Raymond R. Panko

Spreadsheets on trial: a survey of research on spreadsheet risks

Even the earliest writers in end user computing remarked on the potential dangers of end user spreadsheet development. Until recently, there was only anecdotal evidence to support their concerns. Now, there is considerable evidence from experiments, field audits, and surveys of end users and organizations that early concerns were well-founded. The paper presents a framework for risks in spreadsheeting and organizes selected research findings in terms of this framework.

Managerial Communication Patterns

Use of time studies provide detailed information on organizational communication patterns, offering a rich base of data for identifying promising new targets for “groupwork”; support researchers. This article looks at use of time data that provide a detailed picture of communication patterns in the workdays of managers and some other knowledge workers.

Is office productivity stagnant

Has office productivity been stagnant in recent years, despite massive spending on information technology (IT)? This concern has been raised in both academic publications and in the business trade press. This article examines the basis for that concern, whcih, if true, would have profound implications for both IT researchers and practitioners.

IT employment prospects: beyond the dotcom bubble

In the 1990s, enrollments grew rapidly in information systems (IS) and computer science. Then, beginning in 2000 and 2001, enrollments declined precipitously. This paper looks at the enrollment bubble and the dotcom bubble that drove IT enrollments. Although the enrollment bubble occurred worldwide, this paper focuses primarily on U.S. data, which is widely available, and secondarily on Western Europe data. The paper notes that the dotcom bubble was an investment disaster but that U.S. IT employment fell surprisingly little and soon surpassed the bubbles peak IT employment. In addition, U.S. IT unemployment rose to almost the level of total unemployment in 2003, then fell to traditional low levels by 2005. Job prospects in the U.S. and most other countries are good for the short term, and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics employment projections for 2006–2016 indicate that job prospects in the U.S. will continue to be good for most IT jobs. However, offshoring is a persistent concern for students in Western Europe and the United States. The data on offshoring are of poor quality, but several studies indicate that IT job losses from offshoring are small and may be counterbalanced by gains in IT inshoring jobs. At the same time, offshoring and productivity gains appear to be making low-level jobs such as programming and user support less attractive. This means that IS and computer science programs will have to focus on producing higher-level job skills among graduates. In addition, students may have to stop considering the undergraduate degree to be a terminal degree in IS and computer science.

Hitting the wall: errors in developing and code inspecting a 'simple' spreadsheet model

Abstract Field audits and experiments have found substantial error rates when students and professionals have built spreadsheet models. In this study, 102 undergraduate MIS majors and 50 MBA students developed a model from a word problem that was relatively simple and free of domain knowledge. Even so, 35% of their 152 models were incorrect. There was no significant difference in errors per model between undergraduates and MBAs. Even among the 17 MBAs with 250 h or more of experience, 24% of the models contained errors. The cell error rate (CER)—the percentage of cells with errors—was 2.0%. When 23 undergraduates attempted to audit their models through code inspection, only three with incorrect spreadsheets (15%) produced clean spreadsheets when they finished the audit.

Revising the Panko-Halverson taxonomy of spreadsheet errors

Error taxonomies are useful because different types of errors have different commission and detection rates and because error mitigation techniques often are only useful for some types of errors. In the early 1990s, Panko and Halverson developed a spreadsheet error taxonomy. This paper updates that taxonomy to reflect human error research more fully. The taxonomy focuses on quantitative errors during development and testing but notes that qualitative errors are very important and that errors occur in all stages of the system development life cycle.

Monitoring for pornography and sexual harassment

The legal basis for workplace surveillance when dealing with two particular Internet abuses.

Project teams: profiles and member perceptions-implications for group support system research and products

Reports on a series of questionnaire surveys in which 165 managers and professionals each described a single recent project. The project team size varied considerably, with a mean of 7.7 members. The team size was usually selected to get the right mix of expertise, to have someone from each affected unit, or both. Most teams met many times, with a mean of 16.5 meetings and a median of 10. The mean project duration was 6.1 months. During that time, respondents engaged in an average of more than one project communication per working day; only 18% of these communications were in formal team meetings. More than half the projects had at least one member from another site, and 29% had half or more of their members from other sites. So, project teams today are already characterized by a good deal of distributed work. Respondents were familiar with the large majority of their team members before the project started. Satisfaction was high on a number of dimensions. Most projects seemed to involve complex design processes rather than a single decision. We discuss the importance of supporting distributed project teams and some implications for the design of group support system research and products.

Directions And Issues In End User Computing

AbstractData processing is being surpassed by end user computing in both slize and importance to the firm. But end user computing is a complex and highly diverse phenomenon — in large part because of the kinds of departments in which it is used are themselves complex and diverse. This paper explores the rise of end user com.puting and discusses how its intrinsic diversity requires the creation of more sophisticated corporate and research strategies for dealing with end user computing.

Two corpuses of spreadsheet errors

The widespread presence of errors in spreadsheets is now well-established. Quite a few methodological and software approaches have been suggested as ways to reduce spreadsheet errors. However, these approaches are always tailored to particular types of errors. Are such errors, in fact, widespread? A tool that focuses on rare errors is not very appealing. In other fields of error analysis, especially linguistics, it has proven useful to collect corpora (systematic samples) of errors. This paper presents two corpora of errors seen in spreadsheet experiments. Hopefully, these corpora will help us assess the claims of spreadsheet reduction approaches and should guide theory creation and testing.