Management Information Systems Commons^™

Using An Elaboration Likelihood Approach To Better Understand The Persuasiveness Of Website Privacy Assurance Cues For Online Consumers, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Gregory D. Moody, Anthony Vance, Matthew Jensen, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Taylor Michael Wells

Faculty Publications

Privacy concerns can greatly hinder consumers’ intentions to interact with a website. The success of a website therefore depends on its ability to improve consumers’ perceptions of privacy assurance. Seals and assurance statements are mechanisms often used to increase this assurance; however, the findings of the extant literature regarding the effectiveness of these tools are mixed. We propose a model based on the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) that explains conditions under which privacy assurance is more or less effective, clarifying the contradictory findings in previous literature. We test our model in a free-simulation online experiment, and the results of the …

Understanding Information Systems Continuance For Information-Oriented Mobile Applications, Leida Chen, Thomas O. Meservy, Mark Gillenson

Faculty Publications

Consumers’ use of mobile data applications is expected to rise significantly in the next few years. While user acceptance and adoption of mobile applications have received growing interest from IS researchers, only a paucity of studies have focused on user continuance behaviors in the mobile commerce context. Studying the IS continuance behavior of 147 registered users of an information-oriented mobile application, this research extends the general model of IS continuance to include a number of explanatory antecedents: information quality, system quality, process quality, and hedonic value. The enhanced framework makes a significant contribution to the theory of IS continuance intention, …

Establishing A Foundation For Automated Human Credibility Screening, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr, Judee K. Burgoon, Nathan W. Twyman, Jeffrey Gainer Proudfoot, Ryan M. Schuetzler, Justin Scott Giboney

Faculty Publications

Automated human credibility screening is an emerging research area that has potential for high impact in fields as diverse as homeland security and accounting fraud detection. Systems that conduct interviews and make credibility judgments can provide objectivity, improved accuracy, and greater reliability to credibility assessment practices, need to be built. This study establishes a foundation for developing automated systems for human credibility screening

The Effects Of Digital Intensity On Combinations Of Sequential And Configural Process Variety, James Gaskin, Kalle Lyytinen, Youngjin Yoo, Brian Pentland

Faculty Publications

Two forms of variety have been noted in organizational processes: sequential and configural. These describe variations in how a work process is ordered (sequential) or what is involved in enacting each work activity (configural). Each has been mainly studied in isolation. In organizations, these two types of variety are always co-present and scholars will miss important insights if their dependencies and interactions are not examined. This calls for theorizing and empirical inquiries regarding how these two types of variety are related and how digitalization influences them. Our contribution in this paper is to call attention to the need to analyze …

Evaluating Journal Quality And The Association For Information Systems (Ais) Senior Scholars’ Journal Basket Via Bibliometric Measures: Do Expert Journal Assessments Add Value?, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Gregory D. Moody, James Gaskin, Dennis F. Galletta, Sean L. Humpherys, Jordan B. Barlow, David W. Wilson

Faculty Publications

Information systems (IS) journal rankings and ratings help scholars focus their publishing efforts and are widely used surrogates for judging the quality of research. Over the years, numerous approaches have been used to rank IS journals, approaches such as citation metrics, school lists, acceptance rates, and expert assessments. However, the results of these approaches often conflict due to a host of validity concerns. In the current scientometric study, we make significant strides toward correcting for these limitations in the ranking of mainstream IS journals. We compare expert rankings to bibliometric measures such as the ISI Impact Factor™, the h-index, and …

The Business Rules Approach And Its Effect On Software Testing, Thomas O. Meservy, Chen Zhang, Euntae T. Lee, Jasbir Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

Codification and testing of business rules in application programs has historically been a challenge in software engineering. Many organizations have adopted the business rules approach to formalize and compartmentalize business rules as a separate component from application code. This article investigates and presents the effects of the business rules approach on testing activities in the software development life cycle at a Fortune 500 corporation. The findings suggest that the business rules approach has the potential to engage testing personnel early in the development process and to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of testing activities.

