AMCIS 2002 Panels and Workshops IV: Principles of Effective E-Commerce Curriculum Development

The need to teach e-commerce (EC) is a significant issue for academia. Regardless of the downturn in dot.com startups, many organizations are still very much aware of the need for effective EC strategies and applications. In response to industry demand, some universities across the globe have launched EC programs. Others implemented EC electives at undergraduate and postgraduate levels. This paper presents suggestions for teaching EC. Findings from a study of EC offerings by the top fifty UK business schools are presented. A wide disparity exists across schools in terms of EC offerings, including a significant number of schools that do not offer EC modules or degrees. This paper offers and discusses the following recommendations on how to implement an EC curriculum effectively and economically in a business school: 1. EC should be taught throughout the business school curriculum as part of traditional classes followed by EC specialty classes and practicum courses. It is essential that multiple departments invest in offering EC curriculum. 2. Foundation classes should be taught before EC specialty classes. 3. EC survey courses should not be taught early in the curriculum because they are difficulty to staff and maintain. 4. EC classes should be a balance of each discipline\u27s fundamental principles, along with some newer EC theories and applications. 5. Principles taught in Information Systems classes can have broader application when patterns are taught that span many technologies instead of teaching only specific applications. 6. It is important to leverage alumni and industry volunteers to help provide EC lecture series and for input on EC curriculum and teaching

A Method for Building a Referent Business Activity Model for Evaluating Information Systems: Results from a Case Study

In this dynamic age of corporate acquisitions, mergers, and enterprise integration, decisions concerning the evaluation and selection of information systems require comparing the functionality of each candidate system to the intended business activities that it will support. However, consensus on the definition of business activities used to support this evaluation is rare. What is needed is a referent business activity model that defines the business in a manner to serve as the basis for determining how well each candidate system supports the business. This paper 1) defines the referent business activity model concept; 2) provides an example from a case study of business activity modeling; and 3) demonstrates the utility of this model in defining functional requirements for selecting the optimal system from a set of 30 legacy systems to be used throughout the United States Department of Defense (DoD). Twenty-nine DoD business experts were able to construct a referent business activity model consisting of 65 business activities organized in a hierarchical manner. These activities served as the foundation for a questionnaire of 165 questions used to select three information systems out of the over 300 known systems that supported one or more of the 65 business activities. This experience demonstrated the feasibility of achieving consensus among business experts on one referent business model. It also demonstrated the utility of that model in evaluating legacy systems. This case provides a detailed example that business experts can bridge the gulf of ambiguous systems requirements that exists between real-world business activities and the information systems that support them

Participative Analysis of Systems Integration Opportunities

In an effort to increase information sharing while simultaneously decreasing costs, many organizations are moving to integrated data and systems. However, researchers caution thatthe costs and benefits of integration must be carefully evaluated. This paper presents a participative integration analysis methodology for determining not only what can be integrated, but also what should be integrated. Results of the initial case study show that a small group can effectively decide what should be integrated and develop a proposed integration strategy. The results also highlighted that participants intuitively used business scenarios to identify integration opportunities and analyzethe business impacts of integration. Therefore, the participative integration analysis methodology was updated to incorporate scenarios as the central evaluative construct. This methodology will result in recommendations for integrated systems and business processe

Consulting at the Laser ISP (LISP) Company: Using Excel Metrics Capabilities to Solve Semi-Structured Management Problems

Introductory Information System (IS) courses commonly focus too heavily on teaching application features, as opposed to teaching unstructured problem-solving skills. In response to this pedagogical gap, professors at Brigham Young University have developed integrated cases that improve the instruction for their introductory IS course. In this paper, we overview a case that provides a realistic and compelling problem-solving experience for teaching Microsoft Excel measurement capabilities. This case describes the customer service issues and installation problems faced by an Internet service provider, along with pertinent cost and service data. The case requires the student to play the role of a management consultant who is asked to make business recommendations using Excel. To effectively work with this case, students need exposure to Excel lookups, date/time capabilities, and countif / sumif functions, as well as other basic Excel features. To help the instructor implement this case, we have provided teaching notes that overview the history of the case, teaching suggestions, and a highly detailed grading and discussion template

Toward Building Self-Sustaining Groups in PCR-based Tasks through Implicit Coordination: The Case of Heuristic Evaluation

Usability flaws found in the later stages of the software development process can be extremely costly to resolve. Accordingly, usability evaluation (UE) is an important, albeit usually expensive, part of development. We report on how the inexpensive UE method of heuristic evaluation (HE) can benefit from collaborative software (CSW), implicit coordination, and principles from collaboration engineering. In our study, 439 novice participants were trained in HE methods and then performed HE. Our results show that traditional nominal HE groups can experience implicit coordination through the collaborative software features of group memory and group awareness. One of the key results is that CSW groups had less duplication of effort than traditional nominal groups; these differences were magnified as group size increased from three to six members. Furthermore, because they coordinated less, traditional nominal groups performed more work in the overall process of HE. We attribute the reduction in duplication for CSW-supported groups to the implicit coordination available to them; CSW-supported groups could see violations input by other group members, but could not directly discuss the violations. These findings not only show the power of implicit coordination in groups, but should dramatically change how HE is conducted. These results may also extend to other evaluation tasks, such as software inspection and usability assessment tasks

