Editorial Hans

European Journal of Information Systems (2008) 17, 555–556. doi:10.1057/ejis.2008.58 It is my pleasure to write the editorial for the last issue of this year of the European Journal of Information Systems (EJIS). This issue contains no less than nine papers. It is my privilege to introduce them below. We are starting off this issue with a paper from Thompson Teo and Bing Men on knowledge portals in Chinese consulting firms. Consultants use knowledge portals to codify the knowledge they have accumulated in prior consultancy engagements, and this codified knowledge can then be accessed by other consultants who are new to the job or to the industry. The authors are interested in the usage of these knowledge portals, and the factors that contribute to its use. They demonstrate how two important characteristics of knowledge portals interact: the quality of the codified knowledge on the one hand, and the extent to which the consultants believe the requested knowledge can be codified on the other. The latter characteristic is referred to as ‘knowledge tacitness’ and the authors demonstrate its important role in the success of a knowledge portal implementation. The next paper, written by Kari Smolander and colleagues, is a discussion on the concept of software architecture. This important concept is often spoken about in information system development, but nonetheless there is very little consensus on what it actually means. The authors set out to resolve some of its ambiguity, and conducted interviews in three firms to seek clarification on the concept. Their findings suggest that there are at least four ways in which software architecture can be interpreted: as blueprint, language, decision, and as literature. These interpretations shed light on the misunderstandings that often arise when people speak about software architectures. Our third paper is written by Kalle Lyytinen and Michael Newman and contains a wide-ranging theory explaining organisational change in the context of information systems implementation. This is a fascinating paper that contributes in many ways to our understanding of the effects of information systems implementation. First of all, the authors provide different levels of change to conceptualise the effects of information systems. Second, the authors provide different types of change: incremental change and step change. Finally, the authors provide the social-technical perspective as a vehicle to locate the changes. These building blocks provide the foundation for their Punctuated Socio-Technical IS Change (PSIC) model. The authors revisit a case previously identified in the literature to apply their model and to demonstrate how it is superior to a competing model. We are keeping with the socio-technical theme in the fourth article of this EJIS issue. Using data from an emergency hospital in Sweden, Sunyoung Cho and colleagues demonstrate how Actor-Network Theory can be used to describe the effects of information systems implementation in a healthcare context. This is an accessible paper that competently handles the perhaps not-so-accessible terminology ordinarily associated with Actor-Network Theory. The authors augment their explanation with a dynamic approach where they divide their actor-network configurations European Journal of Information Systems (2008) 17, 555–556 & 2008 Operational Research Society Ltd. All rights reserved 0960-085X/08