Management Information Systems Commons^™

R&D Project Scheduling When Activities May Fail, Bert De Reyck, Roel Leus

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

An R&D project typically consists of several stages. Due to technological risks, the project may have to be terminated before completion, each stage having a specific likelihood of success. In the project planning and scheduling literature, this technological uncertainty has typically been ignored and project plans are developed only for scenarios in which the project succeeds. In this paper we examine how to schedule projects in order to maximize their expected net present value when the project activities have a probability of failure and when an activity's failure leads to overall project termination. We formulate the problem, show that it …

Perceptions Becoming Reality: Bridging The Market Knowledge Gap, Siu Loon Hoe

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

PurposeOrganizations constantly strive to learn about new market trends and ideas to stay ahead of the game. However, with an increased demand of market knowledge, how does the organization motivate employees to constantly acquire and disseminate market knowledge? The purpose of this paper is to highlight the perceived importance of market knowledge in promoting continuous employee acquisition and dissemination of customer and competitor knowledge.Design/methodology/approachThe perceived importance of market knowledge concept is highlighted and discussed.FindingsThe paper offers a view on how management could address the increased demand for market knowledge and how the development and learning team could provide further support …

The Development And Evaluation Of Software To Foster Professional Development In Educational Assessment, Morgan C. Benton

Dissertations

This dissertation sought to answer the question: Is it possible to build a software tool that will allow teachers to write better multiple-choice questions? The thesis proceeded from the finding that the quality of teaching is very influential in the amount that students learn. A basic premise of this research, then, is that improving teachers will improve learning. With this foundation, the next question became what area of teaching to improve. The literature on educational assessment indicated that teachers lack competence at effective assessment, particularly in the area of multiple-choice question generation. It is likely that improvement in this area …

User Evaluation Of The Performance Of Information Systems, Edward Mahinda

Dissertations

Information technologies (IT) are considered the primary survival factor for many organizations and the most critical success factor in businesses today. To justify the necessary investment in IT, user evaluation of information systems' performance in organizations is a key consideration. This research investigated a comprehensive and convenient means for end users to assess this performance.

Among the existing theories and models on the evaluation of information system performance based on intrinsic technological properties, the Web of System Performance (WOSP) model provides the most comprehensive basis for information system evaluation, and therefore merited further investigation. The research question was how well …

Complex Adaptive Systems Based Data Integration : Theory And Applications, Eliahu Rohn

Dissertations

Data Definition Languages (DDLs) have been created and used to represent data in programming languages and in database dictionaries. This representation includes descriptions in the form of data fields and relations in the form of a hierarchy, with the common exception of relational databases where relations are flat. Network computing created an environment that enables relatively easy and inexpensive exchange of data. What followed was the creation of new DDLs claiming better support for automatic data integration. It is uncertain from the literature if any real progress has been made toward achieving an ideal state or limit condition of automatic …

Leader Delegation And Trust In Global Software Teams, Suling Zhang

Dissertations

Virtual teams are an important work structure in global software development. The distributed team structure enables access to a diverse set of expertise which is often not available in one location, to a cheaper labor force, and to a potentially accelerated development process that uses a twenty-four hour work structure.

Many software teams are partially distributed, that is, part of the team is colocated. Such partially distributed global software teams are an important work structure in software development projects. However, little is known about what affects or improves team members’ motivation and job satisfaction in the partially distributed environment. This …

Taux : A System For Evaluating Sound Feedback In Navigational Tasks, Robert J. Lutz

Dissertations

This thesis presents the design and development of an evaluation system for generating audio displays that provide feedback to persons performing navigation tasks. It first develops the need for such a system by describing existing wayfinding solutions, investigating new electronic location-based methods that have the potential of changing these solutions and examining research conducted on relevant audio information representation techniques. An evaluation system that supports the manipulation of two basic classes of audio display is then described. Based on prior work on wayfinding with audio display, research questions are developed that investigate the viability of different audio displays. These are …

Mis 799 Capstone: 2008 Winter Cohort List, Raj Soin College Of Business, Wright State University

Master of Information Systems Capstone Executive Summary

Available for download is a list of the 2008 Winter Cohorts, complete with student names, project titles, and faculty advisor names.

