Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> An overview of research methods <s> Information Systems (IS) is a relatively new field of study that investigates information and communications technology (ICT) in organisational settings. Originally a branch of management science, IS became an independent field in the late 1960s. Only recently in North America has IS design research (ISDR) become a distinct line of inquiry within the field. This paper details the emergence of ISDR within North American IS research and outlines its current state. ISDR, as currently conceived in North America, is narrower in scope than design research in fields where it has a longer history. With reference to the literature, we expose directions of research highly germane to ISDR that are precluded by the current common understanding, which requires an artefact as the output of all design research efforts. We propose suggestions for relaxing this constraint on research output while still retaining a focus on research relevance and ICT artefacts. <s> BIB001 </s> Exploring Shared Services from an IS Perspective: A Literature Review and Research Agenda <s> An overview of research methods <s> The Journal of Strategic Information Systems (JSIS) has been an international outlet for Information Systems research that focuses on strategic issues since 1991. This paper reports on an analysis of the research published in JSIS to date. The paper presents a preliminary classification system for research topics related to Strategic Information Systems into which all 316 JSIS research papers as at end 2009 are classified. Discussion on changing emphases in topics over time is provided, in the context of the editorial philosophy of the journal. The paper seeks to stimulate discussion on future directions for research in Strategic Information Systems. <s> BIB002
This section reports on the different types of research methods that have been applied in the IS literature on shared services. The purpose was to ascertain the nature of the research by deriving a descriptive overview of the reported research approaches in the IS shared services literature, and also, to build a point of reference for future research on the topic when authors seek examples and justifications for their selected approaches and their design. Only those papers that focus on shared services (the primary set of 29 papers) were included in this analysis. The articles were first grouped into two broad categories, empirical and non-empirical. Following  , we categorized as empirical papers (25 of 29) those papers that obtained data or observations (primary or secondary empirical data); which could be gathered through quantitative, qualitative, or a mixed approach, including archival data) and the rest as non-empirical papers (4 of 29). Any practitioner oriented papers and those that were mere conceptual papers or argumentative notes were captured under the non-empirical category. The empirical papers were classified into further sub categories -adopting the classification framework of  . In addition to the original sub categories of survey, case study, laboratory experiment, field experiment, and action research we also included: archival analysis [following  BIB002  and design science [Iivari, 2007, Kuechler and BIB001 . These were added as they have become popular and emerging approaches used within IS research. The classification was done based on what the authors directly or implicitly stated as the approach used. The coding of the primary shared services papers only instantiated the case study (18), archival analysis (6), design science (2) and action research (1) categories. Note that 3 studies used multi-method, 1 of which used 2 methods, and 2 used 3 methods. In addition to the type of research method used, we also captured how well the method-design had been documented. Firstly, we checked to see if there was a dedicated section in the paper that was specifically about the design of the method (see Column 11 of Table 5 ). We also evaluated the quality of the description of the method design (which sometimes may have been integrated with other parts of the study instead of being within a dedicated research method section -see Column 12 of Table 5 ). Here we looked for documented details such as who the target respondents were, where they came from and why they were selected, what phases were involved and the Volume 22 associated time frames, and how the data was analyzed. Table 5 provides a summary of this analysis. Two researchers coded and checked all the papers that were classified (using the above mentioned categories), until full agreement of the results was reached.  A weak mentioning of the research method Only 4 of the 29 papers were non-empirical papers. The paper by dealt with how to conduct an archival analysis, using the domain of shared services as an example. The remaining 3 papers were very much practitioner oriented and were about lessons learned with normative guidelines on what had worked and not worked in prior shared services contexts. The majority of the empirical papers (20 out of 25) had a dedicated 'Research Methods' section, and most (22 out of 25) empirical papers had evidence of documenting the overall design of the research. The documentation of the research method is important for the progression of the field, as current and future researchers can judge the quality of existing work and build on this work when the approach used is communicated and well understood. A preliminary