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The adoption of Artificial Intelligence (AI) by the public sector has the potential to improve service delivery. However, the risks related to AI are significant and citizen concerns have halted several AI initiatives. In this paper we report findings from an empirical study on citizens´ attitudes towards AI use in public services in Norway. We found a generally positive attitude and identified three factors contributing to this: a) the high level of trust in government; b) the reassurance provided by having humans in the loop; c) the perceived transparency into processes, data used for AI models and models´ inner workings. We interpret these findings through the lens of social contract theory and show how the introduction of AI in public services is subject to the social contract power dynamics. Our study contributes to research by foregrounding the government-citizen relationship and has implications for public sector AI practice. Paid open access

Research methods are part and parcel of good research. Despite this, we often teach research methods in an ad hoc manner and do not reflect on relevant pedagogical aspects. This situation is changing due to the introduction of dedicated research methods courses as part of a transferable skills agenda in many universities. To address pedagogical aspects of teaching methods in IS, we organized a workshop during the 10th Scandinavian Conference on Information Systems (SCIS/IRIS). Our goal was to create a community of practice among supervisors and teachers of research methods in IS. In this paper, we present our findings from the workshop presentations and discussions. Three main themes emerge from our workshop: 1) Coping with student motivational aspects of learning research methods at micro and macro levels, 2) Challenges related to course design for different institutional contexts, and 3) The challenging interplay between IS theory and empirical data when teaching research methods. We discuss these themes and their relation to the field of IS. We propose some future research topics for the community.

Researchers of Information Systems have long demonstrated that the teaching of research methods hinges on the dynamic interplay between theory and practice. However, grasping the role of theory in both the process (research design) and products (reading and writing articles) of research is challenging for teachers and, crucially, their students. This project contributes to the pedagogical discourse on qualitative research methods in Information Systems. It proposes the prototype of a framework in the shape of an agile lecture sequence for making explicit the role of theory across the research process when teaching research methods in Information Systems. The proposed framework is based on a constructivist approach, recognizing that students co-construct their knowledge recursively through the interplay with the socio-cultural context. Copyright (c) 2020 Elena Parmiggiani Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

Extant Information Systems research emphasizes the strategic benefits of digitalization and value co-creation for business. Less is known, however, about the dynamics of how value is co-created in the digitalization of the public sector, where data infrastructures are increasingly adopted. We identify three core empirical challenges for value co-creation in the public sphere, corresponding to the following conceptual tenets: participation in infrastructuring processes, data curation, and data protection. We propose to draw on the Participatory Design tradition that permeates the Information Systems field in Scandinavia to critically harness the political meaning of value co-creation. Drawing on a two-year project on the design of data infrastructures in three areas of the public domain (environmental monitoring, healthcare, and smart cities), we contribute to Information Systems by proposing a research agenda consisting of three future directions for critical studies of value co-creation in data infrastructures in the public sector.

Open Access. CC BY-NC-ND license (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives.

This thesis investigates the development of ICT solutions for performing real-time subsea environmental monitoring during oil and gas offshore operations. The research is based on a three-year case study of an international oil and gas company headquartered in Norway. The thesis is specifically focused on aspects of integration: how new tools, systems, and approaches are developed, and how existing ones are adapted to fit the existing systems and practices of the oil and gas company. The thesis has three goals. First, it analyzes how real-time environmental monitoring emerges as a distributed, interacting, and interconnected sociotechnical network (information infrastructure). Second, it identifies how the company’s initiatives are currently changing the representations of subsea environmental risk in remote and previously inaccessible areas like the Arctic region. Third, it reflects on the research methodology to address such a spatially distributed and long-term setting. On the theoretical level this work aims to contribute to the field of Information Systems and, marginally, to Computer-supported cooperative work. It is also inspired by Science and Technology Studies. A theoretical framework is developed connecting contributions from these three streams of literature in order to characterize the co-evolution of environmental monitoring infrastructures and their phenomenon of interest, environmental risk. This evolving relationship shows that, on the one hand, the perception of environmental risk as a problem is affected by the integration mechanisms that generate new knowledge. On the other hand, new conceptions of environmental risk have consequences for the maintenance and upgrade of environmental monitoring infrastructures. I call this process infrastructuring. The thesis provides a vivid empirical illustration of how the relationship between environmental risk and integration strategies unfolds in offshore environmental monitoring. By merging the theoretical framework and the empirical case, I argue in favor of a flexible understanding of the development of complex systems in organizational settings. Studies of infrastructure should account for the existence of pragmatic approaches to face persistent uncertainty and the fluid relationship between situated usefulness and a cross-geographical dimension. In line with existing debates in the literature, I demonstrate that the traditionally bounded distinctions of system design/development/implementation and of users/designers must be overtaken when studying infrastructures. On the methodological level, this thesis therefore advocates a deeper empirical analysis of the unfolding of infrastructures in organizational realities.