Alignment Within The Software Development Unit: Assessing Structural And Relational Dimensions Between Testing And Development, Jasbir Dhaliwal, Colin Onita, Robin Poston, Xihui Zhang

Faculty Publications

Just as business-IT alignment has received significant focus as a strategic concern in the IS literature, it is also important to consider internal alignment between the diverse subunits within the IT organization. This study investigates alignment between developers and testers in software development to understand alignment within the IT unit. Prior evidence of tension between these sub-groups (and others as well) suggests that all is not necessarily well within the IT organization. Misalignment within the IT unit can certainly make it difficult for the IT unit to add strategic value to the organization. This study is an important initial step …

Knowledge Sourcing And Knowledge Consumption In Computer- Mediated Complex Decision Making, Nathan W. Twyman, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Katherine Carl

Faculty Publications

Individuals are turning increasingly toward web-based information sources as input for complex decisions. Gathering and evaluating decision criteria in an online context is enticing because of information availability and increased control over the process, but how do these factors impact performance? This study shows how an interaction effect between Social Comparison and Social Facilitation predicts and explains how decision making performance is influenced differently by an information consumption-only approach versus a consumeand- contribute approach. Results from an empirical evaluation indicate that publishing decision criteria and reasoning (e.g. in a forum, blog, or knowledge base) plays an important role in improving …

Effects Of Automated And Participative Decision Support In Computer-Aided Credibility Assessment, Matthew L. Jensen, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jeffrey L. Jenkins

Faculty Publications

Historically, inaccurate credibility assessments have resulted in tremendous costs to businesses and to society. Recent research offers unobtrusive credibility assessment aids as a solution; however, the accuracy of these decision aids is inadequate, and users often resist accepting the aids’ recommendations. We follow the principles of signal detection theory to improve the accuracy of recommendations in computer-aided credibility assessment by combining automated and participatory decision support. We also leverage participation in decision-making theory to explain and predict an increased acceptance of assessment aid recommendations when perceptual cues are elicited from users. Based on these two theories, we design and test …

Model-Driven Software Development, Stephen W. Liddle

Faculty Publications

Software development is a complex and difficult task that requires the investment of significant resources and carries major risk of failure. For decades now, researchers have proposed “model-driven” approaches to improve the state of the art in software engineering. Software models are intended to improve communication among stakeholders and aid in the overall understanding both of a problem space and a proposed software solution that satisfies given requirements. As with architectural blueprints or miniature 3D models, software models make it possible to explore and test a design and its ramifications before investing in the actual build-out. The traditional approach to …

Conceptual-Model Programming: A Manifesto, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Óscar Pastor

Faculty Publications

In order to promote conceptual-model programming (CMP), we present these CMP articles. We hold these articles to be the defining principles for model-complete software development.

Essentially, this CMP manifesto asserts that programming activities are to be carried out via conceptual modeling. For applications amenable to conceptual-model designs, software developers should never need to write a line of traditional code. Thus, programming is actually conceptual-model programming.

To accommodate CMP, conceptual-modeling languages must be executable. They must also be capable of completely deploying both databases and user interfaces and conceptually expressing database access and user interaction. To enable CMP, a conceptual-model compiler …

Multilingual Ontologies For Cross-Language Information Extraction And Semantic Search, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Deryle W. Lonsdale, Yuri Tijerino

Faculty Publications

Valuable local information is often available on the web, but encoded in a foreign language that non-local users do not understand. Can we create a system to allow a user to query in language L1 for facts in a web page written in language L2? We propose a suite of multilingual extraction ontologies as a solution to this problem. We ground extraction ontologies in each language of interest, and we map both the data and the metadata among the language-specific extraction ontologies. The mappings are through a central, language-agnostic ontology that allows new languages to be added by only having …

Picturing Flag Violence In Civil War Sheet Music: The Case Of “Down With The Traitors’ Serpent Flag”, Kenneth Hartvigsen

Faculty Publications

Published in Chicago in 1861, “Down with the Traitors’ Serpent Flag” is one of thousands of political parlor songs from the American Civil War. Many of these songs are unremarkable musically and were preserved in homes, archives, and museum collections largely for their vibrant illustrations. In my presentation I examine this song’s lithographic cover illustration—a Union soldier grinding a Confederate flag into the dust—within a broader discourse of Civil War flag imagery taken from songs, political cartoons, and cartes-de-visite.

