Jeannette-Marie Kelley, Temple University, presents "Examining the Role of Organizational Password Security Policies in Individual Password Security Behaviors" - December 2, 2005

Organizations typically construct computer access password policies that ask (or force) individual users to create passwords that conform to a long list of criteria designed to generate "strong" passwords. These criteria usually include: passwords should be at least eight or nine digits long; they should be comprised of a combination of numbers, letters, and punctuation; they should not include recognizable words, names, or dates; and, they must changed periodically. However, the effect of these password security policies seems to be that many users, in trying to comply with the difficult restrictions, will engage in other password behaviors that are not secure. This research-in-progress describes the results of a pilot study of over 100 business professionals and explores the effects of password policies, memory limitations, and deterrence strategies on password security behaviors.

Rudy Hirschheim, Louisiana State University, presents "The Future of the MIS Discipline: Further Reflections" - October 21, 2005

There is much talk about whether there is or is not a future for the MIS discipline; in this seminar I will attempt to articulate what the current thinking is from a US-centric perspective. In particular, I will look at what is happening to the discipline regarding student numbers and the implications of offshoring. I shall also offer some thoughts on what the discipline can do to avoid the pitfalls of what happened with disciplines who failed to recognize the changing academic and practitioner landscape. It is my hope that the session will be an interactive one, where everyone will be able to share their thoughts on this vital topic.

Maung Sein, Agder University College, presents "E-Government: Achieving Conceptual Clarity" - October 14, 2005

The area of e-Government has rapidly become the focus of much attention amongst academics and practitioners. Led by the drive to streamline government services to citizens and increase participation in the governing and democratic process amongst citizens, government agencies and bodies at different levels are implementing information systems and undergoing process changes under the pervasive umbrella of "e-Government". Yet, what exactly the term means is unclear. Terms such as e-Democracy, e-Voting, e-Services, e-Procurement and “e-Administration” are used sporadically and often confusedly. In addition, there seems to be as many perspectives of the term as there are implementations at least across national boundaries.

This talk will try to sort through these issues, broaching these broad issues:

How can we reach conceptual clarity on the concept of “e-Government”? What is it and what it isn’t? Does it matter?

What are the particular challenges that practitioners and researchers face in this area? What methods and approaches are appropriate to carry out research and advance practice in this area?

So far, what are we doing well? What are we not doing well? What are the possible solutions to these?

Some specific challenges in developing e-Government systems and examine some solutions that have been suggested will be discussed, such as life event based development.

Heinz Klein, Binghamton University, presents "A Phenomenological Evaluation Framework for Cultural Heritage Interpretation: From e-HS to Heidegger’s Historicity" - September 30, 2005

This paper is concerned with the potential of the most recent ICT developments for improving the interpretive mission of the archaeological and historical disciplines. This mission is to communicate the cultural heritage to the general public in cultural institutions like museums or archaeological sites (like for instance Ancient Olympia). We call the support of cultural heritage communication with ICT "e-heritage systems." In this paper we shall primarily focus on formulating evaluation criteria for e-heritage systems that are designed to fully exploit the current and future communicative potential of ICT (as apposed to providing routine economic tracking and information retrieval functions). The purpose of this paper is to derive evaluation criteria for future e-heritage systems from Heidegger's phenomenological view of history in Being and Time and apply them to an example, i.e. the ARCHEOGUIDE System in Ancient Olympia. (back to schedule)

Jeff Smith, Wake Forest University, presents "Ethics and Information Systems: Grounding for Research and Teaching" - September 23, 2005

Many IS researchers profess an interest in topics associated with information ethics; unfortunately, however, the foundations for ethical argumentation and investigation are not well understood across the IS community. In this tutorial, Dr. Smith will attempt to provide an overview of the philosophical frameworks that are important in any consideration of ethical issues. He will then offer a brief discussion of potential research avenues, and he will also provide some thoughts regarding the teaching of IS ethics. (back to schedule)

