Knowledge that Transforms

:Currently, most database management systems (DBMS) are based on the relational data model. Design methods that target relational models as the end product of logical design are generally based on the entity relationship model (ER) or semantic object model. Such methods entail developing an ER or semantic object representation followed by translation to the relational representation by the designer or by a CASE tool. However, there is no popular method that uses the relational concepts directly, that is, without an intermediate representation such as ER. Mathematically rigorous approaches using decomposition or synthesis do not seem to have been adopted by designers. When user views are complex, designers may encounter difficulty in the absence of an understandable method. This paper suggests a practical method for arriving at a normalized solution of user views.

:Fagan inspections are a structured review of development documents that consists of individual preparation, a meeting, and rework by the author of the document. The meeting is used to log the defects found in preparation and to search for more defects. The effectiveness and efficiency of the meeting are typically low compared with those of preparation. This paper describes the use of an electronic meeting system (EMS) to support the logging meeting of a total of fourteen electronic inspections in Philips Medical Systems and Baan Company. The results indicate that the electronic logging meeting contributed much more to the overall result of the inspection than was the case in a traditional inspection. The results have implications for both software inspections and EMS. The implications for EMS discussed in this paper are opportunities for the use of EMS in routine meetings, increased use of meeting metrics, and the benefits of fixed-format input in an EMS.

:We analyze the competitive and economic implications of information technology, the allocation of decision rights, and task bundling during business process reengineering. The popular reengineering literature advocates employee empowerment—decentralizing decision authority and consolidating tasks—as complementary strategies. Our analysis reveals, however, that implementing these two changes simultaneously is suboptimal in many cases. Decentralization and consolidation decisions can occur separately or together; the optimal combination depends on the effectiveness of technology aimed at skill enhancement and the customers’ sensitivity to time and quality. We identify those process parameters that can cause decentralization and consolidation to have opposite effects on process performance; we also point to other parameters, such as customer-to-customer variability, which can cause them to complement one another. Finally, we explain why, in a time-based competitive marketplace, firms are more likely to centralize their decision-making process while concentrating their information technology investments on enhancing productivity and intraorganizational communications.

:This paper addresses the socioemotional dimension in group support systems (GSS) meeting environments from the perspective of the facilitator. A model is presented and discussed. This model represents how facilitators perceive and manage socioemotional issues in a GSS environment. The role of GSS in the model is also explored. The research methodology for gathering and analyzing the data in this paper was based on critical incident technique and semistructured interviews with twenty-six experienced facilitators. The research found that GSS provides a very useful tool for managing socioemotional issues; however, GSS also creates new issues. The implications of this research study’s findings for facilitators and future research issues are posited.

:Strategic planning is typically performed by groups of managers. Group support systems (GSS), an information technology designed to improve group work, may therefore have useful application to strategic planning. In this paper, the application of GSS is examined with respect to four dimensions: process support, process structure, task support, and task structure. A GSS may assist the communication aspects of group meetings by providing process support to improve interaction among participants and process structure to direct the pattern or content of the discussion. GSS may also provide task structure, such as structured analysis and modeling techniques, and task support, such as access to important task information. This paper reports on the use of a GSS in the strategic planning processes of thirty organizations. The ability of the GSS to provide process support was found to be the most important contributor to strategic planning success, with task structure and process structure secondary. Task support contributed little. Those organizations that made greater use of electronic communication, structured problem analysis techniques, and structured meeting processes reported greater success.

:This paper proposes a formal language to support and document argumentation, claims, decision and negotiation, and coordination in network-based organizations. The purpose of the language, once implemented in the organization’s Intranet, is to promote communication using structured arguments, claims and justified decisions and to preserve this information as corporate memory. We contend that organization effectiveness can be achieved by continuous exchange of information, arguments, and joint agreements on actions with appropriate knowledge of the organizational decision-making context. As a mechanism for group decision and negotiation support and as an organizational repository, the proposed language is constructed based on supporting discussions that focus on the relationship between actions and the resources required to implement these actions.

:In an action research study at the Amsterdam Municipal Police Force, a collaborative business engineering approach was employed to explore the joint application of group support systems and animation techniques to support stakeholder involvement in organizational change processes. Stakeholders constructed and evaluated static and dynamic models of the police force’s current and future work processes. Findings illustrate the complimentary potential of the two technologies to support stakeholder involvement in terms of efficiency, resulting model quality, and stakeholder satisfaction with process and technologies. The study illustrates the value of an incremental modeling strategy, the involvement of a substantial number of stakeholders, and the need to keep the momentum in the process. Issues for further research concern the development of a collaborative modeling environment that allows for group enabled model construction and viewing and the automatic transformation between different types of models.

:A decision-making study was conducted to examine the effects of moral hazard on information systems (IS) professionals’ decisions whether or not to implement a system with quality problems. Moral hazard was defined as an incentive to act in one’s self-interest in conflict with the organization’s overall goals while being able to hide those actions through privately held information. Highly experienced IS professionals provided responses to a hypothetical decision case that revealed a tendency to implement a project with quality problems in a moral hazard situation. Their decisions, however, were strongly influenced by ethical considerations. These findings suggest that key economic constructs, such as moral hazard, apply to system implementation contexts. They also suggest that organizations can significantly moderate self-interested behavior by fostering an ethical climate.

:The perception that small size may no longer be an economic disadvantage to either organizations or countries has become fairly widespread. We share the perception that not only are small countries not at a disadvantage, but they may actually have an advantage over larger competitors with regard to information technology industries. Indeed, small developed countries are achieving considerable success in the development of their information technology industries. The three countries studied here—Israel, New Zealand, and Singapore—are among those that have seen the rapid development of their IT industries in recent years, despite the fact that they are among the world’s smaller countries, are considerably different in many geographic, cultural, and political respects, and are geographically dispersed around the globe.The objective of this study is to describe and compare the information technology industries of these three small developed countries. All three countries, with no inherent advantages in raw materials and only small domestic markets, have the IT infrastructure and the human skills needed. They are nimble and flexible and can find niche markets in which to specialize. Not all three, however, have developed IT industries to the same degree. There could be factors specific to small developed countries that facilitate the development of indigenous IT production. The dominant factor that seems to provide some explanation for different levels and directions of development of IT production is government policy in promoting IT production directly, in supporting IT industry R&D, and in education policies designed to provide appropriately trained labor pools.