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BAD 84007 F05 Weinroth

B_AD 84007
Information Technology
Kent State University
Fall Semester 2005
Instructor: Dr. Jay Weinroth
Course Syllabus
Part I -- logistics
  1. Class meetings and Office information. This class meets in BSA A404, Tuesday and Thursday, 1:45 to 3:00 p.m.. My office is A421. E-mail is jweinrot@bsa3.kent.edu and phone is 330 672-1150. If I am not able to answer your call please leave a message. You will also have my home e-mail to be used judiciously, but I will not copy the address to this public document.
  2. STUDENTS WITH DISABILITIES: In accordance with University policy, if you have a documented disability and require accommodations to obtain equal access in this course, please contact the instructor at the beginning of the semester or when given an assignment for which an accommodation is required. Students with disabilities must verify their eligibility through the Office of Student Disability Services (SDS) in the Michael Schwartz Student Service Center (181 MSC) (672-3391).
  3. ENROLLMENT: It is the student's responsibility to ensure proper enrollment in classes. You are advised to review your official class schedule during the first two weeks of the semester to ensure proper enrollment. Should you determine an error in your class schedule, you have two weeks from the beginning of the semester to correct it with your advising office. If registration errors are not corrected by this date and you continue to attend and participate in classes for which you are not officially enrolled, you are advised that you will not receive a grade at the conclusion of the semester.
  4. Last day to drop an individual class.  Check the fall course bulletin for the last date to drop an individual class without special permission. If you stop attending a class without officially dropping, the probable result will be a grade of F.
  5. Cheating -- any form of copying another student's work and submitting it as your own will result in one or more of the consequences specified in the university regulations, for all students responsible for the incident. Obviously where students are given a team assignment the two or more persons both attach their names to the work. It is a quasi-legal requirement to mention this in the syllabus. I do not really regard it as relevant for the students of this class.
 
  1.   GRADE WEIGHTS:
Task
Percent of final grade
Outline for research paper
10%
Mid-semester draft of research paper
25%
Final submission of research paper
35%
Performance on editorial panel – outlines
10%
Performance on editorial panel – mid-semester drafts
10%
Performance on editorial panel – final submissions
10%
 
(7). Academic complaints. University regulations, some of which are reprinted in your copy of the KSU telephone directory, govern many aspects of our classes, including academic complaints.
 
Part II Purpose and Format of the Course
B_AD 84007 was designed to familiarize the student with the environment of refereed journal research in the field of Information Systems/Information Technology. "Technology" is understood here in the sense that the Information Systems function in the business world is as often refereed to as IT as it is referenced as IS. We are still talking about the design, management, and use of computerized information systems for organizational objectives.
To this end, we will read and discuss a number of papers published in refereed journals, in order to understand several ways in which one can conduct some research that will fall successfully into some category that a reviewer and an editor regards as meriting publication. We will look for various papers published in refereed journals that are examples, respectively, of controlled laboratory experiment, survey, field study, case study, executive interviews, literature review coupled with theoretical model building, actual system development with testing and described usefulness.
We will have eight class sessions focusing on discussion of papers we have read. I expect you to bring to class sets of systematic notes (See the electronic handout "Notes on Refereed Journal Articles") for each of the articles scheduled for discussion, and to use these notes to contribute to our understanding of the articles.
The rest of our class meetings will focus on writing for and performing editorial review services for an imaginary journal in information systems. Thus, the members of the class will be both researchers and reviewers. The review part of our course is an imitation of the refereed journal process. When someone submits a paper for possible publication, it is given a review by knowledgeable professionals who recommend accepting the paper, rejecting it, or suggesting a number of changes to the author.  The instructor will act as an associate editor, receiving advice from the reviewers and guiding the decision process.
Each student will submit work to the rest of the class and the instructor, acting as reviewers, in three stages – outline, mid-semester working draft, and final or at least second draft of the paper.
Another major responsibility of each student is to make available to the rest of the class a small number (typically 3 or 4) of important published papers from the literature relevant to his or her ongoing research paper. You may do this by giving us a reliable online source, including the university library database, or by providing hard copies if online access is not readily available. We need access to these background papers in a timely fashion, that is, in time to have read them before we evaluate your outline.
At each stage the student will receive a critique from the reviewers and incorporate the recommended changes in her or his ongoing work.  When a stage of your research is due, you will provide electronic or hard copy of your work to all members of the class and the instructor.  The critique from each student acting as reviewer, and from the instructor, will include a grade, following the criteria spreadsheet we will use for this purpose.   Each reviewer, when writing the review, will provide abundant comments to guide the author toward the completion of an excellent research paper.
As shown above in the summary of percentages of the course grade, for each of the three reviews we conduct (outline, first draft, second draft), each student will receive a grade on the quality of his or her work as a reviewer, using the second criteria spreadsheet created for this purpose.  Each student whose work has been reviewed will fill out a grading spreadsheet for the student who did the review, and the instructor will assign a grade to the quality of each person’s review work also.  As Associate Editor, the instructor’s ratings will count equally with the average of the grades assigned by the class members, both for the grades assigned to each student’s three stages of research and for each person’s work as a reviewer.
 