Compelling secrets exist within this colorful image that may not first meet the eye; to uncover these meanings along with the …

Alignment Within The Corporate It Unit: An Analysis Of Software Testing And Development, Colin Onita, Jasbir Dhaliwal

Faculty Publications

Strategic alignment between an organization's business strategy/capabilities and those of its information technology (IT) unit is an extensively researched subject that addresses the issue of fit between business and technology strategies. A key gap in the literature is lack of recognition that underlying this macro level of alignment are other, more granular levels of alignment involving the interdependent subunits within the corporate IT unit. Given the critical interdependencies between development and testing subunits in software engineering, this paper focuses on an alignment model for ensuring that these two functions work together effectively. A development-testing alignment (DTA) model is described, and …

Dynamic Collaboration: Participant-Driven Agile Processes For Complex Tasks, Joel H. Helquist, Amit Deokar, Thomas Meservy, John Kruse

Faculty Publications

Groups and decision makers are increasingly running headlong into complexity as interconnections and interdependencies between individuals and organizations continue to grow, decision time horizons shrink and more work is being performed by distributed teams. These factors are driving up overall problem space complexity and limiting the effectiveness of time-tested decision and collaboration processes. Increases in problem space complexity lead to higher equivocality in collaborative processes and associated products. Electronic collaboration support tools and associated process management schemes have proven successful in many challenging contexts. However, current collaboration process management schemes and tools may not be able to effectively handle more …

Drilling For Micro-Foundations Of Human Capital Based Competitive Advantages, Russell Coff, David Kryscynski

Faculty Publications

From the origins of the Resource Based View, scholars have emphasized the importance of human capital as a source of sustained competitive advantage and recently there has been great interest in gaining a better understanding of the micro-foundations of strategic capabilities. Along these lines, there is little doubt that heterogeneous human capital is often a critical underlying mechanism for capabilities. Here, we explore how individual level phenomena underpin isolating mechanisms that sustain human capital-based advantages but also create management dilemmas that must be resolved in order to create value. The solutions to these challenges cannot be found purely in generic …

Web 2.0: A Definition, Literature Review, And Directions For Future Research, David W. Wilson, Xiaolin Lin, Phil Longstreet, Saonee Sarker

Faculty Publications

The Web 2.0 paradigm has gained substantial momentum in the last decade. The influence of Web 2.0 principles and technologies has fueled an explosion of information and media content on the Web, and individual and corporate adoption of the technologies continues to rise. As the popularity and usefulness of these technologies continue to unfold, there has yet been no concise definition of the term Web 2.0, nor a clear understanding of its scope. We synthesize and analyze the extant academic and practitioner-oriented literature on the topic to 1) provide a clear, concise definition of the term Web 2.0, 2) categorize …

Digital Technology And The Variation In Design Routines: A Sequence Analysis Of Four Design Processes, James Gaskin, B. Veeresh Thummadi, Kalle Lyytinen, Youngjin Yoo

Faculty Publications

We advance a theory of design process variation across organizational types and the effects of digitalization on these processes. We argue that design routines are subject to greater variation within and between organizations as organizations embed increasingly rich repertoires of digital capabilities in their design activities. Using a sequence analysis method we compare design process variation in four organizations to examine how design routines vary due to differences in embedded digital capabilities and organization of the design process. Our analysis reveals new insights on the effects organizational context and digitalization have on design routine composition.

