200

A friend has emailed some comments and advice, for which I am appreciative. I intend to continue to '"guide" rather than "direct"'.

So far, the biggest challenge for me has been identifying the relevant core literature (MIS seems to rebrand/reboot itself into particularly superficial rabbit holes every 10 years or so, and I'm new to the way European MIS is done here) but thankfully I can repurpose the relatively stable innovation and STS literatures that helped me through my own Masters.

I am still a bit worried about the student's ability to relate the research and industrial work to any kind of theory formation for the broader discipline. I made sure to include Bijker and Kuhn on the list. I'm also around five years out of date on integrating enterprise transaction systems but very little appears to have changed there. I didn't see anything fundamentally new in the technical or business documentation about the platforms that the student aspires to integrate.

Because the student's research is based in an industrial setting I expect that the biggest delays will come from business and technical externalities. I've most recently cautioned the student about getting reliable documentation from all the business stakeholders, and about the potential technical pitfalls of implementing real-time systems on top of web protocols, but I'm willing to be happily surprised by some novel approaches.

I met informally with my co-supervisor this afternoon. She agreed that the staring literature I had sent and critique of the student's research question were appropriate. I would regret not pushing the student to produce top quality work, so my plan is to encourage (obviously and otherwise) the student to earn top marks even if we can't issue 5's ourselves. (Also I'd like to see what bureaucracy is required for the two of us non-"senior PhDs" to be able to do that, and perhaps get my co-supervisor recognised as a senior PhD.)

At the next meeting of all three of us, she has intends to show the student a method to read, organize, and relate literature to the evolving written thesis work. I'm interested in this as well since learning more about how MIS literature is organized may help my own work. (Since the program provides a suggested thesis guidelines and template, I shouldn't need to intervene much there.)

Also, I've signed up for a one-week science communication course offered in September by one of my supervisor's institutes. I've not seen a Finnish-style media release, so this should be interesting.