ICIS 2011 Proceedings

Innovating Communication Skills into MIS Curriculum: Parallel Processing

Jim Wetherbe

The AACSB did a survey of the most successful graduates of top MBA programs asking them to reflect upon their careers and determine the most important skill leading to their success. The answer? Communication skills. Yet what is the single biggest complaint about IT professionals? People skills. But how can we make time in a demanding MIS curriculum to address this critical learning need? In this thought provoking session a teaching method is provided that allows professors to integrate communication skills into MIS learning, make class more entertaining as well as interesting and increase teacher evaluations.

How top performing enterprises govern IT

Peter Weill

Firms with superior IT governance have more than 20% higher profits than firms with poor governance given the same strategic objectives. These top performers have custom designed IT governance for their strategies. Just as corporate governance aims to ensure quality decisions about all corporate assets, IT governance links IT decisions with company objectives and monitors performance and accountability. The session will present insights for effective IT governance from MIT studies of over 1000 firms in 60 countries examining how the best performers govern. Effective IT governance coordinates five key IT decisions: IT principles, architecture, infrastructure, application needs and investment. Case studies in firms such as: Airtel, BMW, P&G, PwC, State Street Corporation, Procter and Gamble, Neptune Orient Lines and Tetra Pak will illustrate best practice and “IT governance on one page”. Using a simple tool each student will be asked to assess the IT governance performance of an enterprise enabling benchmarking against the firms studied and analysis of next steps.

Managing Knowledge: Does Information Technology Help?

Rajiv Sabherwal

In this session, we will first explore some fundamental questions related to knowledge, including: What is knowledge? How does it relate to data, information, truth, and beliefs? Is knowledge an object? What are different types of knowledge? What does the value of knowledge depend on? The second part of this session will focus on how information systems and information technologies influence knowledge management, including creation, sharing, and utilization of knowledge. We will also discuss the potential pitfalls of using information systems and technologies to create, share, and use knowledge. We will examine these issues in the context of traditional information systems as well as emerging information technologies such as wikis and blogs, and emerging phenomena such as crowd sourcing or collective intelligence. In both parts of the session, we will draw upon a few simple examples as well as lessons from companies managing knowledge.

Enterprise Architecture Comes of Age

Jeanne Ross

In today’s digital economy, enterprise architecture has become an essential competency for business success. Enterprise architecture designs the stable platforms providing a foundation for doing business. We define enterprise architecture as the organizing logic for business processes, data, and technology. In this session, we will provide a framework for explaining how firms design and then implement platforms. We will review key case studies of established companies that have successfully transformed for the digital economy, and we will discuss exercises intended to help students become comfortable with the concept of enterprise architecture.

Intrusiveness of Online Video Advertising and Its Effects on Marketing Outcomes

Kendall Goodrich et al.

Web developers have several decisions to make about presenting content and paying for that content with advertisements. In the video domain, many developers opt for video “pre-rolls” that present a brief 7 to 30 second advertisement that precedes longer video content that is of interest. Many characteristics of those ads will affect their intrusiveness; three main antecedents to intrusiveness will be manipulated: the length of the pre-roll, amount of information in the content, and amount of humor in that content. In turn, immediate consequences of intrusiveness, abandonment and ad recall will be investigated. Finally, attitude toward the ad and attitude toward the website will be assessed, along with their logical consequences, intention to purchase the product and intention to revisit the website. A panel of 1,200 adult web users will be consulted and results will be presented at ICIS.

ON INTER-REALITY LITERACY: EMOTIONS AS PREDICTORS OF PERFORMANCE IN VIRTUAL WORLDS

Sabrina Schiele et al.

Virtual worlds, set-up on the Internet, occur as a highly complex form of visual media. They foreshadow future developments, not only in leisure settings, but also in health care and business environments. The interaction between real-life and virtual worlds, i.e., inter-reality, has recently moved to the center of scientific interest (Bainbridge 2007). Particularly, the empirical assessment of the value of virtual embodiment and its outcomes is needed (Schultze 2010). Here, this paper aims to make a contribution. Reviewing prior media theories and corresponding conceptualizations such as presence, immersion, media literacy and emotions, we argue that in inter-reality, individual differences in perceiving and dealing with one’s own and other’s emotions influence an individual's performance. Providing construct operationalizations and model propositions, we suggest testing the theory in the context of competitive and socially interactive virtual worlds.

