Making Academic IS Research More Relevant to Industry Via Open-Architecture Models for Career Paths in Academia

Until the debate regarding relevance of IS research to practice is resolved, it is instructive to learn from more established disciplines where previous practical experience is accounted for and valued. In teaching hospitals, academia and practice are interrelated and co-exist. Retired high-ranked military officers, are sought for top positions, in business, politics, and academia. Promotion and tenure committees for academic IS departments, wishing to encourage interaction with IS practice, ought not only to recognize practical experience and publications in trade magazines, but also to design open-architecture career paths for smooth transition of IS personnel between industry and academia

Is eCommerce of IT Application Services (ASP) Alive and Well?

Given the great importance of outsourcing to the Information Technology (IT) profession, this paper is devoted to E-Commerce of IT application services between Application Service Providers (ASPs) and customer organizations. Instead of dealing with the more general “Is E-Commerce Dead?” question, we address the question of whether “E-Commerce for IT application services is (and will be) alive and well?” Reviewing the history of the ASP industry, shedding light on the factors inhibiting and driving ASPs, and discussing prospective customer profiles and business models leads to the conclusion that, much like E-Commerce, ASPs are alive but not very well yet

Influencing Physician Drug Prescription Habits Towards Cost Containment

In Israel, diffusion of clinical information systems is almost universal in ambulatory medical services. The drug prescription module embedded in a widely-used electronic patient record system has the capacity to intervene and notify physicians about available generic or therapeutic substitute drugs, when their first choice is outside the insurer\u27s preferred drug list. The objective of this paper is to study how such intervention influences drug prescription habits of physicians and helps contain costs. To this end we monitored system use for 40 weeks, recording physicians’ willingness to change their choice to a substitute following system notification. Findings show higher physician compliance with generic substitutes than with therapeutic substitutes, based on a cognitive decision process upon notification, and increase in compliance over time, until stabilization. The resulting direct financial savings on expenditure for drugs, estimated to be 4.7% for chronic drugs, entail long-term savings

Email as a Facilitator of Power Plays:Analysis of Political Events at a University

Interest in the diffusion process of email has been growing steadily. Whereas, initially, successful email implementations had been attributed to technological aspects (Pliskin, 1989; Pliskin, et al., 1989), more recently nontechnological explanations have received considerable attention (Pliskin and Romm, 1990). Lynne Markus, in a recent paper on email use (1994), contrasts individuallevel explanations with collectivelevel explanations and noting that the former considerations are not enough to explain why senior managers choose email for some of their communication tasks. The main argument behind the latter school of thought is that the diffusion of any technology is a social matter which depends on whether the technology is perceived as socially appropriate by the community of potential users. Thus, the decision of individuals to adopt email will therefore depend on whether this technology is seen as capable of serving their unique social needs within their community(Culnan and Markus, 1987). It will also depend on the type of usages that email lends itself to and the degree to which these usages are tolerated within the community. For example, it has been demonstrated by Romm and Pliskin (1994) that the successful diffusion of email can be greatly affected by users\u27 realising its tremendous potential for political usage. The thrust of much of this early research has been to view e-mail as a dependent variable, i.e., to concentrate on what causes email to be successfully implemented in organisations, and to look for explanations for why it is accepted and how its diffusion is affected by other organisational processes (e.g., Rafaeli and LaRose, 1993). It is only in recent years that email has begun to be researched asan independent variable that causes or affects other organisational processes (Kling, 1995). Sproull and Kiesler, for instance, argue that email has a democratising effect on organisations because it enables people who are at the periphery of organisations to become more visible, and facilitates communication between people at the bottom of the organisational hierarchy and those at the top. Similarly, Finholt and Sproull (1990) demonstrate how email can facilitate group decision making and bring about group unity and cohesion. Rice\u27s series of investigations (Rice, 1987; Rice, 1992; Rice, 1993) deal with the effect of networks on group behaviour in the workplace, with particular emphasis on how membership in networks affects members\u27 attitudes about the newtechnology, and promote group innovation. The purpose of this research is to add to the understanding of the role of email in organizational power and politics. We build on a case study that took place at a university and explore the WAYS in which BOTH management and employees used email to further their unique political goals and conclude with a discussion of the implications from this case to email research and practice. Data for this study were collected by the authors at a University which is referredto as UIM, reflecting its InterMediate size in terms of the number of students (about 15,000), academics (about 500), and administrative staff (about 200). Textual analysis, interviews, and observations were employed in the study. These were comprehensiveand mutually supportive. The actual names of organizations and people have been withheld to protect their anonymity

