The results from a five-part Delphi survey of chief IS executives and corporate general managers indicate the most critical information systems management issues and consensus on their importance. The research project is the second in a series of such studies conducted by the Society for Information Management and the MIS Research Center at the University of Minnesota. The research confirmed the expected in some areas and revealed surprises in other areas. While strategic planning continued to top all issues in importance, many changes have occurred since 1983. Three new issues have joined the top ten issues in importance. Also, the rank order of several issues in the top ten has shifted. Survey results are discussed in terms of the differing views of IS executives and corporate general managers. A review of how these views have changed over time is also presented. A number of conclusions are drawn about managing information systems and about the changing nature of the IS executive’s job.

This three-round delphi survey of senior IS executives is the third in a series designed to determine the most critical issues in IS management. Analysis focuses on respondents’ assessments of specific issues as well as emerging trends. Key findings include: (1) Continued concern for traditional issues such as strategic planning and organizational alignment; (2) only six of the top issues from 1936 remained in the top 10; (3) one new issue, technology infrastructure, made the top 10; (4) three issues from previous studies rejoined the top 10—IS human resources, software development, and telecommunication systems; and (5) data-related issues now occupy the top two slots. This study reveals two important trends as the field enters the 1990s. First is the rising importance of technology infrastructure issues. Technology infrastructure issues now occupy three of the top 10 slots including the highest position. Second, it appears that internal effectiveness issues have made a strong comeback after being virtually ignored in 1986. IS human resources, software development, and the applications portfolio—issues that make up the core of the IS function—all increased in importance.

The digital divide is usually conceptualized through goods-dominant logic, where bridging the divide entails providing digital goods to disadvantaged segments of the population. This is expected to enhance their digital capabilities and thus to have a positive influence on the digital outcomes (or services) experienced. In contrast, this study is anchored in an alternative service-dominant logic and posits that viewing the divide from a service perspective might be better suited to the context of developing countries, where there is a huge divide across societal segments in accessing basic services such as healthcare and education. This research views the prevailing differences in the level of services consumed by different population segments (service divide) as the key issue to be addressed by innovative digital tools in developing countries. The study posits that information and communication technologies (ICTs) can be leveraged to bridge the service divide to enhance the capabilities of service-disadvantaged segments of society. But such service delivery requires an innovative assembly of ICT as well as non-ICT resources. Building on concepts from service-dominant logic and service science, this paper aims to understand how such service innovation efforts can be orchestrated. Specifically, adopting a process view, two Indian enterprises that have developed sustainable telemedicine healthcare service delivery models for the rural population in India are examined. The study traces the configurations of three interactional resources—knowledge, technology, and institutions—through which value-creating user-centric objectives of increasing geographical access and reducing cost are achieved. The theoretical contributions are largely associated with unearthing and understanding how the three interactional resources were orchestrated for service-centric value creation in different combinative patterns as resource exploitation, resource combination, and value reinforcement. The analysis also reveals the three distinct stages of service innovation evolution (idea and launch, infancy and early growth, and late growth and expansion), with a distinct shift in the dominant resource for each stage. Through an inductive process, the study also identifies four key enablers for successfully implementing these ICT-enabled service innovations: obsessive customer empathy, belief in the transformational power of ICT, continuous recursive learning, and efficient network orchestration.

Firms increasingly turn to online communities to create valuable information. These communities are empowered by new information technology-enabled collaborative tools, tools such as blogs, wikis, and social networks. Collaboration on these platforms is characterized by considerable membership turnover, which could have significant effects on collaborative outcomes. We hypothesize that membership retention relates in a curvilinear fashion to effective collaboration: positively up to a threshold and negatively thereafter. The longitudinal history of 2,065 featured articles on Wikipedia offers support for this hypotheses: Contributions from a mixture of new and experienced participants both increases the likelihood that an article will be promoted to featured article status and decreases the risk it will be demoted after having been promoted. These findings imply that, contrary to many of the assumptions in previous research, participant retention does not have a strictly positive effect on emerging collaborative environments. Further analysis of our data provides empirical evidence that knowledge creation and knowledge retention are actually distinct phases of community-based peer production, and that communities may on average experience more turnover than ideal during the knowledge retention phase.

Information technology executives strive to align the actions of end users with the desired security posture of management and of the firm through persuasive communication. In many cases, some element of fear is incorporated within these communications. However, within the context of computer security and information assurance, it is not yet clear how these fear-inducing arguments, known as fear appeals, will ultimately impact the actions of end users. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of fear appeals on the compliance of end users with recommendations to enact specific individual computer security actions toward the mitigation of threats. An examination was performed that culminated in the development and testing of a conceptual model representing an infusion of technology adoption and fear appeal theories. Results of the study suggest that fear appeals do impact end user behavioral intentions to comply with recommended individual acts of security, but the impact is not uniform across all end users. It is determined in part by perceptions of self-efficacy, response efficacy, threat severity, and social influence. The findings of this research contribute to information systems security research, human–computer interaction, and organizational communication by revealing a new paradigm in which IT users form perceptions of the technology, not on the basis of performance gains, but on the basis of utility for threat mitigation.

