Addressing business agility challenges with enterprise systems

It is clear that systems agility (i.e., having a responsive IT infrastructure that can be changed quickly to meet changing business needs) has become a critical component of organizational agility. However, skeptics continue to suggest that, despite the benefits enterprise system packages provide, they are constraining choices for firms faced with agility challenges. The reason for this skepticism is that the tight integration between different parts of the business that enables many enterprise systems\u27 benefits also increases the systems\u27 complexity, and this increased complexity, say the skeptics, increases the difficulty of changing systems when business needs change. These persistent concerns motivated us to conduct a series of interviews with business and IT managers in 15 firms to identify how they addressed, in total, 57 different business agility challenges. Our analysis suggests that when the challenges involved an enterprise system, firms were able to address a high percentage of their challenges with four options that avoid the difficulties associated with changing the complex core system: capabilities already built-in to the package but not previously used, leveraging globally consistent integrated data already available, using add-on systems available on the market that easily interfaced with the existing enterprise system, and vendor provided patches that automatically updated the code. These findings have important implications for organizations with and without enterprise system architectures

Improving Transportation Construction Project Performance: Development of a Model to Support the Decision-Making Process for Incentive/Disincentive Construction Projects, MTI Report 09-07

This research presents a project time and cost performance simulation model to assist project planners and managers by providing a complete picture during the Incentive/Disincentive (I/D) contracting decision-making process of possible performance outcomes with probabilities based on historical data. This study was performed by collecting transportation construction project data. The collected project data from the Florida Department of Transportation were evaluated using time and cost performance indices and then statistical data analysis was performed to identify important factors that influence construction project time performance. Using Monte Carlo simulation procedures, this study demonstrated a methodology for developing an I/D project time and cost performance prediction model. User-friendly visual interfaces were developed to perform the simulation and report results using Visual Basic Application programming. The developed model was validated using additional cases of transportation construction projects. Based on statistical analysis, this research found that several project factors influence I/D contracting performance. The important factors that had significant impacts on project performance were the effects of contract type, project type, district, project size, project length, maximum incentive amount, and daily I/D amount. In conclusion, the developed model applied to I/D contracting projects will be a useful tool to assist the project planners and managers during the decision-making process and will promote the efficient use of I/D contracting, which will benefit the traveling public by saving their travel time from construction delays. With additional project data, the developed model can be updated easily and the more data used for the model, the better the accuracy of prediction that can be expected

AMCIS 2002 Panels and Workshops I: Human-Computer Interaction Research in the MIS Discipline

Human Computer Interaction (HCI)or Human Factors studies in MIS are concerned with the ways humans interact with information, technologies, and tasks, especially in business, managerial, organizational, and cultural contexts. This article describes the existence and importance of HCI research in the MIS discipline, its historical development, some of its characteristics, publication opportunities, and future research directions. It is believed that HCI is the subject of a strong research stream in MIS, and will continue to be strong in the foreseeable future. It is hoped that HCI studies can provide the evolution of the human centered technology development that enhances our work/job, our various needs, our organizations, our societies, and ourselves

Knowledge Reuse for Customization: Metamodels in an Open Design Community for 3d Printing

Theories of knowledge reuse posit two distinct processes: reuse for replication and reuse for innovation. We identify another distinct process, reuse for customization. Reuse for customization is a process in which designers manipulate the parameters of metamodels to produce models that fulfill their personal needs. We test hypotheses about reuse for customization in Thingiverse, a community of designers that shares files for three-dimensional printing. 3D metamodels are reused more often than the 3D models they generate. The reuse of metamodels is amplified when the metamodels are created by designers with greater community experience. Metamodels make the community's design knowledge available for reuse for customization-or further extension of the metamodels, a kind of reuse for innovation

NeuroIS: Hype or Hope?

