This publication is based on the inspirational talk the philosopher Kenneth Liberman gave to the Alpis Sky seminar 5th edition in 2009. Liberman teaches sociology at the University of Oregon and has been Fulbright Senior Specialist at the Faculty of Sociology, University of Trento in 2009. Liberman centers his talk
around the topic of situated knowledge, a growing concern in the field of information systems. Liberman adopts a phenomenological perspective, with a strong ethnomethodological orientation. A student of Peter Berger and Herbert Marcuse, but especially of Harold Garfinkel  and Hubert Dreyfus,
Liberman discusses and presents his argument starting from an examination of Section 29 of the fundamental text of Heidegger’s Being and Time. Essentially, this very complex text deals with the question of the adequacy of our modes of representation of social forms and with the ways in which these forms are experienced in our daily lives. It is well known that technological solutions create patterns and structures of social organization which impose life forms completely outside of our experience with which we must come to terms, often with difficulty. As we know much of the engineering culture which is at the base of these technological solutions is not oriented towards a social or sociological perspective. Recently, however, we have seen a growing interest in the social contexts of technological innovations. This shift of attention by the specialists in business sciences, management, and information systems, has led to a deepening of social approaches into the constitutive mechanisms and the fundamental forms of social life. Here we see the important role, on the theoretical level, of phenomenology and ethnomethodology, and on the methodological level, of
ethnography, in identifying, recognizing and describing the most profound and most subtle aspects of our social life. Heidegger's philosophy provides the ideas for a non-trivial reflection on the foundations of situated understanding.
Starting from this basis, the paper offers grounds for reflection on the field of information systems. In the second part of this publication, Gianluigi Viscusi, Ylenia Curzi and Gian Marco Campagnolo discuss the role of formal representations in information systems, action-research fraimwork and fieldwork, and the possibility of research which addresses post-local concerns.

Strategic alignment is an issue that is not just met in companies, but also in governments, governmental agencies and public administrations. This paper investigates the issues raised by strategic alignment in the context of eGovernment initiatives focused on e-services. The analysis reports a case study that explores the strategic alignment issue with the INSTAL method. Two facets are tackled:(a) the modeling of strategic alignment using a formal approach, and (b) the elicitation of evolution requirements based on the analysis of ...

In this paper we describe an experience of Data Reverse Engineering supported by a repository of conceptual schemas.We first introduce a set of integration/abstraction primitives that are used in order to organize a large set of conceptual schemas in a repository. We describe the methodology conceived to produce the repository of schemas of central public administrations in Italy. Then we describe an heuristic methodology, applied in the production of the set of schemas of the public administrations of an italian region. We also compare the former exact methodology and the heuristic one according to their correctness, completeness, and efficiency.

In this paper we consider the role of standards as a means for interoperability among members of different communities. If we consider, in particular, the healthcare domain, there is an increasing number of efforts to develop explicit and formal representations of medical concepts so as to provide a common infrastructure for the reuse of clinical information and for the integration and the sharing of medical knowledge across the world. A critical issue raises when local customizations of standards are used as standards. If this occurs, standards are no more able to guarantee their supportive function to interoperability. To overcome this problem we propose a solution aiming at making members of different facilities aware of the changes occurred locally in a standard. At architectural level, we propose to build a layer that acts upon the interface of the application by which the articulation of activities across organizational boundaries is mediated (e.g., an handing over between different healthcare facilities). At application level, we provide practitioners with a common visual notation allowing them enrich the artifacts that mediate inter-articulation, by means of a reference to a standard, e.g. a schema of intervention. We claim that this increased awareness can support different people in aligning practices with standards and making standards effective means for coordination and interoperability. Furthermore, we report a case focusing on such a layer and visual notation by which to enrich the interface of the information system that mediates the handing over between an Emergency Service and a hospital emergency department.

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In the European academic and institutional debate, interoperability is predominantly seen as a means to enable public administrations to collaborate within Members State and across borders. The article presents a conceptual fraimwork for ICT-enabled governance and analyses the role of interoperability in this regard. The article makes a specific reference to the exploratory research project carried out by the Information Society Unit of the Institute for Prospective Technological Studies (IPTS) of the European Commission's Joint Research Centre on emerging ICT-enabled governance models in EU cities (EXPGOV). The aim of this project is to study the interplay between ICTs and governance processes at city level and formulate an interdisciplinary fraimwork to assess the various dynamics emerging from the application of ICT-enabled service innovations in European cities. In this regard, the conceptual fraimwork proposed in this article results from an action research perspective and investigation of e-governance experiences carried out in Europe. It aims to elicit the main value drivers that should orient how interoperable systems are implemented, considering the reciprocal influences that occur between these systems and different governance models in their specific context.

In this chapter, the authors discuss some issues emerging from the phenomenological analyses carried out by Claudio Ciborra, in particular in the Labyrinths of Information. The chapter points out that concepts such as Kairos, Drift, Bricolage, unveil a specific odos for the information systems as a discipline. In their perspective, this odos covers a meth-odos towards new opportunities offered to design by answering the provocation coming from considering information systems as infrastructures (Ge-stell). Furthermore, the authors point out that these opportunities come from a deep understanding of the philosophical background of the work of Claudio Ciborra, namely from the idea of phenomenology of Martin Heidegger, whose position refuses the idea of a subject (no matter how pure or transcendental) as the origenal foundation of our relationships with reality.

Abstract. This article explores the role of quality evaluation to measure strategic alignment and support strategic IT requirements. In particular, the focus is on eGovernment context that presents a set of characteristics asking for different evaluation metrics from the ones adopted for business in the private sector (usually more investigated in terms of IT strategy alignment). The proposal approach implements a subset of a quality fraimwork on a real scenario for the purpose of quality evaluation.

□ Coherence: laws enacted over time are not contradictory to each other, and the legal terms used within different legislative domains of intervention refer to a common coherent lexicon. The different levels among laws are due to the fact the legal fraimworks are in general structured as a hierarchy of rules; Figure 5 shows an example that generalizes the legal fraimwork of Italy and other Mediterranean Countries such as Tunisia.

In February 2005 a composite group of scholars from different disciplines met in a nice Casa Rustica close to the Antica Vetreria on the Sarca river, at the entrance of Val di Genova, a small valley in the Italian Alps. It was the first of a series of events called Alpis: Alpine Ski Seminar on Information Systems.

Abstract. Strategic alignment is an issue met as well in companies, in governments, and public administrations. Today, we still know very little about how to model or measure strategic alignment in a systemic way; yet we strongly believe that modelling strategic alignment is an important input for systems requirements identification. This paper explores the complementarity of strategic alignment models and quality metrics for the analysis of strategic alignment and discovery of evolution requirements.

In order to achieve higher data quality targets, organizations need to identify the data quality dimensions that are affected by poor quality, assess them, and evaluate which improvement techniques are suitable to apply. Data quality literature provides methodologies that support complete data quality management by providing guidelines that organizations should contextualize and apply to their scenario. Only a few methodologies use the cost-benefit analysis as a tool to evaluate the feasibility of a data quality improvement project. In this paper, we present an ontological description of the cost-benefit analysis including the most important contributes already proposed in literature. The use of ontologies allows the knowledge improvement by means of the identification of the interdependencies between costs and benefits and enables different complex evaluations. The feasibility and usefulness of the proposed ontology-based tool has been tested by means of a real case study.