In striving to learn about an information technology innovation, organizations draw on knowledge resources available in the community of diverse interests that convenes around that innovation. But even as such organizations learn about the innovation, so too does the larger community. Community learning takes place as its members reflect upon their learning and contribute their experiences, observations, and insights to the community’s on-going discourse on the innovation. Community learning and organizational learning thus build upon one another in a reciprocal cycle over time, as the stock of interpretations, adoption rationales, implementation strategies, and utilization patterns is expanded and refined. We advance an overall model of this learning cycle, drawing on two community-level theories (management fashion and organizing vision), both of which complement the dominant emphases of the literature on IT innovation and learning. Relative to this cycle, we then empirically examine, in particular, the dependence of community learning on organizational learning. Sampling the public discourse on enterprise resource planning (ERP) over a 14-year period, we explore how different kinds of organizational actors can play different roles, at different times, in contributing different types of knowledge to an innovation’s public discourse. The evidence suggests that research analysts and technology vendors took leadership early on in articulating the “know-what” (interpretation) and “know-why” (rationales) for ERP, while later on adopters came to dominate the discourse as its focus shifted to the “know-how” (strategies and capabilities). We conclude by identifying opportunities for further inquiry on and strategic management of community learning and its interactions with organizational learning.

Information technology matters to business success because it directly affects the mechanisms through which they create and capture value to earn a profit: IT is thus integral to a firm’s business-level strategy. Much of the extant research on the IT/strategy relationship, however, inaccurately frames IT as only a functional-level strategy. This widespread under-appreciation of the business-level role of IT indicates a need for substantial retheorizing of its role in strategy and its complex and interdependent relationship with the mechanisms through which firms generate profit. Using a comprehensive framework of potential profit mechanisms, we argue that while IT activities remain integral to the functional-level strategies of the firm, they also play several significant roles in business strategy, with substantial performance implications. IT affects industry structure and the set of business-level strategic alternatives and value-creation opportunities that a firm may pursue. Along with complementary organizational changes, IT both enhances the firm’s current (ordinary) capabilities and enables new (dynamic) capabilities, including the flexibility to focus on rapidly changing opportunities or to abandon losing initiatives while salvaging substantial asset value. Such digitally attributable capabilities also determine how much of this value, once created, can be captured by the firm—and how much will be dissipated through competition or through the power of value chain partners, the governance of which itself depends on IT. We explore these business-level strategic roles of IT and discuss several provocative implications and future research directions in the converging information systems and strategy domains.

Although organizational innovation with information technology is often carefully considered, bandwagon phenomena indicate that much innovative behavior may nevertheless be of the “me too” variety. In this essay, we explore such differences in innovative behavior. Adopting a perspective that is both institutional and cognitive, we introduce the notion of mindful innovation with IT. A mindful firm attends to an IT innovation with reasoning grounded in its own organizational facts and specifics. We contrast this with mindless innovation, where a firm’s actions betray an absence of such attention and grounding. We develop these concepts by drawing on the recent appearance of the idea of mindfulness in the organizational literature, and adapting it for application to IT innovation. We then bring mindfulness and mindlessness together in a larger theoretical synthesis in which these apparent opposites are seen to interact in ways that help to shape the overall landscape of opportunity for organizational innovation with IT. We conclude by suggesting several promising new research directions.

Fear appeals, which are used widely in information security campaigns, have become common tools in motivating individual compliance with information security policies and procedures. However, empirical assessments of the effectiveness of fear appeals have yielded mixed results, leading IS security scholars and practitioners to question the validity of the conventional fear appeal framework and the manner in which fear appeal behavioral modeling theories, such as protection motivation theory (PMT), have been applied to the study of information security phenomena. We contend that the conventional fear appeal rhetorical framework is inadequate when used in the context of information security threat warnings and that its primary behavioral modeling theory, PMT, has been misspecified in the extant information security research. Based on these arguments, we propose an enhanced fear appeal rhetorical framework that leverages sanctioning rhetoric as a secondary vector of threats to the human asset, thereby adding the dimension of personal relevance, which is critically absent from previous fear appeal frameworks and PMT-grounded security studies. Following a hypothetical scenario research approach involving the employees of a Finnish city government, we validate the efficacy of the enhanced fear appeal framework and determine that informal sanction rhetoric effectively enhances conventional fear appeals, thus providing a significant positive influence on compliance intentions.

This longitudinal field study (three work sessions plus an initial training session) investigates the efficacy of a new technology—desktop videoconferencing (DVC)—in support of collaborative telelearning (i.e., collaborative learning among non-proximate team members). Two types of collaborative telelearning environments are considered: One involves local groups (i.e., students on the same campus), and the other involves non-proximate distant groups (i.e., students on two separate campuses). The collaborative telelearning environments are compared to each other and to a traditional face-to-face collaborative learning environment. The study found that the three environments are equally effective in terms of student knowledge acquisition; however, higher critical-thinking skills were found in the distant DVC environment. The subjects in the three learning environments were equally satisfied with their learning process and outcomes. At the conclusion of the longitudinal assessment, the distant students using DVC were more committed and attracted to their groups compared to local students who worked face-to-face or through DVC.