Integrating Information Literacy Outcomes into Higher Education Courses

Many colleges and universities are actively developing and implementing curricular initiatives to develop students’ digital information literacy in an effort to prepare the next generation for lifelong learning and with critical thinking skills. Overall, each of these efforts are earnest attempts to consistently provide students with digital information literacy skills, yet each as an approach has fallen short of the digital information retrieval and information evaluation standards outlined by the Association of College and Research Libraries. This highlights the need to develop a comprehensive solution approach to integrating digital information literacy outcomes into higher education courses. This paper focuses on improving a student’s capability for information retrieval and information evaluation through inclusion of digital information literacy outcomes into core course curricula and offers a proposed integrated solution approach involving faculty, academic librarians, information technology administration and students to effectively incorporate digital information literacy skills into a post-secondary courses and curricula

Relational Model Bases: A Technical Approach to Real-time Business Intelligence and Decision Making

This article presents a technical approach to acquiring quality, real-time decision-making information within organizations and illustrates this approach with an extended case study. Using relational model bases for real-time, operational decision making in organizations facilitates a transition to dynamic (vs. forecast-driven) resource allocation decisions. These and related systems offer development of a new generation of DSS applications which can be applied to extend preemptive decision making across many industries. This approach is illustrated through a description of a detailed conceptual case (scenario) pertaining to its application in agribusiness. This approach to decision making can be viewed as an extension of well-known techniques pertaining to DSS but also represents the opportunity to address problems not amenable to traditional post hoc analysis. Researchers can learn from the accumulated knowledge pertaining to DSS but can also examine innovations that push forward into new territories. The article presents and discusses a variety of emergent research questions prompted by the application of these technologies in the business environment

Integrating Management Information Systems Following Organizational Mergers or Acquisitions

Mergers and acquisitions have become a normal business occurrence for companies large and small. Integration of entities following mergers and acquisitions are often more painful and less successful than they could be. The integration of information technology functions plays a vital role in the ultimate results of such a merger by actualizing product and customer synergies, establishing best practices drawing from the best of each organization, and providing smooth transition to integrated reporting and decision systems. This study proposes to investigate best practice for information technology leaders for integration of functions following mergers and acquisitions, considering outcomes and metrics, pre-merger activities, human resources, culture, learning and other key issues. Results are presented as the distillation of comments extracted from a wide variety of perspectives, organizational situations, and personal reflections by MIS professionals. Additional observations are noted, and several emergent questions aimed at furthering our understanding of this phenomenon are presented

Investigating Antecedents to Social Loafing in IT Project Teams: Applying the Collective Effort Model

Even with several decades of IT project management research and practice, there are still issues with keeping projects on time and within budget, with the final product adding value to the project organization. With the overwhelming majority of IT projects involving teams of workers, it is important to take advantage of insights drawn from work within the referent discipline of organizational behavior, and more specifically from work that focuses on teams and team member behaviors. This research focuses on antecedents impacting social loafing that would fall under the category of informal controls. Specifically, our research question is do antecedents identified as important in the Collective Effort Model in team projects have an impact on social loafing? These findings provide a contribution to the theoretical basis for social loafing and potentially lead to a better understanding of how IT project leaders can most effectively influence project processes and outcomes

Analyzing Enterprise Architecture Integration at the DHS Using the Zachman Framework

This paper offers an overview of the enterprise architecture integration issues that exist currently at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) as the result of the ongoing integration of 22 separate federal agencies, each specializing in one or more aspects of homeland security issues. This paper outlines these architecture integration challenges experienced by DHS within the Zachman framework, a well-known structure for capturing and defining an enterprise architecture, and offers future steps for DHS in designing and implementing its integrated enterprise architecture

