Eldon Y. Li

Perceived importance of information system success factors: a meta analysis of group differences

Abstract Factors influencing the success or failure of an information system (IS) have been discussed frequently in the literature. This study identifies several additional factors and proposes that the existing ones be classified into eight different dimensions. These encompass, not only the system aspect, but also the human aspect of IS success (ISS). The study further uses data from past ISS studies and also those collected from a field survey to analyze the differences in the perceived importance of ISS factors between four groups of subjects from North America, namely, the user staff, the IS staff, and the managers of the two groups. It reveals that the rank orders of ISS factors between IS staff and IS managers and between user staff and user managers are not significantly different. However, the rank orders between IS personnel and user personnel are significantly different. Based on these, the top and the least important ISS factors are identified. The findings have several implications for IS management practice.

Artificial neural networks and their business applications

Abstract Artificial neural networks are increasingly popular in todays business fields. They have been hailed as the greatest technological advance since the invention of transistors. The purpose of this paper is to answer two of the most frequently asked questions: “What are neural networks?” “Why are they so popular in todays business fields?” The paper reviews the common characteristics of neural networks and discusses the feasibility of neural-net applications in business fields. It then presents four actual application cases and identifies the limitations of the current neural-net technology.

Mobile agents in distributed network management

By helping to disperse centralized network management tasks to subnet hosts, mobile agent technology helps conserve network bandwidth and improves management efficiency by decreasing network traffic.

Understanding Web 2.0 service models: A knowledge-creating perspective

We examined Web 2.0 services that provide different levels of knowledge exploitation and developed a framework for classifying existing service models from a knowledge-creation perspective. More than 1000 Web 2.0 application sites were analyzed and classified. We termed the two types of service platforms: Experience-Socialization and Intelligence-Proliferation. These involved four types of service models that we termed as Exchanger, Aggregator, Collaborator, and Liberator. These models show the diversity of existing Web 2.0 applications and provide a framework for a better understanding of operating patterns and value propositions within the Web 2.0 paradigm.

Do organizational citizenship behaviors lead to information system success

We adapted a model in organizational theory to determine whether organizational citizenship behaviors (OCBs) of system implementation teams influenced that organizations integration climate and improved their project management, resulting in successful system implementation. Surveys were elicited from 254 system users in various business organizations that had implemented large-scale IS in the previous year; the analysis of their responses provided support for our model, suggesting that the OCB of the implementation team created a higher level of integration climate and more effective project management, and that these in turn influenced information system success. Implications for researchers and managers are discussed and limitations are identified.

Applying Six-Sigma to Supplier Development

Supply chain management (SCM) adopts a systematic and integrative approach to managing the operations and relationships among different parties in supply chains. To implement SCM successfully involves a lot of issues. One of the major issues is supplier development. On the other hand, studies have investigated how quality management can be employed in SCM to improve the performance of various issues in the whole supply network. This study will develop an application guideline for the assessment, improvement, and control of quality in SCM using Six-Sigma improvement methodology. Improvements in the quality of all supply chain processes lead to cost reductions as well as service enhancements. In our approach, supplier evaluation is conducted by principal component analysis. The measurement data from 25 suppliers of a PC manufacturer in Taiwan, including two major input variables and three major output variables, will be used for demonstration.

Stress dynamics of information systems managers: a contingency model

A field study of 109 information systems (is) managers explores the relationship among organizational characteristics, job satisfaction, and work stress. The results indicate that work overload is the major source of perceived is work stress, followed by role conflict, job-induced anxiety, and then role ambiguity. Four organizational contextual factors—Is climate, clarity and sharing of organizational mission, quality of work life, and flexibility of organizational processes—were found to influence signiftcantly work stress and job satisfaction as perceived by is managers. As expected, job satisfaction was signiftcantly related to is work stress while is technological sophistication was not related to is stress or job satisfaction factors. Contrary to predictions, neither the clarity and awareness of organizational policies nor the quality of is resources were found to have impact on any is stressor.

Marketing information systems in Fortune 500 companies: a longitudinal analysis of 1980, 1990, and 2000

Soon after the MIS concept was formed in the mid-1960s, the marketing function applied it to its own information needs, creating a formal effort called the marketing information system, or MKIS. This study surveys Fortune 500 companies to reveal their pattern in MKIS usage. The findings are compared to two previous studies a decade apart. It provides a gauge of the evolution of computer use not only in marketing but also in large firms. This study is the first where the marketing managers reported a decrease in the existence of an MKIS in their firms. Nonetheless, the study found that many firms are linking their marketing plans with their information resources. Besides telephone, facsimile, and e-mail, electronic commerce is widely adopted in these large firms. Most importantly, many marketers today are using computers and the Internet. They are more and more knowledgeable about computer technologies and actively taking part in creating computer applications to meet their own information needs. # 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

A framework for investigating the impact of IT capability and organisational capability on firm performance in the late industrialising context

From the viewpoint of the whole organisation, the capabilities of a firm can be classified into technological capability and organisational capability. Nowadays, how to accelerate the rate of building up and accumulating technological capabilities is of vital importance to the latecomer companies in order to catch up with technological frontier companies. Technological capability encompasses the Information Technology (IT) capability and other technical but non-IT capabilities. In this paper we focus on the IT capability and its effect on a firms performance and propose an integrated framework that provides the latecomer firms with a roadmap to build up their capabilities and improve their performance. The purpose is to advance an understanding of the relationship among IT capability, organisational capability, and firm performance.

Access control in collaborative commerce

Corporate collaboration allows organizations to improve the efficiency and quality of their business activities. It may occur as a workflow collaboration, a supply chain collaboration, or as collaborative commerce. Collaborative commerce uses information technology to achieve a closer integration and better management of business relationships between internal and external parties. There are many emerging issues in collaborative commerce and one of them is access control. To implement collaborative commerce, interfaces between the system elements of the organizations that are involved in the collaboration are needed. However, access control policies are often inconsistent from interface to interface, and therefore conflict resolution should be considered to resolve multilevel access control policy problems. Many studies propose different rules for the resolution of the conflict between access control policies, but little attention has been given to the relationship between the groups or subject classes that represent the different types of corporate collaboration. In this paper, the format of corporate collaboration is considered, and the conflicts between the access control policies of interfaces are addressed. Some general guidelines, other than those that relate to minimum privilege on duty and maximum privilege on sharing, are proposed.