IS Human Capital: Assessing Gaps to Strengthen Skill and Competency Sourcing

Past research has mainly focused on defining information systems (IS) skills and competencies at the industry or global level; it has offered little guidance on best practices for managing IS at the organization level. And yet, a resource-based view indicates that failure to properly manage skills and competencies could lead to suboptimal outcomes such as a loss of IS process knowledge and innovation, an inability to adequately evaluate vendor performance, and a lack of critical skills and competencies needed to meet future demands. In this paper, we examine how one government agency managed its systems for testing personnel. We describe the need for a process to assess IS skills and competencies in order to analyze the gaps and ensure they are filled. A concrete understanding of existing gaps guides sourcing of skills and competencies through hiring, training, internal transfers, and work allocation. This paper presents an effective methodology for this purpose

Misalignment - the core challenge in integrating security and privacy requirements into mobile banking application development

This study identifies and explores the core challenge faced when integrating security and privacy requirements into the mobile banking software development life cycle. Studies on key issues in Information Systems (IS) have been on-going for several decades, with security and privacy moving up the ranks of top issues in IS. Security and privacy requirements can be added into the mobile application development processes by practising secure coding, and/or, by adding a third party security tool. This study gathered data from a single case study; it employs grounded theory methodology to reveal misalignment as the core challenge to integrating security and privacy requirements into mobile banking application development. The forms of misalignment are between security and privacy requirements and (1) external entities, (2) roles, (3) skills and (4) system requirements. The nature of the mobile application domain results in the misalignment forms identified above. Some of the findings indicate the need for further research. Research indicates that mobile application development follows agile methods for development. Agile methods have been compared with Complex Adaptive Systems (CAS). For this reason, research in IS could benefit from studies that focus on CAS as a theory to provide a better explanation on the misalignment issues in mobile application development

The impact of conflict judgments between developers and testers in software development

The primary role of testers is to verify and validate the software produced by developers to ensure its quality. Testing is designed to catch problems in the software and report them for correction, so it is a conflict-laden, confrontational, and judgmental process. This audit role of testing is inherently adversarial, ensuring the development of components of interpersonal conflict judgments between developers and testers. Prior research indicates that such conflict is likely to be negatively associated with software quality and job satisfaction, producing negative judgments about the artifact production process and about the job itself. This study addresses the question: How do judgments of conflict between developers and testers impact the software development process? The authors develop and empirically test a research model which proposes that the conflict judgment targets of both the tasks and the persons who perform them will have direct impact on both software quality and job satisfaction judgments. Results of testing this model indicate that interpersonal judgments arising from conflict, as well as judgments made by testers and developers about the conflict targets of tasks and persons negatively influence subsequent software quality and job satisfaction judgments. Implications for theory and practice are discussed. Copyright © 2013, IGI Global