Defining Information Systems As Work Systems: Implications For The Is Field, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

The lack of an agreed upon definition of information system is one of many obstacles troubling the academic information systems discipline. After listing a number of definitions of IS, this paper defines information system as a special case of work system as defined in Alter (1999a). This definition has many desirable characteristics: It is easy to understand; differentiates IS from IT; covers totally manual, partially automated, and totally automated information systems; links to a life cycle model that generates many insights about development and implementation problems; provides a simple guideline that helps in interpreting common IS/IT jargon; and has other …

Service System Fundamentals: Work System, Value Chain, And Life Cycle, Steven Alter

Business Analytics and Information Systems

Service systems produce all services of significance and scope, yet the concept of service system is not well articulated in the service literature. This paper presents three interrelated frameworks as a first cut at the fundamentals of service systems. These frameworks identify basic building blocks and organize important attributes and change processes that apply across all service systems. Although relevant regardless of whether a service system uses IT, the frameworks are also potentially useful in visualizing the realities of moving toward automated service architectures. This paper uses two examples, one largely manual and one highly automated, to illustrate the potential …

A Web Search Model For Strategic Decision Making, Shailaja Venkatsubramanyan, Stephen K. Kwan

Faculty Publications, Information Systems & Technology

Search services are now ubiquitously employed in satisfying the information needs of managers and business analysts involved in strategic decision making. In this paper, we propose a model of a user’s interaction with a search service in satisfying information needs and empirically evaluate the principal factors involved. Findings indicate that the information need type influences the search process more significantly than the specific search service being used. Consequently, managers and business analysts should pay particular attention to the types of information needs involved in a strategic decision.

The Impact Of Directionality In Predications On Text Mining, Gondy Leroy, Marcelo Fiszman, Thomas C. Rindflesch

CGU Faculty Publications and Research

The number of publications in biomedicine is increasing enormously each year. To help researchers digest the information in these documents, text mining tools are being developed that present co-occurrence relations between concepts. Statistical measures are used to mine interesting subsets of relations. We demonstrate how directionality of these relations affects interestingness. Support and confidence, simple data mining statistics, are used as proxies for interestingness metrics. We first built a test bed of 126,404 directional relations extracted from biomedical abstracts, which we represent as graphs containing a central starting concept and 2 rings of associated relations. We manipulated directionality in four …

Using Google Keyword Statistics To Explain Changes In Traffic To Internet Sites Related To Global Environmental Management, G. Kent Webb

Faculty Publications, Information Systems & Technology

Google recently provided a keyword statistics tool to support its “AdWords” program that conducts a deep evaluation of individual web sites. It provides detailed information on the keywords in the site and an index of monthly and average statistics for these keywords over the past year for users of the Google search engine. The data is intended to help with the design of internet sites and to support bidding for keywords that when purchased become AdWords that draw traffic through the sponsored links of Google search. This paper describes an analysis of the traffic, keywords, and search rank results for …

Upgrade Tracking System From Paper To Digital For Brazilian Parcel/Post Delivery Company, Sennex Express, Keith Walter Witzel

Theses Digitization Project

The purpose of this project was to aid in the development of improved service of an existing small package and document delivery service in Belém, Brazil. This company, Sennex, makes its deliveries by bicycle and motorcycle due to extreme traffic congestion in the city. In order to keep a leading edge on the competition, this project after stating existing conditions, proposes using a barcode tracking system comparable to that used by American companies such as UPS and FedEx.

Developing Data Mart Using Extraction, Transformation And Loading, Senthil Murugan Lakshmanan

Theses Digitization Project

This project is organized to develop the sales data mart for the purpose of reporting data. Data warehouses support online analytical processing applications by gathering the data from various kinds of source information in a multidimensional format. Developing this strategic information can be done with the ETL, which means Extract, Transform and Loading. ETL functions reshape the relevant data from source systems into useful information to be stored in the data warehouse or data marts. The successful deployment of the sales data mart allowed the creation of a user interface that permits users to make strategic decisions. The reports can …

Racial/Ethnic Differences In Exposure To Environmental Volatile Organic Compounds In The U.S. General Population: The National Health And Nutrition Examination Survey 1999–2000, Y. S. Lin, Alberto Coustasse, W. H. Ho, K. Singh, A. Arif

Management Faculty Research

Background: Exposure to volatile organic compounds (VOCs) has been associated with many health disorders. A better understanding of unequal health risk from exposure to environmental VOCs is critical to the elimination of health disparities.

