By Benjamin Barraza

Summary:

Each ICO has an associated white paper that describes the firm's business model, market, cryptocurrency, the team behind the project, and the technology. Then investments are made in the startups. The white papers differ in scope and detail. Comprehensive white papers describing technologically-sophisticated details raised more money than superficial ones simply making claims. Examples of ICO successes and failures are described.

General Take-aways:

• Initial coin offerings (ICOs) are important to understand because startups play an important role in the global blockchain landscape
• ICOs resulted in $14 billion invested during their first five years
• Insights about the processes involved in ICOs shed light on the relationship between technical white papers and the amount of money raised
• Detailed and comprehensive white papers were most successful
• This paper follows the "conversation" model, where Barraza's research is explored
• Insights from history are augmented by insights about changes in the market since his analysis

By Thomas Jensen, Jonas Hedman, and Stefan Henningsson

Summary:

A longitudinal case study provides a rare glimpse into the development and evolution of TradeLens from 2013 to 2019. Data were collected from several sources, including interviews, conferences, focus groups, direct observation, project meetings, and field visits. The business value of this global supply chain system is still evolving, but seven valuable lessons provide guidance for future blockchain projects with interorganizational boundaries.

General take-aways:

• TradeLens is a blockchain-based system used in the international container shipping industry.
• The system enables a trusted exchange of information between players.
• The system also enables them to comply with regulations while raising efficiency, reducing administrative costs, lead times, and risk
• Development of the system required cooperation between two firms, but the process was complex
• Slow adoption was due to initial concerns about the technology infrastructure being fully in place, and about whether shared documents can be trusted

Seven recommended actions include:

1. Refocus strategies towards the entire ecosystem of customers, partners, authorities, and competitors
   
2. Early on, focus on the vision, not the return on investment (ROI), because ROI builds as the network effect grows
   
3. Solutions to interorganizational problems should be approached from the perspective of distributed control, not firm control
   
4. Build partner trust before and after blockchain trust
   
5. Some solutions require governmental authority backing early in the process.
   
6. Evolve the governance model as adoption expands
   
7. Consider blockchain interoperability in strategic plans

By Antonis Stylianou, Chandrasekar Subramaniam, Yuan Niu

Problem 

Research has long posited that the relationship between IT and performance can be explained by investigating overlooked key capabilities that are enabled by IT. These connections are especially not well understood in an inter-organizational (IO) context.

Firms that develop competency in managing knowledge resources across their supply chains are rewarded with higher economic benefits. A major challenge in managing IO knowledge are the competing, and often conflicting, goals of firms in the partnership. The key to dealing with this challenge may lie in the use of IT to enable better inter-firm relationships.

Summary

• We investigate the role of relational and KM capabilities in the link between IT and performance in organizational partnerships.
• We develop and test a comprehensive empirical conceptualization of KM capabilities that refers to the management of “business knowledge,” including the collection, organization, synthesis, and use of business data, information, and insights by the partnering firms.
• We investigate the role of partner interdependence on IO IT, KM, and performance.

Take-Aways

• We demonstrate empirically that IO IT creates value for the partnership. Improved IO relationships in turn strengthen IO KM.
• The ability of partner firms to collectively manage knowledge resources positively impacts the operational and the strategic performance of the partnership.
• When the interdependence between IO partners is stronger, partner firms can achieve greater KM benefits by investing more in their relational capabilities, such as building trust and long-term orientation and fostering collaborative partnerships.
• Our study shows that IO relational capability and IO KM are important missing links that can explain the impact of IT on performance. 

By Samuli Pekkola, Matti Rossi and Kari Smolander

Problem

Grounded theory (GTM) research aims at understanding practice issues from observing it. When researchers collaborate and use GTM, they often report their research method by stating "we did the research." This, however, does not clarify how they reconciled differences in the researchers' viewpoints and their omitted descriptions may lessen the quality of the study, possibly resulting even incorrect conclusions. Omitting details can make it difficult to observe and assess collaborative work.

Summary

This paper analyzes a sample of papers from top Information Systems journals to describe how IS researchers have collaborated during the GTM process and reported their research process. We also describe and compare alternatives for collaboration using GTM. We highlight potential issues that arise from different world views, and provide guidance and examples of how these issues can be avoided, and how the research process can be made transparent.

Take-aways

We advise researchers to use one of our four modes of collaboration as a basis for:

• Deciding which mode best fits with the research endeavor, questions, and strategy
• Considering what activities are needed to establish and maintain a common ground, how much coordination overhead and coordination activities are necessary throughout the research process
• Reporting the research process honestly and transparently in their scientific publication.

These pieces of advice improve researchers' and practitioners' awareness on the GTM research process and increase its transparency. Practitioners would then be more aware of how researchers are studying their organizations, and what problems can hinder their work. Being aware of possible problems in turn helps the reader assess the interpretations of the research data, judge the quality of the study, and assess its results.

By Langtao Chen, Aaron Baird and Detmar Straub

Problem:

More than 500 articles related to health IT were published in IS journals between 1990 and 2017. While remarkable that such a significant quantity of quality health IT research is being published in IS journals, it is nearly impossible, even for researchers who read in this area regularly, to comprehensively understand what this research has contributed.

Article Summary:

To address this problem, we applied analytics methods to systematically analyze the 571 health IT articles published in IS journals between 1990 and 2017. Our article describes how and why we conducted this research as well as the key health IT trends, research theme dynamics, article relationships, and thought leaders systematically identified via our analyses.

Key Takeaways:

• We find four, central health IT research themes: (1) Health IS Acceptance, (2) Health IS Implementation, (3) Health IS Outsourcing, Performance, and Investment, and (4) EMR and EHR. These findings suggest that much of the core of health IT research centers on how health care organizations invest in and then assimilate enterprise health IT, such as EHRs.
• Our findings suggest that five health IT research themes offer significant opportunities for future research: (1) Health Analytics and Data Mining, (2) Mobile Health, (3) Health Information Interchange, (4) Clinical Pathway and Treatment Management, and (5) Online Health Communities and Digital Services.
• We also identify specific leaders in health IT as a whole and within their thematic sub-communities. These findings offer academic institutions insights into who could lead their efforts to capitalize on health care and IS initiatives.

To learn more, visit https://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol20/iss8/5/.