Precarious Balance:The External Dimension of IT Flexibility

We study how a firm’s sourcing flexibility affects the value it obtains from its IT investments, and propose that the existing literature has, by ignoring external actors, taken too narrow a focus and understudied the richness of the concept in two ways. We argue that a firm’s IT sourcing flexibility is restricted by the level of industry concentration among the suppliers of its key information systems. At the same time, increased vendor concentration decreases the variety of applications being used among firms, thus simplifying integration across organizational boundaries. Thus, the short-term beneficial network effects of standardized technologies may be winnowed away over the long term by the high switching costs resulting from the oligopolistic nature of the vendor market. We suggest that IS practitioners and researchers should not ignore the impact of vendors when analyzing the risk of introducing new technology

Selecting IT Control Objectives and Measuring IT Control Capital

COBIT is a well-known framework for IT governance, and provides an extensive list of control objectives for IT managers. However, anecdotal evidence shows that many organizations that use COBIT do not implement the entire framework. Instead, they focus their efforts on only some of COBIT’ s control objectives. We argue that this could be due to the bounded rationality of IT managers, which affects their ability to assess the outcomes of control, and the diminishing returns from implementing controls, because of enforcement costs incurred to control shirking. Managers would thus find it useful if the various control objectives could be ranked, so that they could prioritize their efforts. We use network analysis to identify the most central control objectives in COBIT. We also discuss the development of a measure of “control capital” to capture the level of control an organization achieves after implementing a particular set of controls. Future research will test the empirical validity of this measure

Need of a journal club in every medical education setup

The scenario of scientific inscription has changed a lot with every day a new journal takes birth and so more and more manuscripts are written or manufactured in eagerness of academic endorsement/promotion, but very few academicians are appraising journals. This is a reality that the medical fraternity has exceptionally little curiosity in journal indulgent may be due to lack of proper training in this regards and the journal club (JC) is a reply to this need. Medical education workforce must develop the necessary skills to keep up with the vast amount of information available. The JC is an influential educational instrument and has played an active role in medical education for over a century. Even though, this tool has been included in the postgraduate program, there still remains a need of understanding the concept and importance of journals. This paper provides an inclusive appraisal about what a JC and how to acquire/establish it our departments

The Information Content of Directors’ Trades: Empirical Analysis of the Australian Market

We examine the trading activities of directors in shares of their own companies on the Australian Stock Exchange during the July-December 2005 period. We find that directors of small companies in particular earn abnormal return after both their ‘Purchase’ and as well as their ‘Sale’ trade. Directors of these companies have an uncanny ability to time the market by trading when mispricing is greatest, and are able to predict the future performance of their firms in short run. For directors of medium and large companies, we find evidence that ‘Sale’ trades are the ones which work as loss avoiders. Outsiders recognise to some extent that directors’ trades are informative, however they are slow to incorporate the new information into prices, refuting much of the market efficiency literature.

Time-Varying Hedge Ratios: An Application to the Indian Stock Futures Market

Using different unconditional and conditional versions of the bivariate BEKK-GARCH model of Engle and Kroner, we calculate time-varying hedge ratios for Indian stock futures market involving a cross-section of seven firms across a spectrum of industries. These models are solved not only with the usual square root exponent but also analysed with an unrestricted version where the exponent is set to one. Our results show time-varying hedge ratios with the exponent set to one improve over hedge ratios obtained from the square root exponent setup as well as over static hedge ratios calculated from the error correction types of models. Time-varying optimal hedge ratio calculation in this new framework makes perfect sense in terms of portfolio allocation decision involving individual stock futures.Unrestricted BEKK-GARCH, Stock Futures, Dynamic Hedging

Trading in Target Stocks Before Takeover Announcements: An Analysis of Stock and Option Markets

