Health IT Legislation in the United States: Guidelines for IS Researchers

In this tutorial, I review the most pressing legal issues that health information systems (IS) professionals face and how health information technology (IT) legislation drive them. The issues I discuss include the confidentiality and security of electronic protected health information, meaningful use of health IT, health information exchanges, and information governance. I also provide directions for future research

Access Anytime Anyplace: An Empircal Investigation of Patterns of Technology Use in Nomadic Computing Environments

With the increasing pervasiveness of mobile technologies such as cellular phones, personal digital assistants and hand held computers, mobile technologies promise the next major technological and cultural shift. Like the Internet, it is predicted that the greatest impact will not come from hardware devices or software programs, but from emerging social practices, which were not possible before. To capitalize on the benefits of mobile technologies, organizations have begun to implement nomadic computing environments. Nomadic computing environments make available the systems support needed to provide computing and communication capabilities and services to the mobile work force as they move from place to place in a manner that is transparent, integrated, convenient and adaptive. Already, anecdotes suggest that within organizations there are social implications occurring with both unintended and intended consequences being perpetuated. The problems of nomadic computing users have widely been described in terms of the challenges presented by the interplay of time, space and context, yet a theory has yet to be developed which analyzes this interplay in a single effort. A temporal human agency perspective proposes that stakeholders’ actions are influenced by their ability to recall the past, respond to the present and imagine the future. By extending the temporal human agency perspective through the recognition of the combined influence of space and context on human action, I investigated how the individual practices of eleven nomadic computing users changed after implementation. Under the umbrella of the interpretive paradigm, and using a cross case methodology this research develops a theoretical account of how several stakeholders engaged with different nomadic computing environments and explores the context of their effectiveness. Applying a literal and theoretical replication strategy to multiple longitudinal and retrospective cases, six months were spent in the field interviewing and observing participants. Data analysis included three types of coding: descriptive, interpretive and pattern coding. The findings reveal that patterns of technology use in nomadic computing environments are influenced by stakeholders’ temporal orientations; their ability to remember the past, imagine the future and respond to the present. As stakeholders all have different temporal orientations and experiences, they exhibit different practices even when engaging initially with the same organizational and technical environments. Opposing forces emerge as users attempt to be effective by resolving the benefits and disadvantages of the environment as they undergo different temporal, contextual and spatial experiences. Insights about the ability to predict future use suggest that because they are difficult to envisage in advance, social processes inhibit the predictability of what technologies users will adopt. The framework presented highlights the need to focus on understanding the diversity in nomadic computing use practices by examining how they are influenced by individual circumstances as well as shared meanings across individuals

Herding Behavior in Social Media Networks in China

We conducted an interpretive, qualitative research study to investigate herding behavior around trending posts about disasters on Sina Weibo, one of the most popular social media websites in China. Our preliminary results show that in response to uncertain situations, users engage in sensemaking (Seidel, 2013) and become emotionally engaged (Taylor, 2015) as they converge around trending posts about disasters. Also, state, effect and response uncertainty (Milliken, 1987) may influence how users converge around these posts. Future research will examine the cross-cultural differences of herding behavior across Twitter (U.S.A) and Sina Weibo (China), as well as the differences across financial, scandalous, product based, and political trending posts

Wireless Diffusion and Mobile Computing: Implications for the Digital Divide

Gaps in the rates of digital inclusion continue to plague certain socio-economic segments of the American economy. For these groups, the migration path towards mobile computing and digital inclusion may transpire from 2G voice centric mobile telephone to the data centric smartphone or wireless PDA. This study investigates what socio-economic factors are determinative to the diffusion of mobile telecommunications; how these findings can be extended to mobile computing; and how these findings can inform managerial and policy making decisions concerning the digital divide. Using survey data from 1994 and 1998 and a probit model of mobile phone adoption, we estimate the rate of diffusion and bounds for the long run market shares for specific socio-economic market segments in the United States. In contrast to traditional Internet access, neither education nor age are positive predictors of mobile phone adoption. In addition, Afro-Americans have adopted mobile phones at rates significantly higher than the population. These findings have considerable implications for the diffusion of mobile computing devices and the gaps in digital inclusion that may be overcome through the migration of Internet access to alternative devices

A Utility Theory Model for Individual Adoption of Bitcoin

In recent years, the growth of cryptocurrency prices, notably that of Bitcoin has garnered mainstream news coverage. However, very little is known about the factors that motivate an individual to adopt Bitcoin, though studies abound in the blockchain technology adoption and its use in various domains such as healthcare, supply chain, and finance. In the current paper, we argue that the existing, widely-used IT adoption models may not thoroughly explain the reasons (i.e., benefits, barriers, and specific factors) associated with the adoption of cryptocurrencies. We propose a research model based on UTAUT and utility theory to discover the perceived benefits, perceived risks, facilitating conditions, and social effects in the individual adoption of Bitcoin

Solutions to Increase Mobile Merchant Payment Application Value, Customers’ Continued Intention to Use, and Loyalty

