Industrial Informatics Design, Use and Innovation

Abstract

As computer devices go embedded into the environment people will be surrounded by ubiquitous computers in their everyday life. These devices can serve as a base in services where data are collected and analyzed to serve the customers. Ubiquitous services are to a great extent invisible as people can neither see the computers nor have to be involved in the data collection or the data analysis. The service provider can be located at a distance and is thus also invisible to the customers. A challenge for the parties involved in the service production is to deal with the invisibility and the distance that emerge in ubiquitous services. The aim of this paper is to address the issues of invisibility and distance in ubiquitous services by exploring the implications of using ubiquitous computing to produce services. To address this question, the paper adopts a practice perspective to analyze data from an empirical case study of a remote diagnostics service provider and one of its customers in the mining industry. The study shows that both human enactment and the technology have implications for the service. They do however, reveal a paradox: the technology is designed to enable invisible services while people's enactment of the service strives towards making them more visible. For ubiquitous service providers it is important to cope with this paradox, otherwise it might cause unfulfilled expectations and an unsuccessful service delivery.

Green IS Management Framework Corroboration and Verification: Explicating the Enabling Capabilities of Green IS

“…Green IS provide the information processing, knowledge, and response capabilities for organisations relating to the environment and facilitate environmental decision-making based on complex and large-scale environmental information (Holmström, Mathiassen, Sandberg & Wimelius 2010). Green IS are appropriate for addressing the substantial cognitive load of environmental information and help to embed sustainability into an organisation's operations and culture (Volkoff, Bertels & Papania 2011).…”