“This is the way ‘I’ create my passwords ...":does the endowment effect deter people from changing the way they create their passwords?

The endowment effect is the term used to describe a phenomenon that manifests as a reluctance to relinquish owned artifacts, even when a viable or better substitute is offered. It has been confirmed by multiple studies when it comes to ownership of physical artifacts. If computer users also "own", and are attached to, their personal security routines, such feelings could conceivably activate the same endowment effect. This would, in turn, lead to their over-estimating the \value" of their existing routines, in terms of the protection they afford, and the risks they mitigate. They might well, as a consequence, not countenance any efforts to persuade them to adopt a more secure routine, because their comparison of pre-existing and proposed new routine is skewed by the activation of the endowment effect.In this paper, we report on an investigation into the possibility that the endowment effect activates when people adopt personal password creation routines. We did indeed find evidence that the endowment effect is likely to be triggered in this context. This constitutes one explanation for the failure of many security awareness drives to improve password strength. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research to confirm our findings, and to investigate the activation of the effect for other security routines

A Model for the Study of Knowledge Management Support Systems

Knowledge markets have been proposed as an organizational structure to promote knowledge exchange for increased organizational profitability and survivability. However, the economics and organizational behavior literatures in administered hierarchies suggest that knowledge markets and their component reward systems could suffer from a variety of abuses, inequities, and inefficiencies. These literatures, and the information systems investigations they have spawned, are parlayed into a model for knowledge management research

Ranking Factors by Importance in Factorial Survey Analysis

Factorial survey analysis is a statistical technique with a long history of use in decision-oriented organizational and information systems (IS) research. The technique produces a collection of standardized regression coefficients that help one to rank survey factors by importance. However, such rankings may be invalid because a researcher might not account for two related issues: unequal factor (i.e., dimension) manipulation effect sizes and the inherent multilevel structure of factorial survey data. We address these concomitant issues by demonstrating the ranking problem in simulated datasets, explaining the ranking problem’s underlying statistical causes, and justifying the use of remediating statistical methods. In particular, we focus on coding proportional to effect, a technique in which one consolidates corresponding dimension-level dummy (0, 1) variables into a single re-calibrated independent variable that is regressed on the dependent variable. One then uses the resulting standardized coefficients to rank the factors. We assess the advantages, disadvantages, and limitations of remediation techniques and offer suggestions for future information systems research

Individual Rights to Privacy and Corporate E-mail

E-mail continues to gain popularity as a medium for business communication. Despite considerable attention recently in the popular press, attitudes and behaviors toward e-mail privacy remain adamantly inconsistent with current organizational policies and legal positions (Behar, 1997). In the U.S., employers have the legal right to read messages sent or received by their employees over company equipment. Employees, however, feel that e-mail should be private. An experiment is conducted to further explore user attitudes toward e-mail privacy and conditions under which organizations should be allowed to monitor employee e-mai

Information Systems and Health Care-II: Back to the Future with RFID: Lessons Learned - Some Old, Some New

Healthcare facilities face limited resources and expanding expenses. Emerging information technologies offer a means for healthcare to measure and control their resources and workflow processes, and ultimately improve patient care. The usefulness of one emerging information technology, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), is examined in a proof of application study conducted at a Level-1 trauma unit. Results from the study suggest not only that RFID technology can assist in the measurement and ultimate control of workflow processes, but also that traditional and non-traditional IS practices are necessary for successful RFID implementation. Lessons learned about the idiosyncrasies of RFID implementation and the cleansing and analysis of RFID-generated data are reported

A secure relationship with passwords means not being attached to how you pick them

When you are asked to create a password – either for a new online account or resetting login information for an existing account – you're likely to choose a password you know you can remember. Many people use extremely basic passwords, or a more obscure one they reuse across many sites. Our research has found that others – even ones who use different passwords for each site – have a method of devising them, for instance basing them all on a familiar phrase and making site-specific tweaks

Assessing Information Technology Use over Time with Growth Modeling and Hierarchical Linear Modeling: A Tutorial

Time is an important factor in the use of information technology. However, traditional information systems research methods cannot adequately account for the dynamic nature of time-based relationships often found in longitudinal data. This shortcoming is problematic when investigating volatile relationships that evolve over time (e.g., information technology use across users, departments, and organizations). Educational, sociological, and management researchers study the influence of time using a rigorous multilevel method called growth modeling. We demonstrate the use of growth modeling in this tutorial, which is based on a semester-long study of an actual web-based university-level course content delivery system. The tutorial provides guidance on preliminary data tests, the construction and analysis of growth models using hierarchical linear modeling, and the interpretation of final results. The tutorial also describes other unique advantages of using growth modeling for IS research

Sensemaking and Success in the Transition from Community Colleges to University IS/CS/CE Programs

Increasing the enrollment of women, minority, and other underrepresented populations in undergraduate information systems and computing programs is an important social issue. We explore ways of attracting and retaining community college transfer students—an important source of underrepresented students —by examining their sensemaking efforts as they transition to four-year universities. We conducted a qualitative study to test sensemaking theory and develop recommendations for retaining community college transfer students in undergraduate information systems, computer science, and computer engineering programs