, Copy, Paste, Search, Save, Print, Send, etc.

With the ongoing proliferation and immersion of digital technologies into everything we use, we often wonder how the future of the things we use would look like. While it is not possible to predict this, it is possible to think about it. Chance favors the prepared mind.

Take the digital camera. The way we now go about with taking and sharing pictures is quite different from how it used to be with the film camera. One of the influences has been the information technology, in fact the digital camera probably has more in common with a computer than with a film camera. This also means that a lot of functionality associated with computers has entered the world of digital photography like ‘save,’ ‘copy,’ ‘delete,’ metadata, etc.(and we expect that this functionality works in a way similar to a computer environment, e.g., a perfect copy with one click).

One of the ways of thinking about how digital technologies influence everyday things, may be to apply these notions of computer functionality to them as a thought experiment. For example, what would ‘new’ mean in relation to a digital fridge. I could mean that it registers every new product I put in. Or I may be able to ‘search,’ by asking it if there is any fruit left or how much fruit has been consumed in the last week. I may also be able to ‘save’ so I can see overtime what has been in my fridge.

IT Consumerization and its Effects on (Strategic) IT Managment

IT consumerization is both a major opportunity and significant challenge for organizations. However, IS research has hardly discussed the implications for IT management so far. In this paper we address this topic by empirically identifying organizational themes for IT consumerization and conceptually exploring the direct and indirect effects on the business value of IT, IT capabilities, and the IT function.

More specifically, based on two case studies, we identify eight organizational themes: consumer IT strategy, policy development and responsibilities, consideration of private life of employees, user involvement into IT-related processes, individualization, updated IT infrastructure, end user support, and data and system security.

The contributions of this paper are (1) the identification of organizational themes for IT consumerization, (2) the proposed effects on the business value of IT, IT capabilities and the IT function, and (3) combining empirical insights into IT consumerization with managerial theories in the IS discipline.

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A Critical Realist Perspective of Enterprise Architecture Evolution: Conditioning and Outcomes

This paper investigates how Enterprise Architecture (EA) evolves due to emerging trends. It specifically explores how EA integrates the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Archer’s Morphogenetic theory is used as an analytical approach to distinguish the architectural conditions under which SOA is introduced, to study the relationships between these conditions and SOA introduction, and to reflect on EA evolution (elaborations) that then take place.  

The paper focuses on reasons for why EA evolution could take place, or not and what architectural changes could happen due to SOA integration. The research builds on sound theoretical foundations to discuss EA evolution in a field that often lacks a solid theoretical groundwork. Specifically, it proposes that critical realism, using the morphogenetic theory, can provide a useful theoretical foundation to study enterprise architecture (EA) evolution. The initial results of a literature review (a-priori model) were extended using explorative interviews. 

The findings of this study are threefold. First, there are five different levels of EA-SOA integration outcomes. Second, a mature EA, flexible and well-defined EA framework and comprehensive objectives of EA improve the integration outcomes. Third, the analytical separation using Archer’s theory is helpful in order to understand how these different integration outcomes are generated.

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