Whitaker Ideas Forum: Mairead O’Connor, Examining the Concept of Temporality in Information System Development

Awareness and use of flow methods is rapidly growing across the information systems development (ISD) community. The differentiating feature of flow methods is their speed, epitomised by terms such as lead-time, cycle time, cost of delay, and velocity. Despite this, ISD research adopts an overly simplistic, ‘clock’ interpretation of time, ignoring the complex, multi-faceted, subtle and socially-embedded nature of temporality. This research applies temporality theory to examine ISD flow in two teams, examining concepts such as event time, synchronisation, and temporal perception and personality. It contributes to research and practice by (i) identifying the temporal characteristics of flow practices, (ii) identifying temporal challenges of flow practices, (iii) developing an extensive roadmap for future research to address the current dearth of solutions in existing literature. While this study examines flow methods, lessons learned can then be tailored and applied to other ISD contexts.