In this study we examine both informed trading and contraire trading preceding takeover announcements on US target firms. Our findings suggest that both informed trading and contraire trading exists within the period preceding takeover announcements on both the stock and option markets as evident through abnormal returns and trading volumes. In regard to contraire trading, this study investigates possible explanations for its existence including liquidity clustering, falsely informed trading and deliberate contraire trading. The results find that bid-ask spreads actually increase over the pre-announcement period indicating that liquidity clustering is an unlikely explanation. However, through analysis of an unbiased sample of rumoured target firms, deliberate contraire trading appears both a profitable and more likely explanation for contraire trading than falsely informed trading.Informed Trading; Contraire Trading; Market Efficiency; Event Study

A Comparative Study of Banking in China and India, Nonperforming Loans and the Level Playing Field

This paper compares the operative performances of the banking institutions in China and India, taking into account the contentious issue of institutional differences in banking sectors in these two economies, reflected in the generation of non-performing loans. The study also examines the issue of the use of banks to provide countervailable subsidies to exporting organizations. Our results show that the efficiency differences between banks in these two countries can be directly related to their institutional differences.Technical efficiency; Non-performing loans; Subsidies.

The Impact of Location and Dispersion on IT Investment Choices

This study is a spatially explicit examination of the role of distance from parent headquarters and local norms on the IT profile of a location at the establishment-level. Prior research has hypothesized that physical distance plays a key role in explaining differences in adoption rates of internet technology between urban versus rural establishments. Here, since distance is viewed as playing a key role, we explicitly test the effect of distance. In addition, instead to testing to adoption of a single technology, we examine the propensity to adoption similar aggregate technology portfolios. Doing so will help distinguish the extent of influence that flows from different channels of diffusion. Specifically, we ask: how is IT adoption affected by the interaction between firm attributes, spatial proximity and shared social structures? Using a database of the IT assets of 1,275 establishments from 461 firms, we develop a vector measure to capture the heterogeneity of an IT portfolio and use it to test our hypotheses. This paper presents the initial results of a quick approximation of the model

Improving the Website Design Process for SMEs: A Design Science Perspective

The success of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in e-business is significantly affected by the quality of their websites. Currently, website designers focus mainly on improving the usability of websites. They pay less attention to the psychological, cognitive and other needs of the employees and customers who use these websites. The lack of attention to these needs leads to websites that are not well or appropriately utilised, negatively impacting the e-business ambitions of SMEs. This study adopts a design science approach (Hevner et al. 2004; March and Smith, 1995) to develop a new methodology for designing websites that takes these concerns into account. The new methodology is based on Brown’s principles (Brown, 1999), as they incorporate the various concerns of users. The new methodology was used to design a New Zealand SME\u27s website and multiple methods were used to evaluate it. The data was complemented by the results of the requirements analysis exercise and the designer\u27s wire frame models

Evaluation and comparison of knowledge, attitude and practice about iron deficiency anemia amongst medical students of rural and urban background

Background: Iron Deficiency Anemia (IDA) is most prevalent anemia worldwide. Women have additional iron requirement from puberty to menopause. This arises from physiological needs of menstruation, pregnancy and lactation. Iron is required for oxygen transport, cellular oxidation, phagocytosis and immune functions. The magnitude of anemia as health problem is huge and can be tackled with increasing awareness, promotion of correct attitudes and practices.Methods: Cross sectional study consisting of 50 medical students of age group 18-22 years divided in two groups coming from rural (Group I) and urban background (Group II). A structured questionnaire of 26 questions, out of which 18 questions based on knowledge. 4 on attitude and 4 on practice. Response was assessed using Percentage analysis and Chi square test.Results: All students defined anemia as Hb <11 g/dl, RBC <4.5 million/cu.mm with pallor. 80% students having knowledge that anemia is more common in rural area. Most common sources of information were books and teachers (76% in Group I and 56% in Group II). The practice of eating green vegetables and taking tea after meals was more in Group I.Conclusions: The results of our study showed that though Group II had better knowledge regarding IDA  Group I followed more favourable practices. Our study, though small in size gives a glimpse of the greater picture. The attitude and practice of students and society in general needs to be improved with intensive media campaigns. Greater awareness about causes, prevention and treatment will go a long way in combating IDA.