Unlike consumers in developing countries, it has been challenging to show how mobile payments are a more valuable payment mechanism than cash and credit cards to American consumers. Little is known about what factors will make consumers in the U.S. choose mobile payments over other payment mechanisms and competing mobile payment providers. The purpose of the current study is to develop a multi-dimensional scale for the perceived value of a mobile merchant payment application. We explain the concept and scale of usefulness by applying it to the mobile payment retail environment. By doing so, we gain insight as to which factors should make a mobile payment app valuable and competitive. We adopt a multi-method approach to achieve our research objective. First, by conducting a qualitative analysis of feedback on the mobile order and payment application on the Starbucks Idea site (mystarbucksidea.com) and systematically reviewing and coding users’ comments, we identified three key constructs associated with customers’ continued intention to use the mobile application and their loyalty of use. Namely, application utility, vendor reputation, and quality of context-based services. Based on the results that emerged from the qualitative analysis, we followed the 10-step procedure recommended by MacKenzie et al. (2011) to develop and validate conceptualization and measures for these three higher-order constructs. Next, we emailed the survey to 500 randomly chosen students enrolled in the MBA and BBA programs at a large university in the southeastern U.S. and received 450 valid responses. We used structural equation modeling (SEM) to test our conceptual model. The result indicates that our model has adequate construct validity and reliability. Further, the path analysis result significantly supports all proposed hypotheses. For instance, the vendor reputation significantly influences user perception of the quality of context-based services. Offering context-based services significantly influences the perceived level of mobile application utility. Perceived utility not only increases customers’ continued intention to use the app but also it enhances customer loyalty of use. Our study makes several contributions to the extant literature. First, we develop and validate a conceptual model that can adequately explain why a user would be attracted to a mobile application and why the user would continue to stay with the brand. Second, by employing both qualitative and quantitative methods, we improve the validity of research findings. Third, we develop a multi-scale measuring instrument for the identified constructs that are unique to the current context (i.e., mobile payment retail environment). Finally, we expand the privacy calculus theory to the domain of mobile application

A Value-sensitive Design Perspective of Cryptocurrencies: A Research Agenda

Cryptocurrencies and their underlying blockchain technology have begun to transform numerous industries. Although we have seen an uptrend in the types of created cryptocurrencies, it has not yet translated into mainstream adoption., In this paper, we use value-sensitive design principles to identify values among current and potential cryptocurrency adopters. Using Bitcoin as the context for this qualitative research study, we use grounded theory analytical techniques to discover manifested values among users and non-users. We develop a cryptocurrency value-sensitive design framework to summarize our results. As our main contribution, we offer a research agenda based on the cryptocurrency stakeholders’ underlying value system. This agenda can help information systems scholars apply this value-sensitive design perspective to their own cryptocurrency research

Solutions to Increase Mobile Merchant Payment Applications Value, Customers’ Continued Intention to Use, and Loyalty

The use of mobile payment applications is on the rise. There are a variety of mobile payment applications that attempt to offer value to increase the market share of merchants that provide them. However, many users are likely to stop using apps if optimal utility and customized services are not correctly delivered. This study proposes that offering context-based services that indicate customization and personalization of services will improve the perceived utility of mobile merchant payment applications and in turn, increase continued intention to use it and customer loyalty to the merchant. Our results also show that the reputation of mobile vendors significantly enhances the perceived utility of mobile merchant payment applications. The findings of this study can be valuable to researcher, merchants and mobile application developers

Measuring Researcher-Production in Information Systems

While many studies have assessed IS researcher-production, most have focused on either ranking IS journals or assessing prolific researchers using a restricted time frame and a small inbasketld of journals (i.e., those journals selected for sampling). We found no research that has assessed the IS specificity of journals (i.e., the suitability of journals for publishing IS research) nor any that evaluated IS researcher-production measures. Based on a coding of over 26,000 articles and more than 1,900 authors, this study attempts such an evaluation by (1) determining the rate of publication of IS researchers in 58 journals perceived by at least one IS institution as IS specific, (2) profiling prolific and typical IS researchers using descriptive statistics, (3) evaluating the convergent validity of various researcher-production measures, (4) assessing the reliability of these researcher-production measures by varying baskets of Measuring Researcher-Production in Information Systems by C. Chua, L. Cao, K. Cousins, and D. W. Straub journals and time periods, and (5) comparing the sensitivity of measures across prolific and typical researchers. The study demonstrates that many journals perceived to be of high quality by IS researchers are not specifically targeted to information systems. Changing the evaluation procedure has a significant impact on measures of typical and prolific IS researchers. For typical IS researchers, measures of production are strongly convergent and are not sensitive to changes in journal baskets. However, for prolific researchers, measures of production are not convergent and highly sensitive to changes in journal baskets. The evaluation of both prolific and typical IS researchers is also highly sensitive to temporal effects. The differences in convergent validity and reliability demonstrate that prolific researchers are more sensitive to minor variations in the assessment procedure. Based on the empirical findings, the study closes with recommendations both for the evaluation of researcher-production and for developing institutional target journal lists, i.e., lists of journals viewed favorably by an institution