Objective: The goal of this study was to investigate racial/ethnic differentials in exposure to airborne VOCs within a national sample of the U.S. population and assessed socio-demographic determinants that may contribute to these racial differences.

Methods: We used data from a stratified sample of 576 participants (aged 20–59 years) who provided personal air samples for VOC measurements in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) …

An Empirical Investigation On Customer’S Privacy Perceptions, Trust And Security Awareness In E-Commerce Environment, Anil Gurung, Xin Luo, M. K. Raja

Management Information Systems Faculty Research

Privacy concerns of the users have been listed as one of the hindrances in the growth of e-commerce. Understanding the consequences of privacy and its relationship with risk perceptions may help in finding solutions to this problem. Internet users may use different strategies to protect their privacy so that they can become confident in taking part in e-commerce. In this study, we investigate how users can lower their risk perceptions in the context of e-commerce. The relationships among privacy, risk, trust and internet security measures are empirically investigated to predict the behavioral intention to take part in e-commerce. Theoretical contributions …

A Decision Model For Contracting Helpdesk Services, Meg C. Murray, Joy Young

Faculty Articles

Contractual helpdesk services, also known as call center outsourcing is a growing industry. Helpdesk solutions, which offer customer service to consumers who have an issue, problem or concern, are an integral part of many organizations' wider service function. For smaller companies, outsourcing helpdesk services is becoming more and more popular given the technical expertise and high investment costs required to develop, implement and maintain the infrastructure needed to support these services. Contracting for helpdesk services helps to alleviate smaller companies from concerns with technical issues, retaining employees dedicated to continuous research on the value proposition of emerging products or services, …

Sensemaking In Information Systems: Toward A Sensemaking Inquiring System, James Parrish

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Complexity and uncertainty have long been problems for organizations of all types. Organizational members do not do a very good job of dealing with the complexity and uncertainty as research shows that when faced with complex situations humans often turn to the same sources of information repeatedly (a practice that will eventually betray them), and/or reduce the amount of scanning that they do (Weick 1995; Boyd and Fulk 1996). Organizations often turn to information systems to help them deal with the complexity, but they often take a techno-centric view of knowledge that does not incorporate the human qualities needed for …

Hybrid Data Envelopment Analysis And Simulation Methodology For Measuring Capacity Utilisation And Throughput Efficiency Of Container Terminals, Hokey Min, Byung-In Park

Management Faculty Publications

As growth in international trade slowed down in the recent years, inter-modal traffic volume declined and subsequently led to reduction in demand for container services. The reduced demand in container services and the ongoing glut of container port facilities throughout the world have sparked fierce competition among international container terminals. In an effort to help the port authorities to develop a winning strategy in the increasingly competitive container market, this paper develops a meaningful set of benchmarks that will set the standard for best practices. In particular, we propose a hybrid Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA)/simulation model that is designed to …

Drivers And Inhibitors Of Online Donations To Nonprofit Organizations, Horst Treiblmaier, Irene Pollach

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Despite the overall economic and social importance of nonprofit organizations and the plethora of schol- arly literature on electronic commerce, few authors have combined these two fields to tackle the issue of online donations to nonprofit organizations. In this paper we first present a framework that illustrates several antecedents of online donations. After discussing the descriptive results from two surveys, we compare different user groups regarding their attitudes toward online donations. The results suggest that our scales exhibit sufficient reliability and validity and that the two groups differ significantly. Further- more, we conduct a regression analysis with the cause, trust …

The Voyeur Among Us: Navigating Around The Global Spyware Epidemic, Daniel B. Garrie, Liane R. Komagome

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

Spyware poses a serious threat of privacy infringement to unassuming internet users across the globe. Existing European legislation attempts to protect end-users from unethical review and use of their personal data. Outlawing spyware technology and strengthening the legal consent requirement for data- mining may offer end users additional assurances that their privacy rights are upheld, as well as more tangible shelter from the existing spyware epidemic. These proposed solutions, however, will only create successful safe havens for internet users by obtaining international buy-in.

