This editorial paper introduces and conceptualizes process science as an interdisciplinary field dedicated to the study of socio-technical processes over time. It examines how human actions and digital technologies interact dynamically, leveraging digital trace data and computational techniques to observe, explain, and guide change. The study establishes core tenets, taxonomy distinctions, and a research framework linking practical socio-technical processes with scientific knowledge creation. Problem Traditional research disciplines frequently prioritize an 'entity-first' view, focusing on static structures rather than ongoing, dynamic changes. However, contemporary phenomena—such as generative AI, platform economies, and societal transformations—are inherently socio-technical and continuously evolving, producing massive amounts of digital trace data that static analytical frameworks cannot adequately capture. Outcome - Defines process science as an interdisciplinary domain aimed at capturing, understanding, and intervening in socio-technical change across multiple levels of abstraction.
- Categorizes key activities of process science into discovery (detecting patterns via event data), explanation (identifying cause-effect relations), and intervention (shaping process trajectories).
- Advocates for shifting from an 'entity-first' to a 'process-first' perspective to identify analogies across diverse domains and support computationally intensive theory building.
- Introduces a research framework that integrates digital trace data from practice with theoretical foundations to solve real-world problems and drive societal impact.

This study investigates how individuals with lifelong disabilities utilize virtual worlds, specifically Second Life, to move from social isolation to social inclusion. Through a qualitative research design involving participant observation and in-depth interviews, the authors trace how users perceive and actualize virtual world capabilities. The paper develops an affordance-based pathway model outlining how technology features enable interpersonal relationships and community participation. Problem People with lifelong disabilities frequently face severe social exclusion, isolation, and physical barriers that limit their full participation in everyday social activities. While digital environments offer potential solutions, the underlying mechanisms and technological pathways through which virtual tools lead to meaningful social inclusion remain insufficiently understood. Outcome - Identified three functional affordances (communicability, mobility, and personalizability) and two social affordances (engageability and self-actualizability) crucial for social inclusion.
- Established that the actualization of functional affordances enables and dynamically interacts with social affordances to foster interpersonal relationships and community participation.
- Discovered that outcomes achieved by actualizing specific affordances serve as facilitating conditions that support the perception and realization of additional affordances.
- Extended affordance theory by demonstrating a feedback loop where social engagement refines and enhances the perception and use of basic functional capabilities.

This study conducts a systematic literature review of 40 scholarly articles to synthesize current knowledge on digital sustainability in Information Systems research. It conceptualizes how organizations utilize digital technologies to drive environmental performance and sustainability goals. The authors develop a multidimensional framework that structures antecedents, moderating mechanisms, and economic and environmental consequences. Problem Despite growing interest in leveraging digital technology to address climate challenges, digital sustainability research suffers from conceptual ambiguity. Existing literature across Green IT and Green IS lacks a unified theoretical foundation to explain how digital artifacts generate sustainable value. This lack of clarity hinders organizations from effectively implementing digital tools for environmental objectives. Outcome - Synthesized literature into a multidimensional framework detailing the antecedents, moderators, and outcomes of digital sustainability.
- Identified 14 sustainability-enabling logics showing how digital technology drives value creation, such as automatization, prediction, tokenization, and servitization.
- Categorized consequences into economic benefits, enhanced green employee/customer behavior, and improved environmental performance, alongside critical considerations like digital energy consumption.
- Proposed a research agenda around three main avenues: organizational transformation, product-level value creation mechanisms, and managing the duality/paradox of digital sustainability.