Personal Dynamic Feedback in Acquiring Information to Manage Your Health

Hadar Ronen et al.

This paper makes two contributions at two different levels: one is about a design principle of HCI, namely the provision of personalized and dynamic feedback in interactive applications; the second contribution is a demonstration of the need for visual and dynamic representations to explain the design of interactive interfaces. At the first level, in the context of patients managing their health behavior, we analyze the design of feedback that builds on Visualization, Personalization, and Interactivity. Utilizing these elements DPF creates the right atmosphere for a unique InfoVis experience. We argue that such feedback will increase comprehension, participation in planning health behavior and self-efficacy. These three factors positively affect intentions to change behavior as recommended by the medical staff. A pilot study demonstrates the feasibility and impact of personalized and dynamic feedback. At the second level, we demonstrate how to use, contingently, three forms of visuals: static, dynamic distilled visuals and dynamic visuals in context (film)

Developing Electronic Markets in Low-Tech Environments: India’s Agriculture Markets

Christopher Parker et al.

Research has identified the role of information technology (IT) in creating fair and efficient markets. The markets examined are B2B and B2C designs, where technology is already prevalent among market participants. Less well understood is IT’s ability to enhance market efficiency when participants use minimal IT in their own operations, and existing market processes are manual. In this setting, how does a price and market support system enable markets to operate better? In 2007, Thomson Reuters introduced a text (SMS) information service to agricultural market participants in India called Reuters Market Light (RML). We find that RML has made regional ‘mandis’ more efficient, and empowered farmers to sell crops more profitably. The implication for e-markets research is that a low-tech infrastructure can support a valuable price information system. Key factors for RML are standardization on low-end mobile phones and succinct customizable messages that provide maximum informational value with low bandwidth.

A Typology of Affordances: Untangling Sociomaterial Interactions through Video Analysis

Wietske Van Osch et al.

In this study we untangle the sociomaterial interactions between developers, users, and artifacts by analyzing what types of affordances occur in the interactions between actors and artifacts in the context of group generativity. Hereto, we conducted an in-depth ethnographic and interaction analysis of video data of the interactions of groups of people with each other and with a set of self-developed applications for supporting generative activities. On the basis of our findings, we propose a typology of affordances. Given that affordances are by definition sociomaterial, studying affordances helps us to provide empirical insights into sociomateriality. Furthermore, this typology of affordances enables us to empirically analyze the role of materiality as well as to theoretically explain how materiality affects the way people act and interact with each other and artifacts. Finally, important theoretical and methodological implications for the literature on sociomateriality are discussed.

Dynamic Service Level Agreement Management for Efficient Operation of Elastic Information Systems

Markus Hedwig et al.

The growing awareness that effective Information Systems (IS), which contribute to sustainable business processes, secure a long-lasting competitive advantage has increasingly focused corporate transformation efforts on the efficient usage of Information Technology (IT). In this context, we provide a new perspective on the management of enterprise information systems and introduce a novel framework that harmonizes economic and operational goals. Concretely, we target elastic n-tier applications with dynamic on-demand cloud resource provisioning. We design and implement a novel integrated management model for information systems that induces economic influence factors into the operation strategy to adapt the performance goals of an enterprise information system dynamically (i.e., online at runtime). Our framework forecasts future user behavior based on historic data, analyzes the impact of workload on system performance based on a non-linear performance model, analyzes the economic impact of different provisioning strategies, and derives an optimal operation strategy. The evaluation of our prototype, based on a real production system workload trace, is carried out in a custom test infrastructure (i.e., cloud testbed, n-tier benchmark application, distributed monitors, and control framework), which allows us to evaluate our approach in depth, in terms of efficiency along the entire SLA lifetime. Based on our thorough evaluation, we are able to make concise recommendations on how to use our framework effectively in further research and practice.

IT-Enabled Services as Complex Adaptive Service Systems: A Co-Evolutionary View of Service Innovation

Bongsug(Kevin) Chae et al.