The Effects of Team Flow on Performance: A Video Game Experiment

Research on effective team work has traditionally explained team performance as a result of team cohesion and goal commitment. Team cohesion was originally defined as the general level of attraction the team members had to all others in their group. This social relations-based concept of team cohesion is generally a strong indicator of team performance. However, more recent research has stressed the importance of incorporating the team members’ mutual level of commitment to the team task as another sub-dimension of cohesion. When including task commitment, team cohesion is a somewhat weaker predictor of team performance (Beal et al., 2003). To better conceptualize the role of the task engagement and to explain team performance, we incorporate a variable more relevant to the characteristics of a team task: team flow. The concept of “flow” has been well researched and theorized at the individual level. However, in an experiment based on collaborative video gaming, we demonstrate that not only can flow be extended to the team level to better explain performance, but that teams can quickly generate a psychological flow state from low cost treatments like collaborative video gaming which can also be effectively transferred into subsequent work tasks

Team Video Gaming for Team Building: Effects on Team Performance

Teams rapidly form and dissolve in organizations to solve specific problems that require diverse skills and experience. For example, in the information systems context, cross-functional and project-based teams that comprise a mix of personnel who temporarily work away from their usual functional groups (best perform agile software development (Barlow et al., 2011; Keith, Demirkan, & Goul, 2013). These newly formed work teams need to become productive as quickly as possible. Team video gaming (TVG) has emerged as a potential team-building activity. When new teammates play a collaborative video game, they engage in cooperative and challenging goals while they enjoy the games. Although research has shown that video games can promote learning and recreation, it has not investigated the effects of commercial video games on subsequent work-team performance. Better understanding this issue will provide insights into how to rapidly develop cohesion among newly formed work teams and, thus, lead to greater team performance. We examined this issue through a laboratory experiment. We found that teams in the TVG treatment demonstrated a 20 percent productivity improvement in subsequent tasks (in our case, a team-based geocaching scavenger hunt) over teams that participated in traditional team-building activities

Flood Damage Mitigation in Utah

Utah is subjected to flash flooding in mountain canyons, mudflows and shallow water flooding on lowlands at the canyon outlets, storm water flooding after thunderstorms in urban areas, and prolonged periods of inundation in certain lowland areas during snowmelt periods. In response to these problems, individuals are making private land use and flood proofing decisions, larger communities have storm water collection programs, three federal agencies are involved in structural flood control, and the Federal Emergency management Agency is managing a National Flood Insurance Program designed to promote community floodplain management efforts. A framework was deceloped of the dynamically interactive feedback process through whic people at various levels and from various prospectives seek the benefits of flood plain occupancy, experience floods, and respond by changin their occupancy or the flows. That framework than became the background for identifying what state government should do in Utah to correct unsatisfactory aspects o the existing flood hazard and counter measures. The data used in the analysis included magnitudes of major historical snowfall and precipitation events, estimates of 100-year flows for all 105 gaged locations with more than 20 years of record, envelope curves of 100-year flow versus drainage area for Utah basins, descriptions of the major historical floods (by order according to amount of damage 1. Salt Lake City canyons 1952 $6,74,000; 2. Ogden 1979$1,000,000; 3. Virgin River 1966 $962,000; 4. Sheep Creek (Daggett County) 1965$802,000), descriptions of the sturctural flood control projects built or being planned in Utah by the Corps of Engineers, Soil Conservation Service, and Water and Power Resources Service, data with respect to participation in the national flood insurance program of Utah\u27s 251 communitities, a survey of the flood hazard in 32 of those communitites randomly selected from a stratified sample, and a detailed evaluation of the situations in 7 of them. The study found that the flood hazard in Utah is much more concentrated in smalled basins than is so for other parts of the country and that the major problem lies at the base of the mountains where major damages are regularly being caused by flows at mountin hollows too small for hazard areas to have been mapped through the National Flood Insurance Program. Better methodology needs to be developed and applied for delinating hazard areas from mudflows and shallow water flooding on alluvial fans and other lowlands at the mountain base. Attention needs to be given to the effects of irrigation canals and bridges on the risk. Designs need to be developed that work with nature in dispersing the flood water and recharging much of it to underground aquifers instead rather than against nature in concentrating the flows in a downstream direction. State actions recommended include 1) providing a continuing forum for interaction among federal agencies and local communities, 2) providing technical support for local communitites including review of proposed designs for safety, 3) developing structural and flood proofing designs that will be effective in Utah conditions, and 4) interacting with federal agencies on behalf of the local communities