Knowledge that Transforms

In the course of interacting with a decision support system (DSS), decision makers may have numerous opportunities for exercising judgment. Some judgments pertain to what to do next; others require predictions or evaluations. Either deliberately or inadvertently, a DSS may guide its users in performing these judgments. This article lays a foundation and proposes an agenda for researching such “decisional guidance. ” Studying decisional guidance matters for two reasons. First, deliberately incorporating guidance in a system offers the potential of more supportive systems while raising a number of design questions. Second, understanding the consequences of guidance—deliberate or not— contributes to comprehending how DSSs affect decision-making behavior. This article examines three aspects of decisional guidance: (1) when and why system designers should provide decisional guidance, considering the opportunities, motives, and means for guiding; (2) how designers can provide guidance, introducing a three-dimensional typology for deliberate guidance; and (3) the consequences of decisional guidance—that is, its effects and effectiveness. This article provides a coherent approach to a set of behavioral questions just now beginning to be addressed by researchers in a fragmented, technologically oriented manner.

Information systems failure is a widely recognized problem in the IS community. However, abandonment of IS projects is an aspect of IS failure that has not gained much attention in either IS practice or research. This article examines the organizational practices resulting in the underlying characteristics of IS project abandonment. The results of a survey show IS project abandonment to be a complex multidimensional issue defying easy explanations. IS projects may be abandoned for any combination of factors including cost overruns and/or schedule slippages, technological inadequacies, and behavioral, political, or organizational issues. The last set of factors emerged as being the most dominant in most companies’ decisions.

One of the fundamental issues inherent to both practice and academia emanates from the need to know what knowledge and skills personnel must possess to successfully perform their jobs. This article addresses this issue by performing an educational needs assessment, one that considers the deficiencies of both IS and end-user personnel. To this end, an instrument has been developed, tested, and completed by 275 employees within eight different organizations. The findings of this study suggest that among six different knowledge and skill areas, both IS and end-user personnel are most deficient in the area of “general IS knowledge“ (e.g., IS policies and plans, fit between IS and organization, etc.). In addition, IS personnel appear to be in need of more “organizationalknowledge“(e.g., organizational goals and objectives, critical success factors, etc.). End users, on the other hand, seem to require more IS-related skills (e.g., data access, use of software packages, etc.). The implications of these findings for practitioners and academicians focus on finding ways to improve the education and training programs currently in place.

Executive information systems (EIS) are now successfully providing computer support for senior executives in a growing number of organizations. Previous attempts to support senior executives are discussed with a focus on why these attempts failed and what was learned that should be incorporated in future efforts. An EIS development framework is presented that includes a structural perspective of the elements and their interaction, the development process, and the dialog between the user and the system. Survey data from 50 firms having an EIS are presented and discussed in the context of the development framework. While most of the findings confirm conventional EIS wisdom, others are somewhat surprising, such as the significant role that information systems management often plays in initiating the development of an EIS or serving as its operational sponsor. The findings lead to additional suggestions for EIS research opportunities, as well as predictions about the future nature of EIS.

The public sector has multiple, conflicting, and often intangible goals. It produces “public goods” for problems that should be solved (like crime and poverty), even though these problems may have no known feasible solutions; and it is heavily impacted by politics and bureaucratic red tape. These and other features of the public sector make it potentially a much different setting for IS management than the private sector. This article reports on the first national survey of public sector managers identifying their most important IS issues. The survey, covering respondents from federal, state, and local governments, drew upon prior survey research in the private sector and the literature on public/private sector differences. While most of the top public sector issues also appear on the top private sector issue lists, the rankings show a lag in public IS development as compared to the private sector. Perhaps the most interesting results of the survey, however, are from a deeper analysis. At the main effects-level, we have preliminary evidence that (1) middle-level (instead of top-level) public managers are critical for IS technology development; (2) small government agencies are more interested in IS technology transfer than large ones; (3) governments with a lot of red tape tend to have flexible IS; and (4) local government IS issues are driven by transaction processing while state and federal governments have IS more suitable for their oversight mission

This article addresses how information systems architecture can be used to support organizations in the 1990s—organizations that face the dual challenge of “speed and flexibility” and “low cost and efficiency. ” At the heart of this challenge is the basic notion that information systems have been anything but flexible in the past and that, for many firms, information systems are more disablers of flexibility than enablers. The article discusses two architectural solutions to this problem: “the high road and the low road, ” and the benefits and pitfalls of each. We conclude that neither solution will succeed on its own and that firms need to combine elements of both to meet the challenges of the 1990s. This article is based on some of the things we have learned through research, case writing, and consulting while working with a variety of organizations over the past three years. These experiences have illustrated the importance of and the struggle with IS architecture for today’s global competitors. The content is intended to help guide, provoke, stimulate, and entertain others who believe that the integration of information technology with organizational strategy and structure is of paramount concern to senior managers.

Carefully crafted investments in global information technology offer firms an opportunity to increase control and enhance coordination, while opening access to new global markets and businesses. But engineering such global systems presents numerous challenges to management. In this article, we relate these challenges as they were described to us by 25 senior managers from Fortune 500 firms responsible for implementing and managing global applications of information technology. Among the findings of the interviews are four common approaches for managing global information technology

Change is a fundamental theme in human life. Yet some organizational behavior and MIS researchers have noted that individuals generally resist changes. MIS researchers have also attributed many implementation problems to users’ resistance to change. However, there is no fundamental resistance to every change. Individuals readily adopt changes such as a pay raise or promotion. This article proposes that individuals attempt to evaluate most changes. Changes that are considered favorable are not resisted and may even be sought after and welcomed, while changes considered unfavorable are likely to be resisted. The equity-implementation (E-l) model provides a theory-based understanding of information systems users’ resistance to change. It describes the processes employed by users in assessing the change associated with the implementation of an information system or technology in an organization. The model is based upon equity theory, which is a well-established and widely used theory in social sciences. Users employ three levels of analysis in evaluating the change introduced by an implementation. At the first level of analysis, a user is viewed as assessing a change in terms of the gain or loss in his or her equity status. At the second level of analysis, the user is viewed as comparing his or her relative outcomes with that of the organization. Finally, at the third level of analysis, the user is viewed as comparing his or her relative outcomes with that of other users in the reference group. Users who evaluate the change to be unfavorable in terms of inequity or loss of equity are likely to be distressed by the change and resist it. The E-l model provides a useful framework of analysis, for improving our understanding of users’ assessment of a change. Managers will find the model useful for overcoming resistance to change during implementation.

The literature on strategic uses of information technology suggests that "champions” are often a key to successful implementation. This article describes a field study of 15 information technology (IT) champions and their needs for support from their information systems units. Innovation research is used to hypothesize that IT champions, like other champions, need information, technical resources, and political support from their information systems department units. Interview findings suggest that IT champions strongly value (1) assistance in developing information to help sell their IT vision, (2) a flexible implementation process, and (3) legitimation of their ideas for using information technology. Moreover, IT champions do not want bureaucratic process or arm's length dealings with information systems departments. The way a firm should conduct its dealings with an IT champion depends in large part on a number of organizational factors, including the IS department's mission.