One specific type of service innovation of particular interest to IT and business professionals is IT-Enabled Services (IES). Previous studies have suggested many roles for IT in service innovations. IT has proven a useful tool in service innovation. IT is an important component of most services in many industries, including healthcare, financial services, engineering, and management consulting. However, little work has been conducted in IESs. Thus, there is considerable potential for researchers in IS, operations, marketing, and economics to make contributions to the emerging debates and challenges in IESs and service innovation. Two topics are critically important in both IES research and practice: what IESs are and how such services emerge and evolve. This research-in-progress attempts to offer a novel perspective on these two topics. Drawn upon complexity theory, we conceptualize services (IESs) as complex adaptive service systems (CASS) with such properties and behaviors as emergence, self-organization, adaptive learning, and nonlinearity, and service development or innovation as a co-evolutionary process composed of variation, selection, and retention (VSR). From this perspective, IESs produce and are reproduced by the environment (or by wide business networks). Based on this complexity theory perspective, we also provide propositions regarding what IESs are, how they emerge and evolve, and what strategies are effective for IT-enabled eservice innovation. The last section offers a research plan for a longitudinal case study of Business Analytics (BA) as an IES to qualify the proposed theoretical perspective.

Configurability, Maturity, and Value Co-creation in SaaS: An Exploratory Case Study

Eruani Zainuddin et al.

This study answers the research question, “How do value co-creation components – value, offering, value networks, user involvement, and interaction process – change over time as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) configurability moves toward maturity?” We conducted a case study of GlobalSchool, a SaaS company providing administrative software to small-sized schools. We refined the SaaS maturity model by integrating the concept of self-service. We further assessed configurability (along with SaaS maturity) from the co-creation of value perspective. Our findings show that value co-creation components are dynamic, changing at different maturity levels. We also identified two drivers for change – knowledge and volume of clients. Our study contributed toward the SaaS and value co-creation literature. The managerial implications include the need for SaaS vendors to balance between providing support and self-service, solicit feedback from long-standing clients, and slowly transition clients to the self-service concept.

Metamodel for Service Design and Service Innovation: Integrating Service Activities, Service Systems, and Value Constellations

Steven Alter

This paper presents a metamodel that addresses service system design and innovation by traversing and integrating three essential layers, service activities, service systems, and value constellations. The metamodel's approach to service systems as service-in-operation is an alternative to another currently used approach that views service systems as systems of economic exchange. The metamodel addresses service science topics including basic concepts of service science, design thinking for service systems, decomposition within service systems, and integration of IT service architecture with customer services. This paper's contributions to service science include clarifications concerning concepts such as service, service system, customer, product/service, coproduction and cocreation of value, actor roles, resources, symmetrical treatment of automated and non-automated service systems, and the relationship between service-dominant logic and service systems. Many articles have discussed these topics individually. Few, if any, have tied them together using an integrated metamodel.

A CONCEPTUAL LIFE EVENT FRAMEWORK FOR GOVERNMENT-TO-CITIZEN ELECTRONIC SERVICES PROVISION

ANAS ALSOUD et al.

In recent years, life event approach has been widely used by governments all over the world for designing and providing web services to citizens through their e-government portals. Despite the wide usage of this approach, there is still a challenge of how to use this approach to design e-government portals in order to automatically provide personalised services to citizens. We propose a conceptual framework for e-government service provision based on life event approach and the use of citizen profile to capture the citizen needs, since the process of finding Web services from a government-to-citizen (G2C) system involves understanding the citizens’ needs and demands, selecting the relevant services, and delivering services that matches the requirements. The proposed framework that incorporates the citizen profile is based on three components that complement each other, namely, anticipatory life events, non-anticipatory life events and recurring services.

Mapping the Emerging Field of Service Science: Insights from a Citation Network and Cocitation Network Analysis

Daniel Beverungen

The purpose of this study is to comprehensively map the recent additions to the body of knowledge in the service science discipline. Previous literature analyses insufficiently account for these developments or refrain from applying tool-based bibliographic analysis techniques. Following the introduction of the software tool CiteBridge, a citation network and a cocitation network are constructed based on 3,783 articles and 6,775 citations. Subsequently, both networks are analyzed (a) to map the scope and structure of the discipline, (b) to identify the most authoritative papers and literature review papers, (c) to discover clusters of research in the discipline, and (d) to explore if the service dominant logic of marketing has evolved into an overarching philosophical foundation for service research. The findings are intended to provide researchers with a sound orientation about the recent developments in the field and to further shape the evolution of service science as a research discipline.

IT Service Management: Towards a Contingency Theory of Performance Measurement

Francis Gacenga et al.

