Despite the long tradition of design science in IS, the field as a whole is a
follower—it has contented itself with trying to describe and explain the
deployment of new technologies often after they have succeeded in the
marketplace (e.g., enterprise resource planning [ERP] in the 1990s). A key
challenge for building a relevant research agenda continues to be that building
theoretical perspectives is considerably more difficult at these macro
levels or when dealing with recombinant innovation and new types of use
patterns. In addition, we can argue that the data necessary for insightful
investigation of these macro-scale issues is difficult to access because it is
often locked up in the proprietary dominant infrastructures central to the
phenomena of interest. The mass scale of these platforms that developed out
of consumer-focused products now dominates the corporate market, and has
displaced the services that offered specialized services such as BlackBerry.
Another example of convergence is the combination of both hedonic and
corporate computing.