Amir Hossein Ghapanchi

Antecedents to IT personnel's intentions to leave: A systematic literature review

This paper undertakes a systematic review to gain insight into existing studies on the turnover of information technology (IT) personnel. Our systematic review of 72 studies from 1980 to 2008 examines the background and trend of research into IT personnels intentions to leave their workplaces, in addition to providing a taxonomy of the determinants of their intentions to quit as captured in IT literature. We note a huge growth in the number of academic papers on the topic since 1998. Moreover, most of the research on IT turnover has been undertaken in North America, followed by Asia. Based on the 72 extracted studies, we found a total of 70 conceptually distinct IT turnover drivers. We classified them into the 5 broad categories of individual, organisational, job-related, psychological, and environmental, each containing three to four sub-categories. Finally, this paper presents insightful recommendations for IT practitioners as well as for the research community.

Guidelines for government-to-government initiative architecture in developing countries

The term electronic government (e-government) mainly refers to the information and communications technology (ICT) usage to modify structures and procedures of government agencies. Acknowledging the necessity of utilizing the new electronic, information, and communication technologies, the movement toward implementation of e-government in Iran has recently received the attention of authorities and policy makers. Public administrations have been very much concerned about the architecture of e-government, especially because of the boost of e-government that has taken place in recent years. The paper seeks to provide a set of heuristic principles affecting e-government overall architecture with respect to Iranian government-to-government (G2G) context requirements, which might be applicable for other developing countries with some customization. It is worth mentioning that the grounded action research method was applied to develop a systematic theory from data that contains both inductive and deductive thinking.

Measuring the Effectiveness of the Defect-Fixing Process in Open Source Software Projects

The defect-fixing process is a key process in which an open source software (OSS) project team responds to customer needs in terms of detecting and resolving software defects, hence the dimension of defect-fixing effectiveness corresponds nicely to adopters concerns regarding OSS products. Although researchers have been studying the defect fixing process in OSS projects for almost a decade, the literature still lacks rigorous ways to measure the effectiveness of this process. Thus, this paper aims to create a valid and reliable instrument to measure the defect-fixing effectiveness construct in an open source environment through the scale development methodology proposed by Churchill [4]. This paper examines the validity and reliability of an initial list of indicators through two rounds of data collection and analysis. Finally four indicators are suggested to measure defect-fixing effectiveness. The implication for practitioners is explained through a hypothetical example followed by implications for the research community.

Fuzzy-Data Envelopment Analysis approach to Enterprise Resource Planning system analysis and selection

Nowadays, companies have invested considerable resources in the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. As a comprehensive software solution, ERP seeks to integrate all departments and functions of a company into a single computer system that can satisfy all departments information needs. Many companies have wasted millions of dollars as a consequence of failed ERP implementation and adoption. Some of these failures come back to the selection of an ineffective ERP system. This article seeks to propose a method for selecting appropriate ERP systems, to enable firms decision-makers to achieve an overall consensus by using a decision support process. In addition, since estimating distinct and precise data in the field of Information Systems is hard, a Fuzzy-Data Envelopment Analysis model is used to evaluate the value of each ERP software solution using subjective judgments made by a group of high prestigious IT experts in the petrochemical industry.

The impact of project licence and operating system on the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process in open source software projects

Open source software (OSS) products have been widely adopted by commercial as well as government organisations. However, despite their increased adoption, many OSS projects still fail in responding to users quality needs such as resolving software defects. Hence, this paper investigates the responsiveness of OSS projects to users needs in terms of resolving software defects. To do so, we develop and test a model of antecedents to the effectiveness of the defect-fixing process for OSS projects. Data gathered for this study from 1481 OSS projects confirms that OSS projects that apply a less restrictive licence are less dependent on their team to operate their defect-fixing process. It is also demonstrated that OSS projects developed to run on a broader range of operating systems are more likely to have an effective defect-fixing. The study provides practitioners with insightful recommendations on project characteristics and defect-fixing effectiveness.

A multicriteria decision model for supplier selection in portfolios with interactions

Supplier evaluation and selection problems are inherently multicriteria decision problems. Numerous analytical techniques ranging from simple weighted scoring to complex mathematical programming approaches have been proposed to solve these problems. However, traditional supplier selection models too often fail to consider the interaction and the capacity interdependency among the suppliers. Suppliers may exhibit internal interactions if the evaluation criteria used for one supplier are believed to be significantly affected by the evaluation criteria used by one or more of the other suppliers in the group. We propose a new branch-and-bound algorithm that generates portfolio alternatives based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA). The DEA model proposed in this study evaluates alternative supplier portfolios with a multicriteria model that considers possible interactions among the suppliers.

Project process reengineering (PPR): a BPR method for projects

Many organisations are moving towards making radical changes in their processes. These efforts, which seek to improve the efficiency, effectiveness and adaptability of key business processes, are collectively named business process reengineering (BPR). In many of previous research on project process reengineering, improvements have been based on the conventional BPR methodologies which are designed for business environments. Hence, these attempts have faced only minor improvements in this new era. Additionally, using traditional BPR, which is more business-oriented, will lead to certain imperfections (Bryde, 2003). These methodologies are unable to cover project dimensions comprehensively. Therefore, it is necessary to develop a fine-tuned methodology for reengineering of project processes. Thus, this paper seeks to propose a methodology for reengineering project processes and apply it in a case study of a recent petrochemical project.