Seniors And Information Technology: Are We Shrinking The Digital Divide?, Mark E. Mcmurtrey, Ronald E. Mcgaughey, James R. Downey

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

The “digital divide” has been present in the field of information technology (IT) since the inception of the digital computer. Throughout the course of history, one group (or more) has had better access to computer and information technology than another faction. For example: rich versus poor, young versus old, advanced societies versus less developed countries, etc. This disparity has existed for a variety of reasons, among them political, cultural, economic and even class or socioeconomic in nature. This paper examines one particular component of this phenomenon, the “gray divide” pertaining to the use of IT by our elderly, or senior …

Similarities And Differences Of Custom Designed Erp Systems Development And Implementation In Two Cases In Services And Manufacturing, Farshad Salimi

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

In this paper we made a comparative review of two case studies in development, design, and implementation of in-house custom-designed Enterprise Resource Planning packages in manufacturing and services. For comparison, we scanned through business solutions, tangible and intangible benefits, process of implementation, implementation problems and planning, benefits of ERP implementation, business processes, business strategies, project goals, IT infrastructure, and key critical success factors (KCSFs). The KCSFs and the important key factors were the focus point in evaluation of differences. For instance, in manufacturing, the innovation strategy was identified as an important KCSF in implementation planning phase whereas in service, understanding …

Enterprise Modelling Using Unified Framework Supporting Distributed Object Computing, Manuj Darbari, Bhaskar Karn

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This paper provides a support for the analysis phase in the life cycle of the enterprise distributed computing systems. The major goal of our work is to provide a small but powerful set of enterprise modeling concepts. We will be extending the concept of Enterprise Modeling using EDOC inter-agent system using OPEN Framework.

A Primary Study Of Attributes Of Innovations During The Prediffusion Stage, Frank M. Valier, Richard V. Mccarthy, Jay E. Aronson

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

We provide a theoretical model for testing the adoption of information technology during the prediffusion stage (research and development and early trials) of an innovation. The model was tested using Linux based applications of Open Source Software (OSS). The results of surveying 1000 members of the Linux User Groups WorldWide (LUGWW) are presented. This study is significant because it provides empirical evidence that attributes of innovations correlate with adoption during the prediffusion stage (research and development) of an innovation. This extends diffusion of innovations research and has important implications for DOI theory and practice.

Linking Information Technology And Competitive Strategy: Evidence From China’S Third-Party Logistics Industry, Fujun Lai, Dahui Li, Qiang Wang

Journal of International Technology and Information Management

This study examined how information technology (IT) influences competitive strategies of third- party logistics (3PL) providers in mainland China. First, we examined the influences of IT on the firm’s IT advantage over its competitors. Second, the relationship between IT and competitive strategy was examined. The results show that IT has a significant influence on a firm’s IT advantage and its competitive strategy.

Dimensions Of Information Technology Governance: A Study Of Theory And Practice, Pui S. Ko

Theses: Doctorates and Masters

The emergence of corporate governance is the response to recent high profile collapses of organisations such as Enron and WorldCom. Because of the ubiquitous nature of Information Technology (IT) and its influence on organisational activities, IT governance is increasingly seen as an integral part of corporate governance. However, existing literature shows the lack of a common understanding of IT governance due to various perspectives held amongst academics and practitioners. For example, schools of thought group IT governance according to structure with an emphasis on control and co-ordination or process with an emphasis on capability and continuity. The purpose of this …

Collective Outsourcing To Market (Com): A Market-Based Framework For Information Supply Chain Outsourcing, Fang Fang, Zhiling Guo, Andrew B. Whinston

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

This paper discusses the importance of and a solution to separating the information flow from the physical product flow in a supply chain. Motivated by the inefficient demand forecast caused by information asymmetry and lack of an incentive among supply chain partners to share valuable information, we propose a radically new framework called collective outsourcing to market (COM) to address many information supply chain design challenges. To validate the COM framework, we consider a supply chain with one manufacturer and multiple downstream retailers. Retailers privately acquire demand forecast information that they do not have incentive to share horizontally with other …

Volume And Cost Implications Of Product Portfolio Complexity, Mark A. Jacobs

MIS/OM/DS Faculty Publications

Business leaders are concerned about the impacts of increasing levels of product portfolio complexity since many sense that complexity related costs such as order management, procurement, and inventory threaten to undermine operational efficiencies and consume profits. Even so, managers do not fully understand the extent and breadth of the impacts of product portfolio complexity. A more complete understanding of the operational effects of product portfolio complexity is lacking partially because researchers have not yet offered a robust theoretical perspective or studied it in a focused controlled way; until now. Herein, measures of product portfolio complexity are developed and related to …