2004-2005 Abstracts

Gabriele Piccoli, Cornell University, presents "Customer Managed Interactions." - April 22, 2005

Individuals and businesses have long tussled over who owns consumers' personal data. The decisive blow may be struck by customer-managed interaction, a new service model whose implementation is on the horizon. Superficially, CMI declares consumers victorious by ceding them total control over information about their past purchases and product preferences. But it also helps companies harvest the deep consumer knowledge that customer relationship management (CRM) only promises. This talk will introduce the concept of CMI, building on the limitations of CRM and the notion of data completeness, and discuss the processes and technologies needed for its implementation. (back to schedule)

Hope Schau, Temple University, presents "When Consumer Networks Create Value: the Abandoned Apple Newton Brand Community" - April 15, 2005

This research explores the boundaries of consumer co-creation and production in the context of an online brand community centered on an abandoned technological product, the Apple Newton PDA. The Apple Newton Community is a virtual value-creation network consisting of over 20,000 active members whose primary mode of interaction is online. The results demonstrate that consumers can assume control of a brand and effectively manage all aspects of the marketing mix (product maintenance and modifications, price, distribution and promotion of the device) with little or no offline interactions. The Newton community demonstrates the technology enables richer consumer experience and has a significant impact on marketplace relationships. Newton users present a set of completely sovereign consumers who operate a sophisticated value creation network.(back to schedule)

Detmar Straub, Georgia State University, presents "Strategies for Effective IS Research" - April 8, 2005

This presentation assesses the best ways for junior faculty and doctoral students to get published. It begins with a basic set of views about stages in the research process and how and where publication strategies begin to play a role. The argument is that, a priori, your research may fall into some major categories, like top-level quality work, medium-level quality work, low-level quality work, and practitioner work. Knowing this quality beforehand is the trick, and it may not be practically doable. The argument is next made that most of our journals, irrespective of level, will take most kinds of IS work. Journals seldom have a pre-set bias, because journals are not living, breathing and thinking entities. They are what their associate editors (for the most part) think they are. And this group changes. If there are associate editors on the board whose expertise favors a certain flavor of research, it can and likely will be considered by the journal. The hurdles for tenure are high today. An argument is made is that they are too high and are generally unreasonable. Empirical evidence supports the case. Next the presentation attempts to illustrate its points through a program of research. The point here is that large scale programs spin off a lot of data and possible papers, and the more so if they are well designed to start with. Lacking a theory base, for example, may exclude the work from the top journals. Retrofitting theory to data is not only a dubious practice, but it also does not work smoothly. Preparing papers for submission and getting engaged effectively in the review process are the next issues. Rejections and re-submissions wrap up the presentation aside from acceptances, which are, unfortunately, not as often the experience as most of us would like. (back to schedule)

Ozgur Turetken, Temple University, presents "A Multi-Attribute, Multi-Weight Clustering Approach to Managing 'E-Mail Overload'" - March 25, 2005

The increasing volume of electronic mail threatens to cause a state of "e-mail overload" in which the cognitive demand to process the volume of e-mail messages exceeds individuals' information processing capabilities. To address this mismatch, this study extends the application of hierarchical clustering, an effective approach for summarizing and presenting large volumes of textual information, to the domain of e-mail management. We report on the design and development of a system that applies a multi-weight, multi-attribute clustering approach to a collection of e-mail messages. We hypothesize that this approach will improve users' ability to locate messages while decreasing effort and increasing satisfaction. Our empirical study found that clustering improves user effectiveness over a simple ordered list of electronic mail messages, but improvement from the ability to adjust attribute weights is only marginally significant. As predicted by the economic theory of attention, the user's attention constraint continues to bind even when clustering is available; performance improves but effort remains consistently high. Our findings strongly imply that our application of hierarchical clustering to the e-mail domain is promoising since it improves message retrieval without additional effort and without a reduction in user satisfaction.  (back to schedule)