TEXT MINING AND TEMPORAL TREND DETECTION ON THE INTERNET FOR TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT: MODEL AND TOOL

In today´s world, organizations conduct technology assessment (TAS) prior to decision making about investments in existing, emerging, and hot technologies to avoid costly mistakes and survive in the hyper-competitive business environment. Relying on web search engines in looking for relevant information for TAS processes, decision makers face abundant unstructured information that limit their ability to assess technologies within a reasonable time frame. Thus the following qustion arises: how to extract valuable TAS knowledge from a diverse corpus of textual data on the web? To cope with this qustion, this paper presents a web-based model and tool for knowledge mapping. The proposed knowledge maps are constructed on the basis of a novel method of co-word analysis, based on webometric web counts and a temporal trend detection algorithm which employs the vector space model (VSM). The approach is demonstrated and validated for a spectrum of information technologies. Results show that the research model assessments are highly correlated with subjective expert (n=136) assessment (r \u3e 0.91), and with predictive validity valu above 85%. Thus, it seems safe to assume that this work can probably be generalized to other domains. The model contribution is emphasized by the current growing attention to the big-data phenomenon

OVER-REQUIREMENT IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT: AN EMPIRICAL INVESTIGATION OF THE \u27IKEA\u27 EFFECT

One of the major risks in software development projects is the phenomenon of Over-Requirement, also known as over-specification and gold-plating, where a product or a service is specified beyond the actual requirements of the customer or the market. We argue that Over-Requirement is partially due to the emotional involvement of developers with specified features, an involvement associated with the IKEA or the I-designed-it-myself effect, which implies that people come to overvalue their creations when successfully designed or constructed by them. To investigate this argument, we conducted an experiment in the context of software development in which over 200 undergraduate students participated. The experiment required participants to complete a specification task and measured the change in perceived valuation of a specified nice-to-have feature, by measuring it before and after its specification was completed. The experiment results confirmed the existence of the IKEA effect and its influence on Over-Requirement. The results also imply that the IKEA effect in software development is multifaceted where the level of specification difficulty, whether objective difficulty (in terms of constrained specification duration or unconstrained specification freedom) or subjective difficulty (as reported by participants), affects the magnitude of the IKEA effect

Lessons from Implementation of a Web Site for the Israeli Citizen\u27s Advice Bureau

Web-based services for the public raise some questions regarding the interaction between technology and social contexts in the public sector: Can the internet be harnessed to affect the flow of information from bureaucracy to the citizenry, making it two way rather than one? Are internet services just for yuppies? Will such services be just in English? Should public services on the internet expect to change linguistically, organizationally, conceptually, in response to the audiences they expect to serve? This paper, in an attempt to address such questions, presents a case study, about the web site of The Israeli Citizen Advice Bureau, a government agency that provides the public with information about rights, social benefits, government services, and civil obligations

The Planning Fallacy as an Explanation for Over-Requirement in Software Development

Over-Requirement occurs in software development projects when a software product is specified beyond the actual needs. This study shows empirically that Over-Requirement happens partially due to the Planning Fallacy, i.e., the tendency of people to underestimate the time needed to complete a task. Underestimating the time needed to develop a software feature during project planning, we argue, may lead to including within the project scope more required and unrequired features than can be completed by the project deadline. To investigate this argument, we conducted an experiment in which participants were asked to estimate the time it would take to develop various software features in a software development project and then, given the project\u27s duration, to recommend which of the features to include within scope. The results confirmed that the Planning Fallacy occurs in the context of software development and influences the Over-Requirement phenomenon