This study explores how Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological view on embodiment and ontology of the Flesh can be applied to conceptualize immersive virtual reality (IVR) embodiment within Information Systems research. It proposes the novel concept of 'Immersed Flesh' to capture the rich, sensory experience of virtual immersion beyond simple technical representations. The paper demonstrates the framework's utility through three illustrative use cases and provides theoretical grounding for future IVR research. Problem Mainstream Information Systems literature on virtual embodiment largely relies on non-immersive VR contexts and technological deterministic or instrumentalist perspectives. These traditional views reduce the virtual body to an external representation or object, failing to address the lived, sensory, and existential dimensions of modern IVR experiences. Consequently, there is a lack of a non-dualistic theoretical foundation for understanding how users sense and make meaning of embodiment in immersive environments. Outcome - Conceptualizes IVR embodiment through the new concept of 'Immersed Flesh', defined as a dynamic matrix that merges physical and virtual worlds into a co-extensive reality.
- Adapts Merleau-Ponty's ontology of the Flesh into key structural elements for IS, including Actual Grip, Apparent Grip, Circuit, Chiasma, Interworld, Measuring Body, and Reversibility.
- Illustrates the practical and theoretical value of the framework through three distinct IVR scenarios: expressing the living body (e.g., IVR dancing), intersubjective perspective-taking (e.g., embodying a tree), and experiencing the objective body of passing entities (e.g., avatars of deceased relatives).
- Generates research questions for future IS inquiry into user self-agency, bodily empathy, and ethical considerations surrounding virtual presence.

This editorial outlines the critical challenges and research directions associated with managing and sustaining digital transformations within the Information Systems field. It discusses the gap between short-term adoption studies and long-term organizational normalization, providing a framework for future scholarly inquiry. Additionally, it introduces four selected papers from the Special Issue that explore leadership, theoretical metaphors, scaling tensions, and small business readiness. Problem Although initiating a digital transformation is widely emphasized, organizations face high failure rates because sustaining long-term transformation remains difficult and under-researched. Existing Information Systems literature often focuses on short timeframes and successful case studies, creating a disconnect with real-world complexities, cultural barriers, and structural obstacles. Outcome - Emphasizes the need for longitudinal research designs to observe how digital transformations unfold, normalize, and sustain over extended periods.
- Identifies key research challenges, including the misuse of terminology, unexamined assumptions, root causes of failure, and the dark side of digital transformations.
- Introduces the concept of an 'execution engine' to fundamentally adapt decision-making processes and performance rhythms for long-term transformation success.
- Showcases four special issue papers focusing on healthcare value landscapes, CIO-CDO role alignment, prototype ambiguity in scaling, and microbusiness owner-manager mindsets.

This exploratory case study evaluates the perceived effectiveness of security risk management (SRM) programs within a Fortune 500 company across different organizational levels. Using a mixed-methods approach involving interviews, scenario-based vignettes, and a Q-sort ranking exercise, the research examines key drivers of SRM success. The study revalidates six established critical success factors and identifies three new operational factors that enhance program performance. Problem Organizations struggle with increasing cybersecurity threats and complex compliance regulations, yet low employee security awareness and lack of policy compliance remain persistent challenges. Furthermore, existing research offers limited insight into how perceptions of success factors differ between management and staff, leading to misaligned priorities and reduced program efficacy. Outcome - Confirmed six initial Critical Success Factors (CSFs) from existing literature: Executive Management Support, Organizational Maturity, Open Communication, Risk Management Stakeholders, Team Member Empowerment, and Holistic View of an Organization.
- Identified three newly extracted CSFs from empirical evidence: Security Maintenance, Corporate Security Strategy, and Human Resource Development.
- Discovered key perception differences across organizational levels, with management prioritizing Executive Management Support and staff ranking Open Communication as most essential.
- Emphasized that effective SRM programs require continuous policy updates, joint management-staff governance committees, and alignment between security goals and overall business strategy.

This paper proposes a creative evolution process philosophy perspective for information systems (IS) research, grounded in the philosophical works of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. It establishes a set of five core principles to shift the research paradigm from viewing reality as static entities to seeing it as continuous processes and conscious experiences. The authors demonstrate the practical utility of this perspective by re-examining the challenges and failures in large-scale requirements engineering. Problem Traditional information systems development and research predominantly rely on entitative worldviews that treat reality as composed of fixed, static objects and discrete time steps. This static perspective fails to capture the complex, evolving nature of human experience and temporal flow, which frequently leads to project failures in large-scale IT implementations. Furthermore, the IS literature lacks formal principles and criteria for conducting research anchored in process philosophy that accounts for human consciousness and free will. Outcome - Formulated five foundational principles for process philosophy in IS research: heterogeneous multiplicity, immanence in a process, experience over abstraction, consciousness in duration, and relational ontology.
- Identified entitative abstractions in traditional requirements engineering as a major contributor to large-scale IT project failures.
- Emphasized the critical role of human consciousness, inner time, and free will in co-creating technology systems that adapt to evolving organizational contexts.

