________________________________________________________________________________________________ Author Addresses: R Goede, Department of Computer Science, Potchefstroom University of CHE, Potchefstroom, 2520 South Africa; rkwrg@puknet.puk.ac.za. C de Villiers, Department of Informatics, University of Pretoria, Pretoria, 0002, South Africa; cdevill@hakuna.up.ac.za Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that the copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage, that the copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than SAICSIT or the ACM must be honoured. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers, or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. © 2003 SAICSIT Proceedings of SAICSIT 2003, Pages 208 –217 The Applicability of Grounded Theory as Research Methodology in studies on the use of Methodologies in IS Practices ROELIEN GOEDE Potchefstroom University for Christian Higher Education and CARINA DE VILLIERS University of Pretoria ________________________________________________________________________________________________ Information Systems (IS) development can be seen as a social activity. Research methodologies from social sciences, such as Grounded Theory (GT) can therefore be used to investigate IS practices. This paper asks whether GT can be used to investigate the use of specific methodologies by IS practitioners when the practitioners are not familiar with the methodologies in question. It aims to contribute to GT research methods as well as systems thinking research methods. Categories and Subject Descriptors: H.1.1 [Systems and Information Theory] General Terms: Theory Additional Key Words and Phrases: Grounded theory, Systems thinking, Research Methodologies ________________________________________________________________________________________________ 1. INTRODUCTION The aim of this paper is to determine whether Grounded Theory (GT) can be used to investigate the influences of Systems Thinking on the practices of Information Systems (IS) practitioners. Stated differently: Can GT be used to determine whether the practices of IS practitioners reflect systems thinking methodologies? In order to improve the quality of the work of IS practitioners one can investigate their use of methodologies. For the purpose of this paper quality means that the finished artifact is used by the users to solve the problem intended to be solved and that it was developed within given budget and time constraints. The aim of this paper is to present a general argument for the applicability of grounded theory as research methodology in studies on the use of methodologies in IS practices. It uses a specific question as argumentative starting point. This specific question is whether IS practitioners (specifically data-orientated decision support system designers) use specific systems thinking methodologies unknowingly. Although methodologies in IS can be used and described on different levels, methodologies in this question should be viewed as frameworks for thinking about philosophy rather than practical IS development methodologies such as the waterfall method. The reader is challenged to consider to the argument of this paper wider than the specific research question. A study according to such a research question will not in itself improve the quality of IS artifacts. One would typically follow it up with the development of a framework for the use of the methodology in the chosen field of IS practices. One assumption in the generalisability of the argument is that the practitioners (IS professionals) are not knowledgeable on the methodology that is under investigation. IS practices is understood in this paper to be the every day actions of people working in an IS environment. It is not generalised practices that can be viewed as patterns of actions of IS professionals. It is however possible that a GT case study can lead to the description of generalized patterns of actions of IS practitioners. But at the beginning of the study the researcher assumes that practices of IS professionals do not necessarily fall into describable patterns.