A Guide for Purposive Sampling on Twitter

In this paper, we demonstrate how to use Twitter to conduct behavioral research and to guide researchers who might benefit from using this social media platform to effectively recruit survey participants. We begin by discussing the advantages researchers gain from using Twitter to recruit subjects for surveys, such as respondent anonymity, purposive sampling (which allows researchers to find respondents who participate in a topic of interest), the ability to reach respondents quickly to investigate ephemeral events, and advantages in replicating subject populations in recruitment. We offer a guide that illustrates the mechanics of using Twitter to recruit subjects and present a successful case study that illustrates how we used this technique in the real world to recruit survey participants. We provide solutions for common issues researchers might encounter when using Twitter to recruit subjects, such as nonresponse bias due to not responding to tweets in a timely manner, initial unwillingness to participate, and the inability to find appropriate survey respondents

Risky Behavior: A Three-Factor Adoption Model

This study seeks to understand the convenience versus privacy risk debate that many consumers knowingly and unknowingly participate in every day, as well as the impacts of these information privacy and trust concerns on innovation adoption. We investigate the relationship between the motivation, perception, and intention-to-use of reputation-aware applications, particularly regarding possible privacy threats. Our theoretical model presents a unique and novel interpretation of technology acceptance of reputation-aware systems that have high privacy risks. Specifically, we combine PMT and TAM to propose a three-factor technology adoption model to evaluate the risk, coping, and benefit calculus of technology adoption. We pose two research questions: (1) What are the factors influencing a user’s assessment of the benefits and threats adopting reputation-aware applications?; and (2) Does a three-factor adoption model present greater predictive power to assess behavioral intentions? The results of our empirical evaluation reveal that behavioral intent regarding the adoption of reputation-aware applications can be predicted using a three-factor adoption model, with the findings significant and reliable across all three factors. Additionally, the results show that the conceptual model has improved predictive power over existing acceptance models in the context of reputation-aware applications. The TAM/TPB components were able to predict approximately 62% of the variance of behavioral intention, whereas the PMT and TPB model was able to predict 74% of the variance of behavioral intention

The Impact of Relational Model Bases on Organizational Decision Making: Cases in E-Commerce and Ecological Economics

This dissertation explores reifying the management science concept of organizations as a collection of decisions. Organizational management entails resource allocation activities that can be formulated in terms of elementary relational functions. All elasticity-type formulations, most generic production functions, and various projection models that organizations might require (such as sales forecasts) can all be represented by elementary relational functions. Therefore, information systems in organizations can be representative of relationships between decision requirements, as theorized in relational model bases. A relational model-base structure acts as an integrative device by relating an organization\u27s elementary relational functions to each other, with all that is kept for any model being the current values for coefficients and the now prevailing parametric values for the state variables of the model.Anchoring management information systems around relational model bases is particularly appropriate for organizations that have some reliance on real-time management decision making by providing the answer to two requirements for such organizations: one being the requirement for more accurate and current real-time, operational decision making within the organization; the other being the integration of functions for decision-making purposes within an organization. Relational model bases thus enable more dynamic management and become a central information system type for organizations that have dynamic resource allocation requirements that can employ technical tactics around such relational model bases. The relational model base would reflect revealed needs in an organization as opposed to projected needs, easing an organization\u27s reliance on forecasting and moving it toward real-time decision making. The case for the introduction of these information systems is further strengthened by the fact that relational model base-type structures are already operating in production environments within organizations. The methodology used in this dissertation involved modeling organizational decision requirements in particular organizational cases to determine the behavior of relational model bases within those prototypical organizations and the application of relational model bases to real-time decision making. The first organizational scenario is a recursive agribusiness e-commerce case, with the target application being precision agriculture. The second scenario is a non-recursive ecological economics case, with the target application being preservation of biodiversity through land (habitat) protection

Drama without drama: The late rise of scripted TV formats

This article revisits the history of TV formats - concepts of TV shows that are licensed for local adaptations – focusing on scripted entertainment. While the TV format revolution of the 1990s bypassed scripted formats, they have been catching up in recent years. This paper analyses both the reasons for this late rise and the factors behind the recent growth. It argues that the adaptation of scripted formats is more complex and risks remain higher than for other genres. The underlying economics of their production and distribution also differs from non-scripted formats. Stars came together when demand for drama increased worldwide, Hollywood studios began to mine their catalogues, new exporters and scripted genres emerged, and knowledge transfer techniques improved. Finally, this paper analyses the significance of the rise of scripted entertainment in the global TV format trading system