Vijay Gurbaxani, University of California, Irvine, presents "The Value of IT Outsourcing Arrangements: An Event Study Analysis" - March 18, 2005

This paper examines the value of IT outsourcing arrangements to clients and vendors by examining the stock market returns of these firms when deals are announced. We examine the role and impact of the strategic intent underlying the outsourcing arrangement, and the impact of deal parameters such as the relative size of the contract and the characteristics of the services outsourced. We find that the announcement of the outsourcing of IT services results in a positive impact on the stock price of both client and vendor firms in a two-day window. Moreover, client firms that are focused on improving business performance with their IT outsourcing arrangement receive a higher payoff relative to firms that focus on improving the delivery of IT services. Interestingly, the payoff to clients is higher when labor-intensive activities such as legacy systems management and applications development are outsourced suggesting that inefficiencies in a client's IT operations are more likely to occur in these types of services. In the case of vendors, there is no relationship that we are able to discern between service types and returns. From a vendor perspective, all business is good business. (back to schedule)

Wynne Chin, University of Houston, presents "Two Partial Least Squares Approaches For Assessing Moderator Effects" - February 25, 2005

"A Partial Least Squares Latent Variable Modeling Approach for Measuring Interaction Effects: Results from a Monte Carlo Simulation Study and an Electronic Mail Emotion/Adoption Study"
The ability to detect and accurately estimate the strength of interaction effects are critical issues that are fundamental to social science research in general and IS research in particular. Within the IS discipline, a significant percentage of research has been devoted to examining the conditions and contexts under which relationships may vary, often under the general umbrella of contingency theory (McKeen, Guimaraes, and Wetherbe 1994; Weill and Olson 1989). In our survey of such studies where such moderating variables are explored, the majority fails to either detect and/or provide an estimate of the effect size. In cases where effect sizes are estimated, the numbers are generally small. These results have, in turn, led some to question the usefulness of contingency theory and the need to detect interaction effects (e.g., Weill and Olson 1989). This paper addresses this issue by providing a new latent variable modeling approach that can give more accurate estimates of interaction effects by accounting for the measurement error in measures that attenuates the estimated relationships. (back to schedule)

"A Permutation Procedure For Multi-Group Comparison Of PLS Models"
To date, multi-group comparison of Partial Least Square (PLS) models where differences in path estimates for different sampled populations have been relatively naïve. Often, researchers simply examine and discuss the difference in magnitude of particular model path estimates for two or more data sets. When assessing the significance of the differences, a t-test based on the pooled standard errors obtained via a resampling procedure such as bootstrapping from each sample is made. Yet problems can occur if the assumption of normal population or similar sample size is not tenable. As an alternative distribution free approach, this paper will present the results of applying an approximate randomization test - where a subset of all possible data permutations between sample groups is made.(back to schedule)

Rick Watson, University of Georgia, presents "Evolutionary Information Systems" - February 18, 2005

Some 70,000 years ago, modern humans commenced migrating out of Africa and gradually populated the world. They had evolved a set of specialized information processing skills that enabled them to solve the problems of survival and reproduction they faced living in the African savannah. Because 70,000 years is a short period in the 6 million years since humans diverged as a separate species, we had evolved little since migrating from Africa. Consequently, our current information processing skills are those that were useful for solving the problems faced by those savannah hunters and gatherers. Yet, our world has changed greatly and today's humans face a vastly different range of problems from our ancient ancestors. Thus, in order to understand how modern humans process information and use information systems, we need to be cognizant of these evolved specialized information processing skills and the problems they solved. Evolutionary information systems applies the knowledge and principles of evolutionary biology to understand how individuals and groups use information systems. It examines how the interplay between human information processing skills, human drives, task, and technology interact to determine task performance.(back to schedule)

Ilze Zigurs, University of Nebraska at Omaha, presents "A Pattern Theory for the Management of Virtual Projects" - February 11, 2005

