Acknowledgements : We thank Mr. K. Eric Knutsen for providing us with the data collected by him on behalf of Cresap, McCormick, and Paget, Inc. The analysis and interpretation presented here are those of the authors.

Proceedings Editors Anders G. Nilsson and Remigijus Gustas http://www.it.kau.se/isd2005/ The publication of ISD’2005 Proceedings for the Fourteenth International Conference on Information Systems Development is published by Kluwer/Springer. Proceedings are not available at the conference but will be posted to participants by the publisher.

BACKGROUND Disease data sharing is important for the collaborative preparation, response, and recovery stages of disease control. Disease phenomena are strongly associated with spatial and temporal factors. Web-based Geographical Information Systems provide a real-time and dynamic way to represent disease information on maps. However, data heterogeneities, integration, interoperability, and car...

As the use of information technology and computer-driven systems in manufacturing and construction design has matured, the necessity for software applications to work together, exchange data, processes and information has become crucial to the conduct of business and operations in organisations. This capability is referred to as interoperability (Pouchard 2000), (Pouchard 2002), (Ray 2003). To ...

In this paper we argue that conceptual modeling is well suited to define a convincing profile for the information systems discipline. Different from empirical research, conceptual modeling should not only represent existing domains. To fully exploit the potential offered by information technology, conceptual models should also represent constructions of future reality. While such an approach is...

This chapter critically reviews the literature on power relations in information systems implementation projects. IS projects redistribute information and power in organizations and are thus implicated in both project progress and ultimately project success. The review firstly considers the ideas of Foucault, Giddens, Clegg, Lukes, and Latour, as these are the most established and prominent the...

The chapter provides possible directions for the wider application of the systems approach to information systems development. Potential improvement of software development practices is linked by some leading experts to the application of more systemic ideas. However, the current state of the practice in software engineering and information systems development shows the urgent need for improvem...

This paper reports on a study of the use of blogs to support a Management Information Systems Strategy class requiring higher level thinking skills. Comparison of the use of private vs. public blogs showed that public sites were more effective in providing students with the skills to assess the potential of emerging technologies and to integrate blogs into their daily activites.

This paper addresses the important paradigmatic issue of how to conceive the science of information systems (IS). It investigates especially the relations between IS science and its empirical fields (development and usage of information systems). One possible view of IS science is reviewed; an artefact science view. With inspiration from and critique of this view another view is articulated: In...

The study reported in this monograph aims to investigate the state of the information systems (IS) academic discipline in Australia from a historical and current perspective, collecting evidence across a range of dimensions. To maximise the strategic potential of the study, the results need to be capable of integration, so that the relationships within and across the dimensions and geographical...