Designing to Inform: Toward Conceptualizing Practitioner Audiences for Socio-technical Artifacts in Design Science Research in the Information Systems Discipline

Introduction One characteristic of the information systems (IS) discipline in its current state is the co-existence of two major research paradigms. The first and most traditional paradigm is explanation-oriented and theory-building empirical research to understand real-world phenomena in the context of IS development or use (Gregor, 2006). The other paradigm--design science research (DSR)--seeks to design and evaluate socio-technical IT artifacts that provide potential solutions for classes of real-world problems and ground them in existing theory (Gregor & Hevner, 2013). Since many disciplines use the term "artifact", I will define it first in the sense the IS discipline commonly understands the term. This understanding goes back to Simon (1996) who (first in 1969) distinguished the natural sciences and the sciences of the artificial. The latter are concerned with human-made entities, the so-called artifacts. In the IS discipline, socio-technical artifacts are at the center of interest (Gregor & Hevner, 2013). They comprise an ensemble of technical elements (such as concepts, models, methods, or instantiations (March & Smith, 1995) of information technology) and/or social elements (humans, roles, work processes, teams, groups, etc.) of organizations. A typical DSR research process to design a socio-technical artifact starts with identifying a real-world problem and defining objectives for the solution development (Peffers, Tuunanen, Rothenberger, & Chatteijee, 2007). Afterwards, the actual design and development phase starts, which gives the name to DSR. The designed artifact is then to be applied to the problem context in order to demonstrate suitability to solve the problem that triggered the DSR process. When an artifact is indeed able to fulfill the objectives, it is said to have utility. The next phase, the artifact evaluation, seeks to assess an artifact's impacts and utility in greater detail, its superiority to other solutions (if applicable), and to derive future artifact improvements based on experiences during its application. In the final phase, the researchers communicate the artifact and the corresponding lessons learned throughout the process of design, application, and evaluation to researchers as well as to professionals in practice. In other words, this final phase is the one where the DSR literature in its current state is concerned with informing stakeholders. Over the past decade, IS DSR has seen a tremendous development of theoretical and methodical foundations (Gill & Hevner, 2013; Gregor & Jones, 2007; Hevner & Chatterjee, 2010; Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004; Kuechler & Vaishnavi, 2012; Peffers et al., 2007; Vaishnavi & Kuechler, 2008), as well as high-quality publications of actual DSR research projects (Arazy, Kumar, & Shapira, 2010; Reinecke & Bernstein, 2013; VanderMeer, Dutta, & Datta, 2012). Arazy et al. (2010) design and evaluate an algorithm for a social recommender system, based on behavioral theory. Reinecke and Bernstein (2013) design and evaluate a model, a method, and a sample instance to adapt user interfaces of software applications based on the users' culture. VanderMeer et al. (2012) design and evaluate an algorithm to improve the resource utilization for database systems with a high percentage of read-intensive database operations. These three artifacts illustrate the broad range of artifact types and domain foci of today's IS discipline. Initially, the discipline's main research focus lay on IT artifacts in--typically business organizations (Orlikowski & Iacono, 2001). Nowadays, its application domains extend to, among others, healthcare IT (Chiasson, Reddy, Kaplan, & Davidson, 2007), social media (Krasnova, Spiekermann, Koroleva, & Hildebrand, 2010), or sustainability (Pernici et al., 2012). Likewise, its subject matters extend more and more beyond a technology focus to socio-technical information systems in organizations that comprise information, technology, people, organizational structures and processes, and their relationships (Nunamaker, Jr. …