Peggy L. Lane

Business Communication Skills in Information Systems (IS) Curricula: Perspectives of IS Educators and Students

As the importance of communication skills for students, regardless of their disciplines, becomes evident, it is important to determine whether colleges provide students with adequate opportunities to acquire such skills. The authors compared information systems (IS) educator and student perceptions of communication skills in IS curricula. Gender, discipline, position and student classification, and school size were among the variables that were examined. Results showed that educators and students agreed that IS curricula had the appropriate emphasis on many of the communication skills. However, the two groups significantly differed on their extent of agreement or disagreement with appropriate level of emphasis and the number of courses that cover such communication skills. Results revealed that educators felt there were a few communication skills, such as proofreading, listening, facilitating meetings, and using interpersonal skills with external customers and management, that needed more emphasis in the IS curriculum. Implications for educators and researchers are reported.

Incremental Experts: How Much Knowledge Does a Team Need?

Experts are often viewed as individuals with a vast storehouse of knowledge beyond the normal participants in a domain. In reality, the expert may have just enough additional knowledge beyond those they interface with to propel their team to success. This research explores the interplay between the accumulation of knowledge as facilitated by individual and team network structures and prior skill sets necessary to successfully participate in a business simulation emulating the cash-to-cash cycle of a manufacturing company. Students participate in simulated organizations that compete against one another in an introductory and extended setting, the latter being the more complex market environment. Comparisons within and between teams across simulations indicate that minor background differences in specific participant ability and associated network structures can make significant differences in simulation standings.

Management Teams: The Case for Balancing or Unbalancing

Team formation has emphasized a balanced approach to team member composition in order to insure that required knowledge was not missing from the teams. However, with significant knowledge gaps among team members, the existence of a strong knowledge leader amongst a novice group can impact team success over more balanced teams. This research measures team formation based on a balance of prior domain knowledge and team communication skills. Team success is measured by the results from a simulated business environment in which teams compete based on their knowledge of a cash-to-cash manufacturing market cycle. Results indicate that a strong knowledge leader with strong communication skills in a relatively novice group can be more effective than a team assembled with a more balanced knowledge base.

Contents of an ERP course: concepts and hands-on

The assumption of this paper is that the decision has been made to offer a course in ERP (enterprise resource planning) to business students. One advisory council interviewed indicated that students should take an ERP course and that the content of the course should include both basic concepts and hands-on activities. The basic concepts should include the impacts on a company implementing an ERP system. Students should experience some hands-on activities that would expose them to cross-functional processes in ERP systems. This paper explores the contents of an ERP course that includes both basic concepts and hands-on activities.

Information security policy compliance: a higher education case study

The purpose of this case study is to examine the factors that impact higher education employees’ violations of information security policy by developing a research model based on grounded theories such as deterrence theory, neutralization theory and justice theory.,The research model was tested using 195 usable responses. After conducting model validation, the hypotheses were tested using multiple linear regression.,The results of the study revealed that procedural justice, distributive justice, severity and celerity of sanction, privacy, responsibility and organizational security culture were significant predictors of violations of information security measures. Only interactional justice was not significant.,As with any exploratory case study, this research has limitations such as the self-reported information and the method of measuring the violation of information security measures. The method of measuring information security violations has been a challenge for researchers. Of course, the best method is to capture the actual behavior. Another limitation to this case study which might have affected the results is the significant number of faculty members in the respondent pool. The shared governance culture of faculty members on a US university campus might bias the results more than in a company environment. Caution should be applied when generalizing the results of this case study.,The findings validate past research and should encourage managers to ensure employees are involved with developing and implementing information security measures. Additionally, the information security measures should be applied consistently and in a timely manner. Past research has focused more on the certainty and severity of sanctions and not as much on the celerity or swiftness of applying sanctions. The results of this research indicate there is a need to be timely (swift) in applying sanctions. The importance of information security should be grounded in company culture. Employees should have a strong sense of treating company data as they would want their own data to be treated.,Engaging employees in developing and implementing information security measures will reduce employees’ violations. Additionally, giving employees the assurance that all are given the same treatment when it comes to applying sanctions will reduce the violations.,Setting and enforcing in a timely manner a solid sanction system will help in preventing information security violations. Moreover, creating a culture that fosters information security will help in positively affecting the employees’ perceptions toward privacy and responsibility, which in turn, impacts information security violations. This case study applies some existing theories in the context of the US higher education environment. The results of this case study contributed to the extension of existing theories by including new factors, on one hand, and confirming previous findings, on the other hand.