CFC (Comment-First-Coding) - A Simple yet Effective Method for Teaching Programming to Information Systems Students

Programming courses have always been a difficult part of an Information Systems curriculum. While we do not train Information Systems students to be developers, understanding how to build a system always gives students an added perspective to improve their system design and analysis skills. This teaching tip presents CFC (Comment-First-Coding) – a method for assisting students with information systems design and development tasks where a significant portion of the goal is to actually build the system using a programming language and development environment. CFC uses a scaffolding strategy for building programs where the using the comment construct of the programming language. In CFC, the first step students perform is to describe the programming task via plain English (or any other natural language) inside comments. The CFC process strategically and incrementally builds on this method to gradually add functionality and complexity to the program, while allowing the student to compile and test every individual step. In multiple offerings of a sophomore level data structures course, this method has provided evidence of improved student performance

Provenance in Software Engineering - A Configuration Management View

Information provenance is a mechanism for tracing and verifying sources of information. In software development, provenance can be seen in two dimensions: (a) traceability among different versions of the same artifact and (b) traceability among various artifacts across system lifecycle. Maintaining the provenance, including the history of changes and the rationale of changes, are critical in assessing change requests, identifying of appropriate products/builds, and ensuring configuration integrity. Although some Configuration Management (CM) tools support a form of provenance by keeping logs of changes, such logs are proprietary and cannot be migrated to other systems if needed. In this research, we demonstrate how provenance can be achieved in configuration management by binding an artifact to its traceability and evolution information and storing such information in XML-based metadata, so that the information can be moved along with the artifact from one CM tool to another

AMCIS 2007 Panel Summary: The Promise of RFID Technologies

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) has started to revolutionize the way today\u27s organizations do business. Since its highly publicized adoption by Wal-Mart, several companies have started using RFID in their supply chains with varying results. On the academic level, many new research streams have been launched concerning the applications of RFID in business. However, whether or not the academic community is ready to adopt this technology itself remains a question. To consider the future of this technology in research and industry alike, the authors organized two panels on the topic of the promise of RFID technologies at the 2007 Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS) held in Keystone, Colorado. They also demonstrated the capability of the technology using a proof-of-concept pilot system as a means for providing added services to conference attendees. This article reports on the two panels, as well as on the results from the pilot experiment

Improving Accessibility of Educational Content - An Exploratory Data Analysis

A recent increase in settlements resulting from violations of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has resulted in institutions developing processes for improving course material accessibility. We analyze data from about 1670 sections of courses offered at a US school of business, spanning over 9 semesters that include numerical accessibility scores for various components of the course material. We combine this data with student performance and faculty evaluation data from the same period. In our analysis we observed improvement in overall accessibility scores, yet noticed statistically significant reduction in student performance as well as instructor evaluations. We document that one possible explanation for this result can be linked to the drastic reduction of course materials. We conclude that instead of relying only on a measure of accessibility, faculty should be involved in a multi-faceted process that includes communication and training to identify and improve issues with accessibility in course content

Role of Pilot Study in Assessing Viability of New Technology Projects: The Case of RFID in Parking Operations

The use of pilot studies to evaluate the economic justification of technology projects is common in practice. The pilot studies play even greater role in the projects affecting customer interactions with the product/service offerings since perception and/or reaction of customers is captured and analyzed through such studies. Yet, many times the methodology used in these studies lacks rigor and comprehensiveness, and there are scopes for further improvement. The current literature provides limited information on how the pilot studies should be used to decide whether to go ahead with a proposed technology project or not. In this paper we present guidelines for effectively using pilot studies in making such decisions. With the help of a real-life pilot study on deployment of RFID technology in parking operations at a university, we discuss how the proposed guidelines may be implemented to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of the proposed project. In recent times RFID technology is getting increasing attention and many organizations are in the process of deploying this technology. The paper offers a timely and cost-effective evaluation study of a particular application of RFID technology. We found that users’ benefits and costs played a crucial role in determining whether the proposed project should go forward or not. Also, we found that intangible benefits and costs to be important. These findings along with our discussions on the general methodology will provide practical guidelines for evaluating viability of technology projects using pilot studies

Stages in Adoption of RFID Innovations by Organizations: Identifying Facilitaors and Inhibitors

Radio Frequency IDentification (RFID) innovations have gained considerable attention in the last several years and attracted the attention of organizations across different industries. RFID technologies have found applications in diverse areas such as package tracking, inventory management, baggage handling, school attendance, and logistics. Prior literature on RFID innovations offers insights into the major benefits and challenges of RFID; the technological, organizational, and environmental factors that influence organizational adoption of RFID; and the experiences of specific companies. However, there is a lack of understanding of the processes by which organizations actually adopt and implement RFID technologies over time. We develop a stage model of RFID adoption, empirically examine it using multiple case studies, and identify the facilitators and inhibitors of RFID adoption over time