Introducing Ethnography to IS Practitioners with an Experiential Pedagogy

In this paper we describe a long-term effort to raise the awareness of IT practitioners in the Swiss French region to the value of ethnographic observation techniques for requirements elicitation. This effort brought together academia and industry. Several awareness raising sessions were designed and delivered to IT practitioners in industry events. We used an active pedagogy, designing role-play phases interspersed with debrief and theory. We describe the context of this work, the design of the sessions and our subjective assessment.