The diffusion of WOZ: expanding the topology of IS innovations
- PDF / 659,811 Bytes
- 8 Pages / 595 x 794 pts Page_size
- 107 Downloads / 168 Views
& 2007 JIT Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. All rights reserved 0268-3962/07 $30.00 palgrave-journals.com/jit
Research Article
The diffusion of WOZ: expanding the topology of IS innovations Gabriel J Costello1 and Brian Donnellan2 1
Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Galway, Ireland; National University of Ireland, Galway, Ireland
2
Correspondence: GJ Costello, Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology, Dublin Road, Galway, Ireland. Tel: þ 353 (0) 91 742382 3; Fax: þ 353 (0) 758413; E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract The growth and diffusion of self-service technology (SST) over the last decade has resulted in an increasing number of business and government transactions being completed without human assistance. One innovation in this area, the speech-enabled business system, is characterised by complex implementations that bring together languageprocessing technologies, applications development, and end-user psychology. A resulting secondary innovation, the Wizard-of-OZ (WOZ) experiment is a valuable technique for simulating and building human–machine prototypes to ensure successful deployment of the completed service. The objective of the paper is to examine these innovations in relation to the changing business landscape; the technology and innovation literature, and the population of likely adopters. The review is carried out by placing the authors’ former experience as practitioners within current theoretical research frameworks. The result is a number of suggestions relating to both IT technology research and IT innovation research. Firstly, it proposes the simplification and diffusion of the WOZ methodology to support the growth in demand for automated e-business transactions that is mindful of human and ethical challenges. Secondly, the paper argues that because SST and business extends the traditional boundaries of the customer service function, it now needs to be incorporated into Swanson’s tri-core innovation typology. The paper concludes by presenting the suggested reorientation of information systems research that incorporates an outward facing perceptive as a conceptual model. Journal of Information Technology (2007) 22, 79–86. doi:10.1057/palgrave.jit.2000085 Published online 5 December 2006 Keywords: Wizard-of-OZ (WOZ) experiments; self-service technology (SST); automatic speech recognition (ASR); innovation typology; diffusion of innovations, information technology adoption
Introduction he growth and diffusion of self-service technology (SST) over the last decade has enabled an increasing number of business transactions to be completed without human assistance. This phenomenon has propelled human–computer interaction (HCI) considerations from the realm of specialised basic research to the mainstream of business information systems (IS) innovation. Furthermore, this development must be assessed within the current context of some scholars calling for a Copernican revolution in the way in which, organisations introduce and use information and communications technology (ICT) (Ciborra, 2002). As a result
Data Loading...
