Copyright (c) 2010 Association for Information Systems All rights reserved. http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq Recent documents in Management Information Systems Quarterly en-us Thu, 04 Mar 2010 22:30:51 PST 3600 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/11 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/11 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:20 PST Customer reviews are increasingly available online for a wide range of products and services. They supplement other information provided by electronic storefronts such as product descriptions, reviews from experts, and personalized advice generated by automated recommendation systems. While researchers have demonstrated the benefits of the presence of customer reviews to an online retailer, a largely uninvestigated issue is what makes customer reviews helpful to a consumer in the process of making a purchase decision. Drawing on the paradigm of search and experience goods from information economics, we develop and test a model of customer review helpfulness. An analysis of 1,587 reviews from Amazon.com across six products indicated that review extremity, review depth, and product type affect the perceived helpfulness of the review. Product type moderates the effect of review extremity on the helpfulness of the review. For experience goods, reviews with extreme ratings are less helpful than reviews with moderate ratings. For both product types, review depth has a positive effect on the helpfulness of the review, but the product type moderates the effect of review depth on the helpfulness of the review. Review depth has a greater positive effect on the helpfulness of the review for search goods than for experience goods. We discuss the implications of our findings for both theory and practice. Susan M. Mudambi http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/10 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/10 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:18 PST This paper informs the literature on the business value of information technology by conceptualizing a path from IT assets--that is, commodity-like or off-the-shelf information technologies--to sustainable competitive advantage. This path suggests that IT assets can play a strategic role when they are combined with organizational resources to create IT-enabled resources. To the extent that relationships between IT assets and organizational resources are synergistic, the ensuing IT-enabled resources are capable of positively affecting firms' sustainable competitive advantage via their improved strategic potential. This is an important contribution since IT-related organizational benefits have been hard to demonstrate despite attempts to study them through a variety of methods and theoretical lenses. This paper synthesizes systems theory and the resource-based view of the firm to build a unified conceptual model linking IT assets with firm-level benefits. Several propositions are derived from the model and their implications for IS research and practice are discussed. Saggi Nevo http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/9 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/9 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:17 PST Little research has examined the impacts of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems implementation on job satisfaction. Based on a 12-month study of 2,794 employees in a telecommunications firm, we found that ERP system implementation moderated the relationships between three job characteristics (skill variety, autonomy, and feedback) and job satisfaction. Our findings highlight the key role that ERP system implementation can have in altering well-established relationships in the context of technology-enabled organizational change situations. This work also extends research on technology diffusion by moving beyond a focus on technology-centric outcomes, such as system use, to understanding broader job outcomes. Michael G. Morris http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/8 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/8 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:16 PST This study explores how team leaders sense the need for technology adaptation intervention in distributed, computer-mediated ("virtual") teams. Analysis and coding of critical incident data collected in interviews of practicing leaders produce a five-trigger model including (1) external constraint, (2) internal constraint, (3) information and communication technology (ICT) inadequacy, (4) ICT knowledge, skills, and abilities inadequacy, and (5) trust and relationship inadequacies. The resulting five-trigger model provides several key contributions including (1) a diagnostic tool for examining real, multi-trigger team technology adaptation contexts, enabling better leader training and evaluation as well as improved research on team technology adaptation and interventions and (2) a better understanding of the relationship between the technology structure strength indicators in adaptive structuration theory and the need for team technology adaptation intervention. Dominic Thomas http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/7 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/7 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:15 PST As business and technology environments change at an unprecedented rate, software development agility to respond to changing user requirements has become increasingly critical for software development performance. Agile software development approaches, which emphasize sense-and-respond, self-organization, cross-functional teams, and continuous adaptation, have been adopted by an increasing number of organizations to improve their software development agility. However, the agile development literature is largely anecdotal and prescriptive, lacking empirical evidence and theoretical foundation to support the principles and practices of agile development. Little research has empirically examined the software development agility construct in terms of its dimensions, determinants, and effects on software development performance. As a result, there is a lack of understanding about how organizations can effectively implement an agile development approach.Using an integrated research approach that combines quantitative and qualitative data analyses, this research opens the black box of agile development by empirically examining the relationships among two dimensions of software development agility (software team response extensiveness and software team response efficiency), two antecedents that can be controlled (team autonomy and team diversity), and three aspects of software development performance (on-time completion, on-budget completion, and software functionality). Our PLS results of survey responses of 399 software project managers suggest that the relationships among these variables are more complex than what has been perceived by the literature. The results suggest a tradeoff relationship between response extensiveness and response efficiency. These two agility dimensions impact software development performance differently: response efficiency positively affects all of on-time completion, on-budget completion, and software functionality, whereas response extensiveness positively affects only software functionality. The results also suggest that team autonomy has a positive effect on response efficiency and a negative effect on response extensiveness, and that team diversity has a positive effect on response extensiveness. We conducted 10 post hoc case studies to qualitatively cross-validate our PLS results and provide rich, additional insights regarding the complex, dynamic interplays between autonomy, diversity, agility, and performance. The qualitative analysis also provides explanations for both supported and unsupported hypotheses. We discuss these qualitative analysis results and conclude with the theoretical and practical implications of our research findings for agile development approaches. Gwanhoo Lee http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/6 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/6 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:14 PST What happens to organizations that chase the hottest information technologies? This study examines some of the important organizational impacts of the fashion phenomenon in IT. An IT fashion is a transitory collective belief that an information technology is new, efficient, and at the forefront of practice. Using data collected from published discourse and annual IT budgets of 109 large companies for a decade, I have found that firms whose names were associated with IT fashions in the press did not have higher performance, but they had better reputation and higher executive compensation in the near term. Companies investing in IT in fashion also had higher reputation and executive pay, but they had lower performance in the short term and then improved performance in the long term. These results support a fashion explanation for the middle phase diffusion of IT innovations, illustrating that following fashion can legitimize organizations and their leaders regardless of performance improvement. The findings also extend institutional theory from its usual focus on taken-for-granted practices to fashion as a novel source of social approval. This study suggests that practitioners balance between performance pressure and social approval when they confront whatever is hottest in IT. Ping Wang http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/5 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/5 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:13 PST Organizations today outsource diverse business processes to achieve a wide variety of business objectives ranging from reduction of costs to innovation and business transformation. We build on the information processing view of the firm to theorize that performance heterogeneity across business process outsourcing (BPO) exchanges is a function of the design of information capabilities (IC) that fit the unique information requirements (IR) of the exchange. Further, we compare performance effects of the fit between IR and IC across dominant categories of BPO relationships to provide insights into the relative benefits of enacting such fit between the constructs. Empirical tests of our hypotheses using survey data on 127 active BPO relationships find a significant increase (decrease) in satisfaction as a result of the fit (misfit) between IR and IC of the relationship. The results have implications for how BPO relationships must be designed and managed to realize significant performance gains. The study also extends the IPV to identify IC that provide the incentives and means to process information in an interfirm relationship. Deepa Mani http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/4 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/4 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:11 PST While many corporations and Information Systems units recognize that environmental sustainability is an urgent problem to address, the IS academic community has been slow to acknowledge the problem and take action. We propose ways for the IS community to engage in the development of environmentally sustainable business practices. Specifically, as IS researchers, educators, journal editors, and association leaders, we need to demonstrate how the transformative power of IS can be leveraged to create an ecologically sustainable society. In this Issues and Opinions piece, we advocate a research agenda to establish a new subfield of energy informatics, which applies information systems thinking and skills to increase energy efficiency. We also articulate how IS scholars can incorporate environmental sustainability as an underlying foundation in their teaching, and how IS leaders can embrace environmental sustainability in their core principles and foster changes that reduce the environmental impact of our community. Richard T. Watson http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/3 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/3 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:10 PST Human life is dependent upon the natural environment, which, most would agree, is rapidly degrading. Business enterprises are a dominant form of social organization and contribute to the worsening, and enhancement, of the natural environment. Scholars in the administrative sciences examine questions spanning organizations and the natural environment but have largely omitted the information systems perspective. We develop a research agenda on information systems innovation for environmental sustainability that demonstrates the critical role that IS can play in shaping beliefs about the environment, in enabling and transforming sustainable processes and practices in organizations, and in improving environmental and economic performance. The belief-action-outcome (BAO) framework and associated research agenda provide the basis for a new discourse on IS for environmental sustainability. Nigel Melville http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/2 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/2 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:09 PST Detmar W. Straub http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/1 http://aisel.aisnet.org/misq/vol34/iss1/1 Wed, 03 Mar 2010 14:59:08 PST MIS Quarterly