This study explores how Large Language Models like GPT-4 can simplify complex online privacy policies while maintaining their essential legal validity. The authors evaluated multiple prompt strategies across 25 real-world privacy policies using standard readability metrics and ROUGE content preservation scores. Based on these findings, they developed a Chrome extension that provides real-time policy summaries and an interactive Q&A feature directly within the user's browser. Problem Online privacy policies are typically lengthy, complex, and filled with dense legal jargon, leading over 90% of users to accept them without reading. Existing attempts to simplify policies often lack real-time adaptability during active browsing or fail to address individual user questions, resulting in widespread uninformed consent. Outcome - The audience-adjusted rewriting prompt ('rewrite so a 10th-grade student can understand while maintaining legal accuracy') produced the highest readability improvements while preserving core legal content.
- Readability metrics improved substantially after simplification, with Flesch Reading Ease increasing significantly and complexity indices like Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level dropping sharply.
- ROUGE content evaluation metrics (ROUGE-1 Precision = 0.8862, ROUGE-L Precision = 0.6025) confirmed strong textual overlap and high fidelity to original legal terms.
- A prototype Chrome extension was created, enabling real-time policy summarization and context-aware Q&A capabilities grounded in the APCO theoretical framework.

This study introduces a memory analysis framework based on Patanjali's Yoga Sutra to evaluate information systems implementation. It incorporates core concepts such as Samskara (subliminal impressions) and Alambana (external triggers) to understand how accumulated stakeholder experiences influence technology engagement. The framework is applied to an existing case study of an agricultural marketing information system in India. Problem Current information systems research predominantly focuses on team memory within Western organizational contexts, overlooking individual cognitive variations and Eastern philosophical perspectives. Additionally, existing studies rarely theorize memory per se, leaving a gap in understanding how subliminal impressions and past negative experiences impact stakeholder trust and behavioral responses. Outcome - The Yoga Sutra framework demonstrates that subliminal impressions (Samskara) formed by past unfair trade practices deeply influence stakeholder behaviors and technology adoption.
- Contextual factors and research interviews function as triggers (Alambana) that evoke unpleasant memories, reinforcing distrust between system users, government boards, and private vendors.
- Information system failures in developing contexts often result from a lack of adherence to core ethical and behavioral values rather than culture acting as a barrier.

This study proposes an ethics-based ontology for Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) research by combining Heidegger's existential phenomenology with Hans Jonas's ethics of responsibility. The paper examines how technology impacts lived experiences, human identity, and moral agency, applying this theoretical framework to re-analyze two One Laptop per Child (OLPC) case studies in Nepal and Peru. Problem Current ICT4D research predominantly relies on realist and idealist ontologies that view technology primarily as functional tools for systemic or economic growth. This narrow focus creates an ethical gap, neglecting how technological interventions affect human dignity, local agency, cultural integrity, and long-term intergenerational justice. Outcome - Establishes an ethics-based ontology in ICT4D that shifts focus from instrumental views of technology to lived human experience and moral responsibility.
- Demonstrates through the OLE Nepal case study how embedding technology into local educational ecosystems, national curricula, and teacher practices leads to sustainable success.
- Reveals through the OLPC Peru case study how top-down, context-unaware technological implementations erode local agency and lead to project failure.
- Highlights key implementation challenges, including translating abstract philosophical concepts into practical design metrics and addressing Eurocentric biases in technology evaluation.

