This paper describes the formulation of a design theory for an information system to support learning and teaching within an institution of higher education. The design theory has been tested via an instantiation that is about to enter its tenth year of operation and has been used by thousands of people. This real-world instantiation has provided significant benefits including identifying unexpected directions for research, providing significant supporting evidence and enabling a complementary research cycle between design-science and behavioural-science research. This paper describes the evolutionary development of the ISDT, how it has helped improve an existing information system and examines some questions about the practice of information systems design science research which arose from the process.

Many alternative methods for designing secure information systems (SIS) have been proposed to ensure system security. However, within all the literature on SIS methods, there exists little theoretically grounded work that addresses the fundamental requirements and goals of SIS design. This paper first uses design theory to develop a SIS design theory framework that defines six requirements for SIS design methods, and second, shows how known SIS design methods fail to satisfy these requirements. Third, the paper describes a SIS design method that does address these requirements and reports two empirical studies that demonstrate the validity of the proposed framework.