Information Systems
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The Information Systems (IS) research group focuses on information systems in organisational contexts, concentrating competencies in design, implementation, and evaluation of such systems, including decision support systems, relations between organisational IS and social collaborative networks, decentralised systems, and adoption models of IS. We also aim to study IS such as e-learning, gamification, marketing, hospitality, and tourism.
The main areas addressed by the IS research group are the following:
Applied Digital Technologies (ADT): Several scientific fields, such as education, sustainability, health, and tourism, use digital tools to support tasks like decision-making, classification, information organisation, and machine learning. They are integral components of e-learning systems, enterprise resource planning systems, knowledge management systems, computer auditing tools, social networks, collaborative systems, cloud computing, among others. The Applied Digital Technologies (ADT) area focuses on the adoption, study, analysis, and development of these digital tools, aiming to maximise their effectiveness across different contexts.
The Decentralised Systems (DS) area of the IS group proposes methods, techniques and tools to advance research in decentralised technologies in the context of the Information Systems. Our research is driven by user-centred and application-driven approaches to support the sustainability of the IS in the digital transformation movement and in the context of global ecological requirements. The rapid deployment of all kind of sensors, edge computing, decentralised service infrastructures, decentralised ledger technologies, blockchain, machine learning algorithms and artificial intelligence, which permeates the organizations and the user’s lives, raises challenging issues. The researchers of the DS area contribute to address these challenges by analysing, designing, developing and testing innovative prototypes and proof-of-concepts to IS business problems and applications. Within the DS area we focus on the following main domains: blockchains, distributed ledger technologies, advanced databases, interoperability, knowledge representation and ontologies, semantic web, service science, cloud services and architectures.
Decision Support Systems (DSS) require the use of Data Science to benefit from the loads of data currently available to leverage decision making. Therefore, research within Decision Support Systems is currently based on the design of information systems to address challenges within specific domains. The interdisciplinary nature of Iscte and, particularly, ISTAR, has driven this vibrant research area fuelled by ISTAR’s Information System group.
Enterprise IT Governance (EITG): Information Technology (IT) has become crucial to the support, sustainability and growth of most businesses. IT not only has the potential to support existing business strategies, but also to shape new strategies. In this mindset, IT becomes a relevant success factor for survival and prosperity and an opportunity to differentiate and to achieve competitive advantage. Additionally, the pervasive use of technology has created a critical dependency on IT that calls for a specific focus on IT Governance (ITG) which includes IT Service Management (ITSM). ITG defines and spreads the necessary mechanisms and frameworks as a means of rationalising, directing and coordinating an organisation’s IT-related decision making to ensure the present and future business/IT alignment objectives.
This research thread aims at researching in the state of the art in the following ITG topics:
- mechanisms and frameworks to support IT-related decisions, actions and assets that are more tightly aligned with an organization’s strategic and tactical intentions;
- assessment of ITG contributions due to alignment with organization’s mission, strategy, values, norms, and culture;
- impact and conciliation of internal and external factors on designing ITG mechanisms;
- inconsistencies and incongruities on ITG mechanisms and frameworks.