Knowledge that Transforms

An empirical investigation of some relationships between organizational context and MIS structure is reported. The major findings are that MIS structure is significantly correlated with organizational structure which, in turn, is closely associated with organizational size. Additional relationships were found between organizational size and the rank of the MIS director, between implementor/user relationships and psychological climate toward MIS, and between the last two variables and degree of MIS integration.

Leading MIS executives and academicians have identified systems development as one of the most critical issues of the 1980s. Their concerns include providing user accessibility to stored information, reducing development cost and delay, increasing developer productivity, and increasing MIS's impact on organizational growth, productivity, and profitability. Among the number of proposed alternative approaches to traditional systems development, prototyping is mentioned frequently. Prototyping is routine in hardware development but not software. The authors review published references to prototyping and related concepts, and synthesize a process model for information systems. In this model, resource requirements are enumerated and discussed. The article includes an analysis of the economics of prototyping, and a brief discussion of several examples. Prototyping for information systems development addresses today’s critical issues; it will no doubt raise a new set of research questions for tomorrow.

The authors discuss concepts underlying the growth of Inter-Organizational Information Sharing Systems (IS *). A classification scheme is presented and the issues of cost commitment, responsibility, and complexity of the operating environment are discussed. Organizational impacts associated with IS * participation are also examined.