Exploring the Explanatory Power of Actability – The Case of Internet-based Software Artefacts

This paper is an inquiry into the empirical grounding of actability—an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics. The paper describes the structure and the application of an analytic framework based on actability and the semiotic framework. Actability has been proposed as an important concept for the understanding of information systems pragmatics and the semiotic framework provides a layered model of information systems that balances the technical and more social issues. The framework has been used as a tool to direct attention during a qualitative analysis of the Internet-based software artefact. The results show that actability and the semiotic framework can be used effectively to gain understanding of specific information systems phenomena.