Case Study: Content and Connections in the Information Systems Curriculum

Maintaining and growing interest in information systems (IS) courses and enrollment in the IS major continues to be a significant concern for university information systems departments. Research in this area understandably focuses on the content of the IS curriculum: the courses to be included, the topics to be taught in those courses, and specific teaching techniques and examples to be employed in the classroom. We argue that alongside these considerations of content, it is critical to examine the connections between these curricular elements and the interests and activities of key stakeholders in the university community including, for example, faculty and their research interests, alumni, employers, and students and their cocurricular interests. We briefly point to existing examples of this focus on connections in existing research and then describe how this focus on connections is put into practice in our university’s information systems curriculum

Desperately Seeking IS Curriculum Relevance: Teaching Information Systems in a Cross-Functional Context

The information systems academic community has been searching for an effective response to the steep decline in enrollment in IS programs. Researchers have identified the design of the introductory IS course as a critical opportunity for increasing student interest in the IS field. In this paper we describe our experience redesigning an introductory IS course in the context of a semester long cross-functional product development project for college juniors. By including practitioners in the design process, we identified four areas to be addressed to increase the career relevance of the course and used this agenda to develop new content which tied the IS course more closely to the semester project, especially in the area of online marketing

Cowboys or Commanders: Does Information Technology Lead to Decentralization?

The model distinguishes between two kinds of decentralization: connected and unconnected. Our model predicts that unconnected (i.e., independent) decentralized decision makers should be common when communication costs are high. Then, as communication costs fall, centralized decision makers should become more desirable. Finally, as communication costs fall still further, connected decentralized decision makers should become desirable in many situations

Useful Descriptions of Organizational Processes: Collecting Data for the Process Handbook

This paper describes a data collection methodology for business process analysis. Unlike static objects, business processes are semi-repetitive sequences of events that are often widely distributed in time and space, with ambiguous boundaries. To redesign or even just describe a business process requires an approach that is sensitive to these aspects of the phenomena. The method described here is intended to generate semi-formal process representations suitable for inclusion in a "handbook" of organizational processes. Using basic techniques of ethnographic interviewing and observation, the method helps users map decomposition, specialization, and dependency relationships at an intermediate level of abstraction meaningful to participants. By connecting new process descriptions to an existing taxonomy of similar descriptions in the Handbook, this method helps build a common vocabulary for process description and analysis.

Web Services: Enabling Dynamic Business Networks

A Dynamic Business Network is a distinct system of participants (customers, suppliers, complimentors, competitors, service providers) that use the network to achieve customer satisfaction and profitability and where participants and relationships evolve over time. However, unpredictability and rapid change in a Dynamic Business Network creates a significant challenge in implementing and supporting business application software. Traditional information systems implementation methods require an a priori design and are built for a particular purpose for use over an extended period of time. Loosely coupled business networks change interrelationships between nodes both quickly and frequently, thus providing little or no notice for planning, implementing, or changing the supporting applications. The dynamic sourcing capabilities of the emerging Web Services framework provide a key to enabling these complex eco-systems. We explore the strategic and technological dimensions of Web Services and describe how they can be used to support dynamic business networks

Bringing Context Inside Process Research with Digital Trace Data

Context is usually conceptualized as “external” to a theory or model and treated as something to be controlled or eliminated in empirical research. We depart from this tradition and conceptualize context as permeating processual phenomena. This move is possible because digital trace data are now increasingly available, providing rich and fine-grained data about processes mediated or enabled by digital technologies. This paper introduces a novel method for including fine-grained contextual information from digital trace data within the description of process (e.g., who, what, when, where, why). Adding contextual information can result in a very large number of fine-grained categories of events, which are usually considered undesirable. However, we argue that a large number of categories can make process data more informative for theorizing and that including contextual detail enriches the understanding of processes as they unfold. We demonstrate this by analyzing audit trail data of electronic medical records using ThreadNet, an open source software application developed for the qualitative visualization and analysis of process data. The distinctive contribution of our approach is the novel way in which we contextualize events and action in process data. Providing new, usable ways to incorporate context can help researchers ask new questions about the dynamics of processual phenomena

Digital Cement: Software Portfolio Architecture, Complexity, and Flexibility

This paper is about the relationship between an organization’s software portfolio architecture and its ability to make changesto it. Responding to business and technology changes often involves modifying the software portfolio and the speed and costof making changes to the software portfolio is a measure of the system’s flexibility. The specific research question is: “Howdoes software portfolio architecture affect software portfolio flexibility?”This research develops measures of architectural and component complexity and hypothesizes that these constructs affect onedimension of software portfolio flexibility: architectural flexibility. The hypotheses are tested by (1) collecting componentand dependency data from a biopharmaceutical company’s software portfolio, (2) combining this data with survey, systeminstrumentation, and archive data, and then (3) estimating and interpreting multiple regression models. The generalconclusions from the research are that both complexity at the component level and complexity at the architectural level affectsoftware portfolio flexibility

Applying specialization to process models

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