This short paper proposes a conceptual research model to investigate the factors influencing the adoption and sustained usage of gamified location-based applications for community building. The framework integrates ten core factors across technology characteristics, gamification elements, and social dimensions to explain user engagement. The authors present a quantitative research methodology involving a survey of active Pokémon GO players to empirically test and validate eleven proposed hypotheses. Problem While gamification and location-based games like Pokémon GO have achieved widespread popularity, existing research primarily focuses on short-term individual user behavior or educational outcomes. Little is understood about the long-term sociopsychological mechanisms and 'stickiness' factors that enable location-based games to foster sustainable, real-world community engagement and social bonds. Outcome - Formulates a novel theoretical framework connecting technology adoption, gamification mechanics, external social influences, and intrinsic motivations to app stickiness and community engagement.
- Identifies key drivers such as location incentives, perceived ease of use, reward value, achievement, network influence, herd behavior, social motive, and sense of belonging.
- Establishes an empirical research design targeting over 1,000 active Pokémon GO players using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM).
- Provides preliminary theoretical grounding for designing mobile gamified systems that promote social sustainability and persistent physical-world social interactions.

This study investigates social commerce (s-commerce) adoption, consumer characteristics, and platform preferences in Qatar. Utilizing a quantitative survey of 441 Qatari residents, the research analyzes demographical trends, internet usage habits, and online shopping frequencies within the country's unique socio-cultural context. Problem Despite rapid growth in social media usage and e-commerce across the GCC region, research on social commerce adoption specifically in Qatar remains very limited. Furthermore, there is a lack of empirical understanding regarding how local socio-cultural factors and demographic profiles shape consumer engagement and purchase behaviors in Qatar's digital landscape. Outcome - Most social commerce users in Qatar engage in s-commerce purchases 1-3 times per month (82%), with an additional 18% purchasing 4-7 times monthly.
- Instagram emerged as the leading platform for s-commerce in Qatar (46%), followed by WhatsApp (20%), TikTok (14%), and Facebook (9%).
- Female consumers (56%) and younger demographics aged 20-24 (48%) constitute the largest user segments engaging in social commerce.
- The findings highlight the significant impact of local culture, digital infrastructure, and localized content preferences in driving social commerce diffusion.

This study explores the current state, challenges, and opportunities for integrating location analytics into Information Systems (IS) research and education. Drawing on insights from an academic panel, it outlines how spatial methodologies can enrich IS theories, enhance research rigor, and better prepare students for data-driven business roles. Problem Despite the critical role of location analytics in modern industry decision-making and strategic planning, its presence in academic IS research and business school curricula remains remarkably sparse. This gap leaves researchers overlooking spatial dimensions in complex problems and leaves graduates lacking essential geospatial skills required by the modern workforce. Outcome - Demonstrates how incorporating spatial methodologies (such as spatial autocorrelation and geographically weighted regression) can address complex societal 'wicked problems' like climate change, network disruption, and privacy.
- Provides a strategic roadmap for integrating location analytics into undergraduate and graduate IS curricula to prepare students for high-demand business roles.
- Outlines actionable steps to bridge academia and industry, including collaborative case study development, special journal issues, and enhanced faculty training in geospatial tools.

This study presents a threat-centric security analysis that maps adversarial techniques across a five-layer reference architecture for generative AI systems. The authors combine architectural decomposition and threat taxonomy mapping with a comparative analysis of EU and US governance frameworks to evaluate security controls. Problem Generative AI systems introduce security risks that fundamentally differ from traditional software due to probabilistic outputs, emergent failure modes, and expanded attack surfaces from tool and retrieval integration. Conventional perimeter-based and policy-only controls are insufficient because many GenAI vulnerabilities are structural rather than configurable. Outcome - High-impact generative AI risks are structural properties inherent to architectural design rather than isolated, patchable bugs.
- Effective risk mitigation requires a layered defense-in-depth model that combines traditional cybersecurity controls with AI-specific mechanisms such as context separation and tool sandboxing.
- Transatlantic regulatory divergence establishes EU frameworks as the de facto technical baseline for multinational deployments, driving global architectural convergence.