Video Game Design In The Mba Curriculum: An Experiential Learning Approach For Teaching Design Thinking, James Gaskin, Nicholas Berente

Faculty Publications

In the spirit of design thinking, we have developed a ―hands-on‖ video game design workshop intended to be used for an MBA course on design thinking. This novel approach to teaching complex concepts and skills to business students has been received with enthusiasm, and it provides a unique and memorable experience for students to draw on as they encounter situations in which they will apply design thinking in the future. Additionally, student-produced games and student reflections on the workshops provide initial evidence of the value of teaching design thinking through this type of experiential method. In this article we review …

A Web Of Knowledge: A Conceptual-Modeling Perspective, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Cui Tao

Faculty Publications

The current web is a web of linked pages. Frustrated users search for facts by guessing which keywords or keyword phrases might lead them to pages where they can find facts. Can we make it possible for users to search directly for facts? Equivalently, can we turn the web into a web of facts (instead of a web of pages containing facts)? Ultimately, can the web be a knowledgebase—a web of knowledge—that can provide direct answers to factual questions and also provide the confidence necessary to make those answers believable? We answer these questions by showing how to superimpose a …

Conceptual Modeling Foundations For A Web Of Knowledge, David W. Embley, Stephen W. Liddle, Deryle W. Lonsdale

Faculty Publications

The semantic web purports to be a web of knowledge that can answer our questions, help us reason about everyday problems as well as scientific endeavors, and service many of our wants and needs. Researchers and others expound various views about exactly what this means. Here we propose an answer with conceptual modeling as its foundation. We define a web of knowledge as a collection of interconnected knowledge bundles superimposed over a web of documents. Knowledge bundles are conceptual model instances augmented with facilities that provide for both extensional and intensional facts, for linking between knowledge bundles yielding a web …

Psychological Ownership And The Individual Appropriation Of Technology, James Gaskin, Kalle Lyytinen

Faculty Publications

We use information technology to accomplish a significant portion of our daily tasks. The way individuals choose to use technology varies as much as the outcomes of their usage. Appropriation – the way that people choose or learn to use technology – has been explored at a group level to explain group behaviors and performance. Although appropriation antecedents and outcomes have been investigated in many studies, none has attempted to explain the motivations or factors influencing the individual appropriation of technology; nor has extant research discovered the impacts resulting from individual appropriation. In this exploratory paper, we inquire within this …

Design Dna Sequencing: A Set Of Methodological Artifacts For Sequencing Socio-Technical Design Routines, James Gaskin, Kalle Lyytinen, Veeresh Thummadi, Douglas Schutz, Youngjin Yoo, Aaron Weiss, Nicholas Berente

Faculty Publications

With the introduction of new digital and physical tools into the workplace, the process of design has dramatically changed over the past few decades. Thus, design processes have evolved into many forms which vary, not only between organizations, but within organizations, and even within teams over time. These myriad “mutations” of the design process call for a new method to identify patterns of design activity and their change in order to deeply understand the design process. In this paper we suggest a new method for identifying patterns of activity in design teams. Such activity involves composites of distributed interactions – …

Creating Automated Plans For Semantic Web Applications Through Planning As Model Checking, Bonnie Brinton Anderson, James V. Hansen, Paul Benjamin Lowry

Faculty Publications

The uncertainties of planning engendered by nondeterminism and partial observability have led to a melding of model checking and artificial intelligence. The result is planning as model checking. Because planning as model checking tests sets of states and sets of transitions at once, rather than single states, the method remains robust and viable in domains of large state spaces and varying levels of uncertainty.

We develop a test bench for Semantic Web agents and use model-based planning to derive strong plans, strong cyclic plans, and weak plans. Our results suggest potential robustness and efficacy in devising plans for agent actions …

A Behavioral Analysis Of Passphrase Design And Effectiveness, Mark Keith, Benjamin Shao, Paul Steinbart

Faculty Publications

Although the use of multiple methods of user authentication for IT system increases security, passwords are often the only credential required for access. Consequently, the challenge is to discover ways to improve password strength without impairing usability. Longer pass “phrases” have received increased attention as a solution to this challenge because they are potentially more resistant to attacks yet are easy to remember. Recent evidence, however, suggests that passphrases increase the likelihood of typographical errors resulting in login failures and negative user perceptions. This paper presents experimental results that demonstrate well-designed passphrases do not increase login failures and, thereby, generate …

