Marie-Claude Boudreau

The field of personal visualization has seen significant advancements, driven by increased personal data and interest in self-improvement. While traditional personal visualization tools focus on behavior tracking, this paper explores an innovative approach to visualizing personal values aligned with users' professional mental models. We present the development of a tool that uses the stock market metaphor to represent individual values, leveraging the business backgrounds of the co-authors. Data collected over a year tracked four values: wisdom, security, curiosity, and love. These values were visualized as stocks, reflecting their daily fluctuations and overall trends. Our work demonstrates that aligning personal visualization tools with a familiar metaphor enhances user engagement and personal development, suggesting new directions for personal visualization research and for one’s approach to life.

This chapter reviews the development and promotion of energy informatics as a subfield of information systems (IS) as a means for engaging the IS scholarly community in addressing global climate change. It discusses the early work around 2010 that defined energy informatics and established a research framework. Subsequent work on the shift in dominant logic from service to sustainability and development of an IS strategy for sustainability is reviewed. The growth of sustainability-related research in academia, along with sustainability-related concerns in industry, are assessed. The chapter concludes optimistically, as the tide has turned, and renewables today have an economic advantage over fossil fuels. Now, the IS field has a new opportunity of participating in the digital transformation of this decade – solving the intermittency problem. The potential for IS involvement is presented, followed by a forward-looking conclusion.

In the context of IS consulting, this study applies the principles of engaged scholarship to examine the perennial problem of constraining opportunism. Using constructs proposed by the theory of relationship constraints, this paper examines the relative effectiveness of different constraint mechanisms on information systems (IS) consultants in China, Saudi Arabia, and the United States, for projects with different levels of information asymmetry, tacit knowledge, and explicit knowledge. While we found support in all of these countries for the salience of these dimensions, there are important distinctions in the effectiveness of different constraints among the countries. Generally, consulting clients in the United States believe that social constraints are more effective, while those in China and Saudi Arabia favor legal constraints. Our research suggests that these findings are a result of differences in legal systems and the foundations of social norm formation. Our findings highlight the importance of tacit knowledge and information asymmetry (over explicit knowledge), and we provide a conceptual model for an IS-interventionist approach to reducing opportunism.

Maintaining thermal comfort within an occupied building requires energy; thus, optimized solution methods for balancing energy use with indoor environmental quality (adequate thermal comfort, lighting, etc.) are needed. Current building temperature control systems do not adequately take in account the adaptive capability of the occupants, but this concept can be used advantageously during implementation of demand response. Demand response programs can affect both the occupants’ thermal comfort from temporary adjustments to space temperature settings. This paper describes ongoing research and field testing of methods to optimize building energy consumption for heating, ventilation and air conditioning applications accounting for human factors such as the thermal comfort by the occupants. Model predictive controllers could serve as powerful tools to optimize the operation of smart buildings and improve human comfort perceptions while helping to better integrate renewable energy systems with increased grid stability. Practical application: This work outlines how the operation of cooling systems can be optimized with respect to reducing peak demand while still maintaining thermal comfort within acceptable ranges.

Interorganizational systems (IOS) are information and communication technology-based systems that transcend organizational boundaries. However, their use does not always lead to successful interorganizational collaboration, particularly in settings where significant changes in business processes are needed. The architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) industry offers such a setting, in particular as its stakeholders are encouraged to use of a novel type of interorganizational system known as building information modeling (Building Information Modelling), which can only be successfully used if parties collaborate. This research seeks to uncover what leads to interorganizational collaboration in this particular context. Drawing on rich data from interviews with BIM users involved in interorganizational projects, the authors propose a conceptual model of how interorganizational collaboration unfolds. The authors highlight the central role played by interorganizational infrastructure, collective identity, and IT affordances, on interorganizational collaboration.