Knowledge that Transforms

Heterogeneous sharing in synchronous collaboration is important with the proliferation of diverse computing environments, such as wearable computers and handheld devices. We present here a data-centric design for synchronous collaboration of users with heterogeneous computing platforms. Our approach allows clients with different capabilities to share different subsets of data in order to conserve communication bandwidth. We have built a robust middleware consisting of a distributed repository of shared data objects and a client-server-based infrastructure. Using the middleware, we have developed a framework for building collaborative applications for clients with different display and processing capabilities. We discuss the design and implementation of our middleware and framework and evaluate them by building four complex sample applications that demonstrate scalability, good performance, and high degree of code reusability.

(2004). Special Section: Measuring Business Value of Information Technology in E-Business Environments. Journal of Management Information Systems: Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 11-16.

This article presents an economic model that enables the study of incentives for business-to-business (B2B) e-procurement systems investments which permit inventory coordination and improved operational control. We focus on the information technology (IT) adoption behavior of firms in the presence of transaction costs, agency costs and information uncertainty. But we conclude that it is appropriate to rethink the prior theory and develop an extended transactions cost theory perspective, following Clemons, et al. (1993), but with the possibility of shocks included. We distinguish among three kinds of B2B eprocurement systems platforms. Proprietary platform procurement systems involve traditional electronic data interchange (EDI) technologies. Open platform procurement systems are associated with e-markets Web technology. Hybrid platforms involve elements of both. The key drivers appear to be firm size and uncertainties that derive from the inability of a buyer firm to perfectly predict final retail demand and actual supply. We find that larger firms tend to adopt costlier solutions, but rely upon procurement technologies with more certain-to-deliver value, such as proprietary EDI. Smaller firms tend to adopt less costly procurement technologies that entail greater supply uncertainties, such as open platform procurement systems. We arrive at our findings through the specification of an analytical model that captures the key elements of our perspective—transaction costs, agency costs, information uncertainty, and shocks—and specifies the conditions under which strong conclusions can be made about the likely observed equilibrium e-procurement solutions of firms. _____________________________________________________________________________________

Robert O. Briggs is Research Coordinator at the Center for the Management of Information at the University of Arizona and Associate Professor of Collaboration Engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands. He is also Director of Research and Development for GroupSystems.com. As a researcher, he has published more than 60 scholarly works on the theoretical foundations of collaboration, and he applies his findings to the development and deployment of collaborative technology to enhance team productivity, team creativity, and team satisfaction. His work on organizational transition of collaborative technology led to new insights about how to conceive of and deploy group support systems so as to create self-sustaining and growing communities of users. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1 994.

Creating electronic communities is a critical venture in the digital economy. However, fraud and misrepresentation have led to widespread skepticism and distrust of electronic communities. We develop an evolutionary model to explore the issue of trust within an electronic community from a dynamic process perspective. This model emphasizes large populations, continuous change in community memberships, and imperfect information and memory. As the term trust is often used in the context of individual interaction, at a group level we propose using the term health to measure the sustained competitive advantages of honest members over cheaters throughout the evolution of a community. We find conditions under which an electronic community is healthy and attracts outside population. We find that many factors, such as information dissemination speed, honest players' payoffs and possible losses, new community members' initial trust status, and the replacement rate of community members, all affect the health of an electronic community, and that some of them also affect a community's size. We then discuss the implications of our research for e-community practices.

The majority of the reported research and development efforts on automated techniques and tools for conceptual database design have focused on design from first principles. Very few have used case-based reasoning, where cases of conceptual design are stored, indexed, and used for future designs. Furthermore, there is a general lack of reported research on validating and verifying such systems. In this paper, we describe our approach in using case-based reasoning for conceptual database design. To test and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach and its theoretical foundation, two prototype systems were constructed. In the absence of existing matching conceptual design constructs, the first system uses first principles of conceptual design to assist a human designer in arriving at a design for a new problem. In contrast, the second system uses constructs from previously stored design cases. The two are tightly integrated. A novel approach in structuring the case base was developed. Unique aspects of the case-base architecture and its learning mechanism are described. In order to measure user preference, an experiment was designed and conducted. Findings indicate that reuse of schemata not only is preferred by the users over the design from the first principles, but also results in fewer errors.

We develop a multichannel model of separating equilibrium where a seller markets a durable good to high- and low-type consumers in two different chan-nels--an online Internet storefront and an offline bricks-and-mortar store. We show how the digital divide, where high-type consumers dominate the online channel and low-type consumers dominate the offline channel, artificially segments the marketplace, thereby mitigating the classic cannibalization problem. This allows the seller to more efficiently market its goods to each consumer segment. We show conditions under which low-type consumers are initially served in the offline channel, but subsequently bridging the divide results in their not being served in either channel. We also examine the implications of bridging the digital divide when the seller uses delay by engaging in intertemporal price discrimination.

Collaboration is essential in many mission-critical activities. Consequently, numerous methods and tools are available supporting collaborative processes such as strategic planning, risk management, requirements definition, and so on. These methods typically emphasize the collaborative, value-creating activities, but there is often less emphasis on quality aspects. Quality assurance (QA) techniques have been wellknown in engineering for a long time, and their effectiveness and efficiency has been empirically evaluated in many domains. In this paper, we propose to integrate repeatable QA techniques and collaborative processes. We evaluate our idea in the context of a collaborative process for requirements negotiation. We propose pre-process techniques to be used before the actual negotiation, in-process techniques for checking quality during a negotiation, as well as post-process inspection techniques. These techniques help a project team reduce unnecessary complexity and to mitigate risks stemming from defects in requirements negotiation results. We present the results of a feasibility study we conducted to test our approach.

Although the Web has grown to several billion pages over the past few years, just a few of the Web sites get most of the visits. Such sites, called portals, attract visitors and advertisers and provide a lot of valuable content at no charge to the visitors. The portals attract a disproportionate amount of the Internet advertising dollars and have the ability to influence the success of new electronic commerce ventures. Using monthly audience data, we examine relative market shares of Web sites in search engines, travel, financial, news, and other categories. We find clear evidence of increasing disparity in page views, with the top Web sites getting an increasing share of the market. Using economic modeling, we show that this disparity is a result of a development externality that exists in this industry: the sites that have more viewers get more revenues; this in turn allows them to develop more content and attract an even greater number of viewers.