Information Technology Service Management (ITSM) focuses on IT service creation, design, delivery and maintenance. Measurement is one of the basic underlying elements of service science and this paper contributes to service science by focussing on the selection of performance metrics for ITSM. Contingency theory is used to provide a theoretical foundation for the study. Content analysis of interviews of ITSM managers at six organisations revealed that selection of metrics is influenced by a discrete set of factors. Three categories of factors were identified: external environment, parent organisation and IS organisation. For individual cases, selection of metrics was contingent on factors such as organisation culture, management philosophy and perspectives, legislation, industry sector, and customers, although a common set of four factors influenced selection of metrics across all organisations. A strong link was identified between the use of a corporate performance framework and clearly articulated ITSM metrics.

Perceptual Congruence between IS Users and Professionals on IS Service Quality – Insights from Response Surface Analysis

Alexander Benlian

Despite the importance of matching different viewpoints on IS service quality in organizations, there is still little understanding about how perceptual congruence between IS professionals and users affects user satisfaction. Drawing on cognitive dissonance theory and perceptual congruence research, our study examines 169 matched-pair survey responses using polynomial regression and response surface analysis. We demonstrate that perceptual congruence on IS service quality between IS professionals and users can have a nonlinear relationship with user satisfaction. We find that greater perceptual congruence is associated with higher user satisfaction and that user satisfaction increases when congruent perceptions of both IS professionals and users are high compared to when they are low. Moreover, the rate in the decrease of user satisfaction away from perfect congruence is dependent on the direction of incongruence, highlighting the importance of developing awareness of congruent perceptions to increase user satisfaction. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Remote Service Satisfaction: An Initial Examination

Stefanie Paluch et al.

As more providers establish remote services for remote repair, remote diagnosis and maintenance purposes to provide greater value to their customers, understanding what creates a satisfying customer experience becomes crucial. Even though this understanding appears crucial, no studies have examined the factors that make customers satisfied with remote services. To partly fill this void, the authors examine the role that customer perceptions of (1) remote service technology, (2) remote service workflow, (3) economic value, (4) information exchange, (5) interaction, (6) remote service individualization, and (7) auxiliary services play in customer remote service satisfaction assessments. They find that remote service technology, remote service workflow, and interaction are the dominant factors in customer assessments of satisfaction. The authors discuss the implications of these findings and offer directions for future research.

Viewing Systems as Services: The Role of Service Quality

Shahriar Akter et al.

The significant and sustained growth in services worldwide prompts IS researchers to give special attention to service and service concepts as core aspects of the IS field. This study proposes that ‘viewing systems as services’ is critical to extend the focus of technology-business alignment in service science research. The study evaluates the influence of mHealth service quality on satisfaction, perceived value and continuance intentions using a cross-disciplinary approach. The conceptual model is rooted in the traditional cognition - affective– conation chain but explicitly identifies system quality, interaction quality and information quality as the core dimensions of mHealth service quality. The model is validated in the context of a business-to-consumer (B2C) mHealth services using PLS path modeling. The results confirm that service quality has a direct impact on continuance intentions and an indirect impact through perceived value and satisfaction in mHealth context.

Investigating Value Co-Creation in Innovation of IT-enabled Services: An Empirical Study of Mobile Data Services

Hua Ye et al.

Service innovation is increasingly being recognized as an important strategy for firms to sustain competitive advantage. The interconnectivity and interactivity afforded through information technologies (IT) has transformed how new services are created, delivered, and experienced. With the newness of the phenomenon and the lack of understanding, information systems (IS) research examining the influence of innovativeness of IT-enabled service on its performance has been limited. Further, customers are considered as important value co-creators and increasingly included in organizational innovation efforts. However, it is unclear how customer participation affects the performance of new IT-enabled services. Also, the interaction effect of service innovativeness and customer participation on new service performance remains unexplored. Motivated thus, this paper aims to address the knowledge gap by drawing on the value co-creation perspective and service innovation literatures. We construct a model to explain the effects of service innovativeness and customer participation on new IT-enabled service performance. A preliminary test of the model was performed using initial data on mobile data service (MDS) applications obtained from the Androidzoom platform. The results reveal that both service innovativeness and customer participation positively impact new IT-enabled service performance in terms of the number of downloads of the applications. Also, customer participation is found to positively moderate the relationship between service innovativeness and new IT-enabled service performance. The potential contributions and plans for further testing and enhancing the model are described.