The management of virtual projects is fundamentally different from that of traditional projects. Furthermore, the research in this area comes from different reference disciplines and perspectives, and a unified view or theory of best practices does not yet exist. Being able to combine perspectives in a seamless way with skills and technology could provide integrative blueprints for best practices in virtual projects. Pattern theory provides a way to think about this issue. This talk will report on a recent study conducted with co-author Deepak Khazanchi and sponsored by the Project Management Institute. In our study, we focused on three concepts as the underlying theoretical elements for identifying patterns of effective virtual project management: (1) coordination, (2) communication, and (3) control. We derived a project typology from existing literature and examined the key concepts empirically via a series of virtual focus groups. The talk will present both the theoretical framing and the resulting patterns that we derived from the focus group data. (back to schedule)

Zaheer Asif, Temple University, presents "ICT support for Deliberative Communications" - February 4, 2005

It has been said that true democracy is possible not through free speech but through deliberative speech (Noveck 2003). Deliberative communications are those that are carried out in a space relatively free from domination, defensiveness or other distorting influences with an objective of sincerely reaching mutual understanding or agreement on issues that need informed consensus. Such communications can take place at any level, including groups, organizations, and society. Of late, the ‘cyberspace’ has been increasingly attracting the attention of social, political and legal theorists due to its preeminent potential to support deliberative communications. This potential of the Internet can have profound influence on the conceptualization and functioning of democratic states as well as institutions and organizations. The mushroom growth of blogs and discussion fora is an indication of society’s interest in using the Internet as an instrument of public opinion and will formation. However, research on the deliberative potential of the Internet is conspicuously absent from the premier IS research journals. We wish to draw attention to the general significance of the topic for IS research and based on this to overcome the lack of attention by the IS researchers. The principal purpose of this research is to study the impact of ICTs on the quality of public debates and to understand the dynamics of group will formation in cyberspace. We argue for a strong theory-base that should guide the exploration of the requirements of ICT support for deliberative processes of a social nature at all levels, and suggest that the critical social theories of Foucault and Habermas may provide such a foundation. At this stage the methodological alternatives under consideration are prototyping a virtual decision making environment, and using grounded theory to document the participant experiences. (back to schedule)

Shu Zou, Temple University, presents "Shall We Chat? Investigating Interactivity in Dyadic Communication in Text-based Online Live Chat Help Services" - January 28, 2005

Online live chat help services have been adopted rapidly and widely on many web sites such as Land’s End and TalkNow of Temple University Library. This service has become a new way to enhance customer service by providing instant answers and instructions to users. The relationship in online live chat involves the dyad of the customer service representative and the user who is seeking assistance. They have a temporary (but highly interactive) relationship with the purpose of problem solving. This presentation shows the current status of a research in progress exploring the characteristics of interactivity of a live chat session and how the participants communicate with each other through text-based chat and co-browsing. A research model is proposed based on the analysis of live chat transcripts, and theories from the areas of communication, Information Systems, and psychology. (back to schedule)

Jerry Luftman, Stevens Institute of Technology, discusses "Strategic Alignment Maturity" - November 19, 2004

The focus of this discussion will be Luftman's framework for applying the strategic alignment model and assessing alignment maturity in helping companies around the world understand, define, and scope an appropriate strategic planning direction that leverages Information Technology. His new book "Competing in the Information Age: Align in the Sand", published by Oxford University, available mid 2003 is expected to surpass the initial best seller "Competing in the Information Age" which is still selling strong around the globe. (back to schedule)

Abhijit Jain, Temple University, examines "The TAM in Conditions of Limited Clarification of a New Technology Option: The Role of Opinion Leadership, Personal Innovativeness and Current Satisfaction" - November 12, 2004

