Robert K. Plice

Leveraging Alumni and Business Community Relations to Assess the Information Systems Curriculum

A recent Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (2006) task force called for increased interaction between business schools and the business community to identify essential skill sets and help with the curriculum-management process. An information systems curriculum-assessment study solicited input from recent alumni working in the business community who had demonstrated a solid grasp of the curriculum. An analysis of the responses indicates that communications and teamwork skills are perceived as highly important to the business community. Qualitative and statistical analyses show that the business community perceives value in curriculum content that emphasizes managerial and systems development topics and covers technical topics broadly rather than deeply.

Spam and Beyond: An Information-Economic Analysis of Unwanted Commercial Messages

The phenomenon of unwanted commercial messages (UCM), including e-mail spam and emerging forms that target other Internet communications facilities, is analyzed from an information-economics perspective. UCM traffic pays off for its senders when it is noticed and consumed by Internet users; the industry is, therefore, dependent on a common-pool resource that is accessed through an information asset. An analytical model of the industry is derived and solved computationally, and two dimensions of information quality held by the senders of UCM traffic are manipulated in the model. It is shown that such manipulations can moderate over time both the number of UCM campaigns undertaken and the amount of Internet bandwidth consumed by UCM. Manipulations of the information-quality dimensions affected by e-mail filtering reduce the amount of traffic that penetrates an Internet users attention space but increase the amount of Internet bandwidth consumed. This is consistent with data reported by e-mail security providers as filters have been deployed. It is also shown that both public and private entities have adopted policies and practices with unintentional informational side effects. These effects may have led to more rather than less, spam e-mail traffic. It is concluded that the lessons learned from the case of e-mail spam can be applied to the development of policies and practices for mitigating newer, emerging forms of UCM, including versions targeting instant-messaging systems and Web logs.

Toward an information-compatible anti-spam strategy

As filters improve, the information assets of spammers become more valuable and lead to more, not less, overall spamming activity. This is troubling to contemplate, because it means no amount of spending on better filters will be enough. The next levels of escalation might then involve sender-receiver prearrangement, a new accounting infrastructure or, perhaps, payment or bonding prior to email delivery. We would characterize these steps as capitulation to the spammers, should they occur, because they would mean the end of the free, anonymous, and neutral email that we know today. To avoid capitulation, we argue that researchers should look beyond new spam-identification technologies and consider the information-economic implications of their deployment.

Toward an Understanding of Software Piracy in Developed and Emerging Economies

The software industry loses billions of dollars annually to software piracy and has raised awareness of the high software piracy rates worldwide, particularly in emerging economies. In this paper, the authors build a general model of software piracy that includes three economic and social factors suggested by the literature, including per capita GNI, the relative size of a country’s IT market, and government corruption. The paper demonstrates that the relationship between national software piracy and per capita GNI is nonlinear, with additional gains in per capita GNI, producing marginally smaller reductions in software piracy. No structural variation is found in the model with respect to whether an economy is developed or emerging, using the OECD membership as a proxy. However, a structural break did exist with respect to the relative size of a country’s IT market. The analysis suggests that the classification of an economy as developed or emerging does not necessarily advance the understanding of the causal mechanisms that give rise to software piracy. Findings suggest that more insight can be gained by focusing on strategies that take into account the relative size of a country’s IT market.

Internet Business Practices Across the Globe: Lessons from Emerging Economies

Firms from emerging economies are rapidly becoming formidable competitors to established industry leaders from developed economies. Aside from anecdotal reports, there is little scholarly evidence concerning the operational details of how emerging economy firms are becoming competitive with developed economy firms. This article addresses the gap by building on the International Business, Strategy and Information Systems literature, and through an empirical analysis of original survey data for 468 firms across ten countries. We develop three primary empirical findings. First, despite the differences between emerging economy firms and developed economy firms, we find that emerging economy/high internationalization firms use marketing- and supply chain-oriented Internet business practices with about the same frequency as developed economy/high internationalization firms. Second, we find that emerging economy/high internationalization firms are more driven than developed economy/high internationalization firms to use Internet business practices to expand existing markets and enter new markets. Third, we find that emerging economy/high internationalization firms report relatively higher sales and customer service impacts from Internet business practices than do developed economy/ high internationalization firms. These findings suggest that emerging economy firms have used the Internet as a resource to position themselves as credible competitors to developed economy firms.

Modeling Software Piracy in Developed and Emerging Economies

The software industry loses billions of dollars annually to software piracy and has raised awareness of the high software piracy rates worldwide, particularly in emerging economies. We build a general model of software piracy that includes three economic and social factors suggested by the literature, including per capita GNI, the relative size of a countrys IT market, and government corruption. We then test the model with respect to whether an economy is developed or emerging as designated by OECD membership and find no structural variation. However, a structural break did exist with respect to the relative size of a countrys IT market. The analysis suggests that the classification of an economy as developed or emerging is not necessarily useful for understanding the causal mechanisms that give rise to software piracy. Our findings suggest more insight can be gained by formulating strategies that take into account the relative size of a countrys IT market.