The term emerging technology (ET) has been frequently used by IT professionals and academics. However, little research has shed light on this term and specified its characteristics and what it means. Therefore, this paper aims to define and conceptualize the characteristics of ET. These characteristics are uncertainty, network effect, unseen social and ethical concerns, cost, limitation to particular countries, and a lack of investigation and research. Several examples of ETs are given to validate these characteristics.

Requirements analysis (RA) is a key phase in information systems (IS) development. During this phase, system analysts use different techniques and methods to elicit and structure the system's requirements. The current paper rationalises the use of grounded theory (GT) as an alternative socio-technical approach to requirement analysis. It will establish theoretically that applying grounded theory procedures and techniques will support and add value to the analysis phase as it solves some problems of the existing traditional and socio-technical system design methods. Furthermore, to validate this proposal, a case study applying GT on a real project will demonstrate its applicability and success for requirement analysis. Implications of its application are also discussed.

Communities of practice (CoPs) are increasingly capturing the interest of many fields such as business companies, education and organizations. Many CoPs were developed for people who have common interest in healthcare, agriculture and environment, and teaching. However, there is lack of COPs dedicated for researchers. This research aims to explore the appropriateness of Facebook (FB) as a platform for serving a CoP of researchers. To achieve this goal, first we identify the needs of CoPs for researchers within UAE context. Consequently, we adopted qualitative research approach to elicit the needs. We applied the grounded theory method to analyze the data. The results of the analysis showed seven main needs: collaboration, debating, awareness/ notification, reference management, cross search, customization, tracking, and user orientation. Secondly, we evaluated the compatibility of FB features to the identified needs. Although we found that FB covers most of CoPs needs, there are few needs which are not met successfully so this raised some technical and practical issues, which have been highlighted in the paper.