An important goal in technology adoption research is to refine and exploit the technology adoption model (TAM) in order to obtain insights about technology adoption intentions early in a systems development process, even before a working prototype is built (i.e. under conditions of limited clarification of the new technology option). Using such a context, i.e. where potential adopters have limited information about a new technology option, this research theorizes and tests the impact of opinion leadership, personal innovativeness and current satisfaction on relationships in the extended TAM (also called TAM2) of Venkatesh and Davis (2000). (back to schedule)

Anol Bhattacherjee, University of South Florida, presents: "Persuasion Strategies for IT Usage: An Elaboration Likelihood Model" - November 5, 2004

This study examines the role of persuasion strategies in motivating IT usage. Drawing upon the elaboration-likelihood model (ELM), we examine two such strategies, central and peripheral routes to persuasion (respectively operationalized using argument quality and source credibility constructs), and link them to the salient cognitions related to IT usage (perceived usefulness and attitude respectively). We also examine the temporal stability of the effects of these persuasion strategies on user cognitions, and contingent factors (job relevance and user expertise) moderating these effects. Eleven hypothesized associations based on the above theoretical analysis were empirically tested using longitudinal field survey data collected within the context of document management system usage at a governmental agency. Our empirical data demonstrates the applicability of ELM in understanding how IT usage can be proactively motivated in organizations, while also highlighting the inherent idiosyncrasies of using source credibility as a peripheral cue in IT usage contexts. (back to schedule)

David Croson, Temple University, discusses "The Mushroom Treatment: Information Suppression and Misrepresentation in Organizations." - October 22, 2004

The "mushroom treatment" is a common metaphor for the practice of "keeping employees in the dark and feeding them a steady diet of bull manure." We develop a model of this practice of information suppression and misrepresentation within organizations, wherein informed principals have an incentive to deliberately communicate degraded information (clipped "sales
leads") to their subordinates who perform critical tasks ("sales") for the firm. We find that the principal can generally increase expected revenues by strategically controlling the timing of the information dissemination, and that a further increase may be possible by deliberately degrading information quality in a manner verifiable for the agent. This revenue improvement comes about because the principal's credible precommitment to transfer manipulated information can induce first-best effort in situations where an accurate representation of the signal would promote shirking by the subordinates.

The benefits of manipulating information in terms of exercising control and resolving incentive problems within a firm renders deliberate (and possibly costly) obfuscation a natural part of an organization's internal communication structure. The value of an information system within an organization, therefore, will not be monotone in its transmission accuracy; enforcedly accurate information systems which prevent such manipulation entirely may have negative value. (back to schedule)

Dan Fesenmaier, Temple University, discusses "Persuasive Designs for Travel Websites." - October 15, 2004

The Internet has been recognized as the central channel supporting the tourism industry. From the consumer perspective, the growth of travel related websites enables potential visitors to easily access information about the destination, enabling a “sampling” prior to the trip. From the producer’s perspective, the Internet offers endless opportunities with which to communicate in a global market. Importantly, the growth of travel related websites has been led by the belief by producers that the simple provision of travel information is sufficient for potential travelers to decide to visit their destination. This belief appears to have drastically limited the development of Internet related systems which utilize its more creative/powerful capabilities.
Fogg (2003), among others, has recognized that Internet related technologies offer a tremendous potential to persuade or moderate people to change their attitudes and behavior. Indeed, there are many excellent examples of persuasive systems including Amazon.com, etc. The emergence of such systems has led to the growth in research focusing on the design of persuasive systems, sometimes times referred to as ‘captology.’

