Global Diffusion of the Internet V - The Changing Dynamic of the Internet: Early and Late Adopters of the IPv6 Standard

The introduction of a new network level protocol called Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) represents a significant step forward in the development of the Internet. While IPv6 offers a number of advantages over the current standard (IPv4), its adoption has been inconsistent, often varying by geographic and political region. Through an investigation of early and late adopters of IPv6, this paper seeks to understand the factors that influence the time of adoption decision. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, we interviewed Internet thought leaders. Based on previous literature about the characteristics of early and late adopters, and characteristics specific to IPv6 derived from the interviews, we developed a set of initial notions describing the conditions that are likely to encourage early adoption of IPv6. In stage two we tested those conditions through interviews with eight ISPs in six countries. We found that relative advantage, uncertainty and risk, crisis, and power relationships influence an organization\u27s time of adoption while organizational age does not impact the time of adoption. In addition, we found that sponsorship and availability of information indirectly affect time of adoption by mitigating the perceived risk of early adoption

A Process Based Framework for Assessing IT Value

The financial impact of IT involves both tangible and intangible social and technical costs. The problem of measuring “true” costs and benefits of IT investments is a complex problem and has caused researchers to focus on issues such as the productivity paradox, total cost of ownership, and cost taxonomies. This task becomes even more complicated when considering technologies that impact a variety of processes across the value chain. Therefore, a comprehensive approach designed for taking into account multiple aspects of IT value is desirable. In this paper we propose a model of IT cost that integrates socio-technical and process perspectives. Our model helps reveal which investments have the most return, and where that return is realized

Deploying APIs in the Cloud: A Novel Approach to the MIS Infrastructure Course

Among the most in-demand technology jobs for 2020 include cloud architect and software developer. The typical IT infrastructure position will require programming knowledge, while the typical developer will require infrastructure knowledge. The creation and deployment of APIs is an ideal vehicle to teach both programming and cloud infrastructure in an integrated way. This paper describes the design and structure of a new undergraduate cloud infrastructure course that takes this integrated approach

Comparing the Understandability of Alternative Data Warehouse Schemas: An Empirical Study

An easily understood data warehouse model enables users to better identify and retrieve its data. It also makes it easier for users to suggest changes to its structure and content. Through an exploratory, empirical study, we compared the understandability of the star and traditional relational schemas. The results of our experiment contradict previous findings and show schema type did not lead to significant performance differences for a content identification task. Further, the relational schema actually led to slightly better results for a schema augmentation task. We discuss the implications of these findings for data warehouse design and future research

What’s “Funny” about Technology Adoption? Humorous Appropriation of Online Review Platforms

The open nature of online review platforms allows for use of the technology in unexpected ways, attracting some visitors with an objective other than aiding other consumers’ purchase decision. These consumers are exhibiting a particular form of adoption called technology appropriation by writing humorous reviews that often make fun of the products or telling absurd stories. This study conceptualizes humorous appropriation of an online review platform through a content analysis of 33,987 reviews for 14 products on Amazon.com. We find reviews written for products where the review platform has been appropriated for humor differ from “regular” reviews across three dimensions: narrativity, emotionality, and impropriety. These humorous reviews tend to be more narrative, more negative, and contain more words about inappropriate or sensitive subjects. Our model of humorous appropriation extends the technology appropriation literature and has implications for how online retailers and sellers manage this emerging form of digital performance

Designing Systems that Support the Blogosphere for Deliberative Discourse

Web 2.0 has great potential to serve as a public sphere (Habermas, 1974; Habermas, 1989) – a distributed arena of voices where all who want to do so can participate. A well-functioning public sphere is important for pluralistic decision-making at many levels, ranging from small organizations to society at large. In this paper, we analyze the capability of the blogosphere in its current form to support such a role. This analysis leads to the identification of the principal issues that prevent the blogosphere from realizing its full potential as a public sphere. Most significantly, we propose that the sheer volume of content overwhelms blog readers, forcing them to restrict themselves to only a small subset of valuable content. This ultimately reduces their level of informedness. Based on past research on managing discourse, we propose four design artifacts that would alleviate these issues: a communal repository, textual clustering, visual cues, and a participation facility for blog users. We present a prototype system, called FeedWiz, which implements several of these design artifacts. Based on this initial design, we formulate a research agenda for the creation of new tools that effectively harness the potential of the growing body of user-generated content in the blogosphere and beyond

Mitigating Selective Filtering’s Polarizing Effect on Web 2.0 Content

For almost two decades, the Internet and related technologies have made more information available to information usersthan they can handle. The decentralization of content creation that is a feature of Web 2.0 has only exacerbated this problem.This state of overload, combined with our tendency toward hypothesis-confirming behavior, can result in biased informationselection, and threatens both civil discourse and effective decision-making. In this paper, we describe a study of a techniquedesigned to mitigate filtering by enabling content consumers to see a greater diversity of information. The results of ourexperiment support the notion that the strength of people’s opinions can be changed by reading relevant information, butprovide only weak support for the effectiveness of categorizing information content. We discuss how the results will guideour future research and inform theory and practice

Effectiveness of Shallow Hierarchies for Document Stores

Employees spend as much as 4.4 hours every week searching for documents that they never find. Despite this cost, most managers continue to believe that there is no viable alternative to keyword search. In this paper we present the results of an experiment which uses the eight level hierarchy of ABI/Inform to test how many levels are necessary to retrieve one specific paper. Our findings demonstrate empirically that a browsable subject hierarchy of just four levels provides almost as accurate a search result at deeper layers. Therefore the cost of implementing and maintaining a browsable hierarchy is not nearly as high as is frequently estimated. This has significant implications for both researchers and practitioners