期刊名称：Electronic Journal of Business Research Methods
印刷版ISSN：1477-7029
电子版ISSN：1477-7029
出版年度：2011
卷号：9
期号：2
页码：109-118
出版社：Academic Conferences International Limited
摘要：Design science (DS) is a problem solving paradigm that involves building and evaluating innovative artifacts in a rigorous manner to solve complex, real world problems, make research contributions that extend the boundaries of what is already known, and communicate the results to appropriate audiences. The importance of this paradigm in the Information Systems (IS) field has been recognised since the early 1990’s with the publication of seminal articles by for example Nunamaker et al (1991), Walls et al (1992) and March and Smith (1995). However, over the past 15 years, DS research in IS has been sparse. In more recent times this has begun to change, with an increasing number of research contributions considering DS research. DS research in IS is important as the dominant behavioural science paradigm is not sufficient for addressing the types of problems that call for human creativity and innovative and novel solutions. One widely debated problem in the IS field that calls for such novel solutions centres on how organisations manage, deliver and optimise value from their IT investments. This paper presents a DS research project in the IS field that aims to improve organisational ability in managing and optimizing value realised from IT investments through increasing maturity in critical areas. This research involves development of an IT Capability Maturity Framework (IT CMF). The IT CMF project is centered at the Innovation Value Institute (IVI) at the National University of Ireland Maynooth (NUIM). The IVI is a joint venture between NUIM, Intel and the Boston Consulting Group and seeks to drive innovation in the management and use of IT in order to optimise business value. The IT CMF represents an emerging blueprint of key IT capability processes, and at a high level consists of four integrated IT management strategies or macro processes: managing IT like a business, managing the IT budget, managing the IT capability, and managing IT for business value. The IT CMF represents a blueprint for incrementally improving these four macro processes across five maturity levels: initial, basic, intermediate, advanced, and optimized. These four macro processes are further broken into 32 critical processes (CPs), which are the key activities that an IT organisation needs to manage in order to deliver IT solutions and measure the business value generated. The content development and review for the IT CMF is performed by the IVI development community, which comprises academic researchers, industry based practitioner‑researchers and consultants based in over 55 global companies. This paper discusses its development in terms of key DS principles and presents reflections on the challenges and value associated with adopting a DS approach. The paper adds to the growing body of DS literature in the IS field, and enables other researchers and practitioners to judge the rigor with which the IT CMF artifact was created and evaluated, and its utility in practical application.
关键词：design science; IT CMF; IS; case study; maturity models