Detecting Concealment Of Intent In Transportation Screening: A Proof Of Concept, Judee K. Burgoon, Douglas P. Twitchell, Matthew L. Jensen, Thomas O. Meservy, Mark Adkins, John Kruse, Amit V. Deokar, Gabriel Tsechpenakis, Shan Lu, Dimitris N. Metaxas, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., Robert E. Younger

Faculty Publications

Transportation and border security systems have a common goal: to allow law-abiding people to pass through security and detain those people who intend to harm. Understanding how intention is concealed and how it might be detected should help in attaining this goal. In this paper, we introduce a multidisciplinary theoretical model of intent concealment along with three verbal and nonverbal automated methods for detecting intent: message feature mining, speech act profiling, and kinesic analysis. This paper also reviews a program of empirical research supporting this model, including several previously published studies and the results of a proof-of-concept study. These studies …

Automatic, Multimodal Evaluation Of Human Interaction, Matthew L. Jensen, Thomas O. Meservy, Judee K. Burgoon, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr.

Faculty Publications

This article outlines an approach for automatically extracting behavioral indicators from video, audio, and text and explores the possibility of using those indicators to predict human-interpretable judgments of involvement, dominance, tension, and arousal. We utilized two-dimensional spatial inputs extracted from video, acoustic properties extracted from audio and verbal content transcribed from face-toface interactions to construct a set of multimodal features.Multiple predictive models were created using the extracted features as predictors and human-coded perceptions of involvement, tenseness, and arousal as the criterion. These predicted perceptions were then used as independent variables in classifying truth and deception. Though the predicted values for …

The Cmc Interactivity Model: How Interactivity Enhances Communication Quality And Process Satisfaction In Lean-Media Groups, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Nicholas C. Romano Jr., Jeffrey L. Jenkins, Randy W. Guthrie

Faculty Publications

Process satisfaction is one important determinant of work group collaborative system adoption, continuance, and performance. We explicate the computermediated communication (CMC) interactivity model (CMCIM) to explain and predict how interactivity enhances communication quality that results in increased process satisfaction in CMC-supported work groups. We operationalize this model in the challenging context of very large groups using extremely lean CMC. We tested it with a rigorous field experiment and analyzed the results with the latest structural equation modeling techniques. Interactivity and communication quality dramatically improved for very large groups using highly lean CMC (audience response systems) over faceto- face groups. Moreover, …

Proposing The Hedonic Affect Model (Ham) To Explain How Stimuli And Performance Expectations Predict Affect In Individual And Group Hedonic Systems Use, Paul Benjamin Lowry, Jeffrey L. Jenkins, James Gaskin, Bryan Hammer, Nathan W. Twyman, Martin Hassell

Faculty Publications

Hedonic systems represent a multibillion-dollar industry and play an important role in how people recreate, socialize, and even conduct business. A key goal of hedonic system design is to promote positive affect—a variable known to influence cognitive beliefs, trust, disclosure, adoption, and purchase intentions. Yet, little research has identified or explained how stimuli from design features lead to positive affect in hedonic systems. This article introduces a new theoretical model, the Hedonic Affect Model (HAM), which is a comprehensive and generalizable model explaining the causes of positive and negative affect in a hedonic software context. HAM outlines three stages that …

Ict Perceptions And Meanings: Implications For Knowledge Transfer, Anne P. Massey, Taylor M. Wells

Faculty Publications

Driven by global competition and economic pressures, organizations are increasingly interested in transferring and leveraging local expertise at the global level. While many of the challenges of knowledge transfer (KT) have been discussed in the literature (e.g., incentives, cognitive limitations), the challenge of KT in distributed, or “virtual”, settings and the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) have received limited attention. While any given ICT may be described in terms of one’s perceptual awareness of its capabilities (e.g., richness, interactivity), it may also be described relative to the meanings an individual attaches to it, i.e., the idea of it …