This panel discusses the opportunities and challenges of applying cognitive neuroscience theories, methods, and tools to inform IS theories, methods, and data (termed “NeuroIS”). Given the ability of cognitive neuroscience to localize the functionality of brain areas that underlie higher-order human processes using functional neuroimaging tools, many social scientists in economics, psychology, and marketing use such tools to derive many interesting insights by opening the “black box” of the brain. Recently in the IS discipline, there have been some attempts to explore the potential of cognitive neuroscience for IS research (e.g., Dimoka, Pavlou, and Davis 2007). The purpose of this panel is to explore the potential of cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging tools for IS research, and consistent with the theme of this year’s ICIS, suggest whether and how NeuroIS may help IS academics conduct IT research that really matters. This panel will host an intellectual debate on the opportunities and challenges of employing cognitive neuroscience and functional neuroimaging tools in IS research. The panelists come from different disciplines (Marketing, IS, Neuroscience), theories (technology adoption, IS economics, IT productivity, design science), and methods (behavioral/organizational, economics, technical), and they will discuss how IS theories and methods in their respective areas can be complemented by cognitive neuroscience theories and neuroimaging data. They will also debate the potential of physiological data for IS research, the pros and cons of functional neuroimaging tools, and whether NeuroIS can help IS researchers do research that they could not do with other means. The panel will have a broad appeal to IS researchers who may be interested in the potential of cognitive neuroscience for IS research but they are concerned about the challenges associated with using neuroimaging tools. The panel will debate whether NeuroIS can help IS researchers learn more than they already know, and whether, how, and when cognitive neuroscience will prove beneficial for IS research. The panel will also debate whether and how NeuroIS can contribute to IS research, whether and how the IS field can benefit by cognitive neuroscience theories, and what research questions could arise from using neuroimaging tools in IS research. The panel’s ultimate goal is to gauge whether NeuroIS is “hype or hope,” aiming to conclude whether NeuroIS could provide valuable opportunities for IS research, or whether the challenges associated with neuroimaging tools will impede their wide usage

Naming trouble in online internationalized education

This paper offers an analysis of cultural politics that emerged around naming practices in an ethnographic study of the interactions within an online MBA unit, offered by an Australian university to both ‘local’ Australian students and international students enrolled through a Malaysian partner institution. It became evident that names were doing important identity, textual and pedagogical work in these interactions and considerable interactive trouble arose over the social practices surrounding names. The analysis uses sociolinguistic concepts to analyse selected slices of the online texts and participants' interview accounts. The analysis shows how ethnocentric default settings in the courseware served to heighten and exacerbate cultural difference as a pedagogical problem. These events are related to the larger problematic of theorising the context of culture in times of globalisation and increasingly entangled educational routes, with implications for the enterprise of online internationalised education

Panel: OASIS in the mirror: reflections on the impacts and research of IFIP WG 8.2

What has IFIP contributed to the field of information systems and organizations through the activities of Working Group 8.2, its central working group in information systems? What has WG 8.2 delivered to its constituents? What have the results and impacts of the WG 8.2 been on the larger community? This panel will not shy away from controversy as it discusses the history, contributions, and unrealized potential of research spawned by this working group over the past 30 years.The past and the future of information systems: 1976-2006 and beyondRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Cognition Matters: Enduring Questions in Cognitive IS Research

We explore the history of cognitive research in information systems (IS) across three major research streams in which cognitive processes are of paramount importance: developing software, decision support, and human-computer interaction. Through our historical analysis, we identify “enduring questions” in each area. The enduring questions motivated long-standing areas of inquiry within a particular research stream. These questions, while perhaps unapparent to the authors cited, become evident when one adopts an historical perspective. While research in all three areas was influenced by changes in technologies, research techniques, and the contexts of use, these enduring questions remain fundamental to our understanding of how to develop, reason with, and interact with IS. In synthesizing common themes across the three streams, we draw out four cognitive qualities of information technology: interactivity, fit, cooperativity, and affordances. Together these cognitive qualities reflect IT’s ability to influence cognitive processes and ultimately task performance. Extrapolating from our historical analysis and looking at the operation of these cognitive qualities in concert, we envisage a bright future for cognitive research in IS: a future in which the study of cognition in IS extends beyond the individual to consider cognition distributed across teams, communities and systems, and a future involving the study of rich and dynamic social and organizational contexts in which the interplay between cognition, emotion, and attitudes provides a deeper explanation of behavior with IS