This presentation summarizes the results of research focusing on persuasive design over the past four years by the National Laboratory for Tourism & eCommerce, now located at Temple University. Specifically, five projects are discussed:

* The semantics of online travel information search;
* Model experience in online travel planning;
* Consumer responses to the preference elicitation process in destination recommendation systems;
* Personality testing in recommendation systems;
* Assessing the initial step in the search process: Meta tags on travel websites

The results of these and other studies confirm the potential impact of various aspects of website design, the lack of development in the tourism industry and establishes the foundation for the future research at NLTeC. In particular, future research will focus on the relative impact of persuasive designs, the nature and extent to which these systems may be used to guide travel planning and decision making, and the factors influencing this behavior. (back to schedule)

Mark Serva, University of Delaware provides "An Examination of the Theoretical Nature of Trustworthiness in a B2C E-Commerce Environment." - September 24, 2004

Advancing research on trust requires clarifying the different conceptualizations of trust and trust-related constructs. The purpose of this study is to advance the theoretical conceptualization of trustworthiness by synthesizing previous research and testing three alternative conceptualizations within the e-commerce context. Data collected from multiple studies involving over 700 participants were used to examine the relative merits of trustworthiness as a one-dimensional construct, a grouping of three first-order constructs, and a second-order construct. Our results indicate that a one-dimensional view may be too simplistic, given the variety of factors that online consumers must weigh. Instead, the study suggests that trustworthiness is multidimensional and that both first- and second-order conceptualizations have a place in e-commerce trust research. Trust researchers should be guided by the research question, hypotheses, and research design in deciding which conceptualization to use. (back to schedule)

Dennis Galletta, Temple University, discusses his findings from "A Cross-Cultural Study of the Effects of Web Advertising." - September 10, 2004

Web advertising has taken many forms, including those that appear within the Web page as an inline graphic, as well as those that "pop up" (over) or "pop under" a browsing window. Grounded in the concepts of perceived intrusiveness and the dual-process theory of cognition and perception, research provides theory-based expectations about how users come to view these ads as irritating and intrusive and thus avoid them. There have been few studies of the affective, cognitive, and behavioral impacts of such advertisements. This study also examines factors that can explain the hypothesized outcomes, in a 2x2x2 fully-factorial design. Besides a control group without ads, factors included ad placement (pop-up versus inline) and ad congruence (with the site's content or not). 417 volunteer undergraduate business students from two countries (Mexico and the United States) performed several search tasks under conditions chosen for them at random. Results indicated that, as expected, intention to return was higher without ads than with ads; retention of website information was higher when ads were not congruent (rather than congruent) with website content, and for sites with inline (rather than pop-up) ads; retention of ad content was higher for non-congruent (rather than congruent) ads, and for inline (rather than pop-up) ads. In contrast, intentions to return were not affected by ad placement, retention of site content was not affected by the existence of ads, retention of animated ads did not surpass that of static ads, and intrusiveness of ads was not affected by the ad congruence, as had been expected. This study provides an initial step into examining several important factors that should be considered by advertisers and designers of sites hosting those ads. (back to schedule)

John D'Arcy, Temple University discusses "The Role of Individual Differences and Employment Context on the Effectiveness of IS Security Countermeasures." - September 3, 2004

General deterrence theory provides a theoretical basis for the use of deterrent security countermeasures (e.g., security policies, security awareness training, preventative security software) as a means to limit the incidence of information systems (IS) misuse in organizations. However, empirical studies that have examined the effectiveness of such techniques have produced inconclusive results. A limitation of these studies is that they have failed to assess the impact of deterrent security countermeasures on individual perceptions of punishment certainty and severity, which, according to general deterrence theory, have a direct influence on abusive behavior intentions. Moreover, additional individual and situational factors that influence perceptions of punishment have not been explored. This paper draws from the IS security, criminology, and risk behavior literatures to develop a model of IS misuse intentions that includes the following propositions: (i) deterrent security countermeasures influence perceived certainty and severity of sanctions, which in turn predict IS misuse intentions; (ii) the relationship between deterrent security countermeasures and perceived certainty and severity of sanctions is moderated by individual differences (computer self-efficacy, prior IT training/experience, age, gender, and risk perception) and by employment context (employee type and virtual status). Empirical validation of the model should contribute to our understanding of IS misuse behavior and also assist managers in determining appropriate uses for deterrent security countermeasures. (back to schedule)