This paper investigates how scenario-based learning using AI-powered storytelling chatbots can engage university students in learning social engineering concepts. Utilizing a design thinking methodology with co-creation, an interactive chatbot powered by GPT-4 Turbo was developed to simulate real-world cybersecurity scenarios. The study evaluates the chatbot's effectiveness in delivering active learning experiences and providing dynamic feedback to students. Problem Traditional instruction methods in Information Systems often struggle to effectively engage students or illustrate the subtle tactics used in social engineering attacks. Although AI-driven interactive storytelling holds great potential for experiential education, research into designing AI chatbots as role-playing storytellers remains in its infancy. Outcome - The study demonstrated that co-designing AI chatbot prompts with students created effective 'teachable moments' for understanding social engineering tactics and data governance.
- Analysis of student interactions revealed diverse engagement approaches, ranging from friendly small talk to strategic IT troubleshooting and phishing tactics.
- Key strategies were established for integrating a storytelling culture in higher education, including establishing a shared language, providing appropriate digital resources, and fostering collaborative environments.
- Essential ethical guidelines were identified, emphasizing the necessity of robust data privacy, algorithmic bias mitigation, and content boundaries in educational AI applications.

This study investigates how information systems (IS) support open innovation networks among small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Through a three-year case study of an inter-organizational medical device project developing a cardiovascular stent graft, the authors examine the key IS functionalities required across the open innovation process. Problem Developing complex products increasingly requires open innovation networks where independent firms pool their specialized expertise and resources. However, conventional enterprise applications are not designed for open innovation, creating a gap in understanding how to select, configure, and maintain a shared IS infrastructure across diverse network partners. Outcome - Identifies five key IS functionalities critical for innovation networks: collaborative work environments, knowledge maps, knowledge spaces, innovation procedure toolkits, and social media platforms.
- Reveals that network success stems from pragmatically using a diverse set of accessible IS tools to form a shared infrastructure rather than relying on a single complex system.
- Delivers nine practical guidelines for CIOs to manage IS infrastructure across the co-shaping, co-performing, and co-opting phases of open innovation networks.

This study examines how small and medium-sized enterprises use inter-organizational information systems to facilitate new product development within multi-firm innovation networks. Through an in-depth qualitative analysis of three case studies, the paper explores how information systems enable networking capabilities that allow partners to align their physical, human, and organizational resources. Problem Existing theories like the Resource-Based View primarily explain competitive advantage at the individual firm level, leaving a research gap regarding how network-level resources are developed and reconfigured across organizational boundaries. Consequently, firms in collaborative innovation networks struggle to systematically identify partner capabilities, align complementary assets, and manage shared inter-organizational processes. Outcome - Inter-organizational information systems are essential for enabling networking capabilities and constructing unique, shared resource constellations at the network level.
- Four core informational purposes of information systems—representation, sharing, architecture, and reach—facilitate the cross-boundary resource alignment process.
- Creating IS-embedded network resources enables collaborating firms to establish sustainable competitive advantages that extend beyond individual firm boundaries.

This study introduces collective inferencing, a novel framework that leverages generative AI to analyze and structure experts' tacit insights across platform ecosystems. By converting unstructured operational data and stakeholder experiences into dynamic functional modules, the method enables adaptive decision-making and dynamic governance. Problem Managing modern digital platforms and business ecosystems is increasingly complex due to distributed stakeholders with conflicting goals and constraints. Traditional management frameworks rely on static, top-down blueprints that fail to capture context-specific tacit knowledge needed for real-time strategic alignment. Outcome - Formulates a four-step Collective Inference Method involving differential analysis, landscape mapping, dynamic modeling, and scenario synthesis.
- Demonstrates how generative AI can structure messy stakeholder narratives into functional modules while mitigating hallucination risks.
- Validates the approach within the cplace platform ecosystem, resulting in 59 actionable management measures that effectively address governance, customization, and user empowerment.