 
Part III Access at Kent State to refereed journals
  1. You can find some of these journals on the second floor of our library. Papers from past years are bound in large hard cover volumes. Issues from the current year are in a special area on the second floor. You can also avail yourself of the holdings of various other libraries that will honor your Kent State student ID, such as Akron. Hard copy versions of these journals are becoming more rare every year, in contrast with electronic copies.
  2. You can request the loan of various articles directly from the librarians working in our Interlibrary Loan offices.
  3. You can access much of what you will want to read and, as far as I as instructor am concerned, all you need to read in this course on line from the Kent State Libraries web site. Their site is www.library.kent.edu. There you will want to click on the link for Alphabetical List of Databases. From there select B and then go to Business Source Premier and click either on On Campus or Off Campus as needed. On Campus works in the college computer lab. Call the Reference librarians to find out what password you need if you are going to work Off Campus. Printing can be tricky. Often you need to print via the icon on the lower menu bar (the one directly part of the screen presentation of the article) rather than via the print command under the File menu.
  4. Finally, some journals are stricter at protecting their recent material than are others. You will see that in some instances the journal’s on line link ends up offering you the opportunity to pay for receiving a copy of the article. In these cases you will see that our library’s web site provides you with the alternative of getting the article through interlibrary loan. There will be a charge, but less than the journal itself wants to charge you.
But the bottom line on this is that I am NOT requiring you in this course to use any article from a refereed journal that you cannot access for free on line. If you are desperately curious to get an article unavailable online into your hands, the library will help you, for a fee. If you are seriously going to consider submitting your paper to a real journal, you may find it worthwhile to pay for some articles. However, I will accept your work – and I expect our in-course editorial reviewers to do the same – from issues that are a year or two old if those are the only ones you can get on line without paying. There is plenty of very good work you can do on that basis, and, after all, we are practicing here. Finally, some journals are much more generous than others about making their current or at least recent work available on line. I have given them my preference in the assigned readings.
 
Part IV ASSIGNED READINGS
access all of these assigned readings on line through the KSU library database. Use Business Source Premier, and type in the title of the article in the search window for subject. You can then print the article.
Note that you may choose to write your own research paper for this course in any one of these modes of approach, as well as others. It is not necessary to plan to engage in new data gathering unless you have a special reason to do so.
 
1.      Peace, A. et al, "Software piracy in the workplace: a model and empirical test," Journal of Management Information Systems, Summer 2003. Vol.20 issue 1, p. 153. This is an example of the traditional research paper; theoretical model connects literature and derived new data gathering.
2.       Tang, J. and Cheng-Kiang, F., “The effect of interpersonal influence on softlifting intention and behaviour,” Journal of Business Ethics, 2005, Vol. 56, p. 149.
3.       Young, K., “Internet Addiction,” American Behavioral Scientist, December 2004, Vol. 48, p. 402.
4.       Baumer, D. et al, “Internet privacy law: a comparison between the United States and the European Union,” Computers & Security, September 2003, Vol. 23, p. 400.
5.       Zhou, L. et al, "A comparison of classification methods for predicting deception in computer-mediated communication," Journal of Management Information Systems, Spring 2004, Vol.20 issue 4, p. 139. Exact contrast with the previous paper – detailed investigative work.
6.       Wilson, E.V., “Persuasive effects of system features in computer-mediated communication,” Journal of Organizational Computing and Electronic Commerce, 2005, Vol. 15, p. 161.
7.       Sussman, S. et al, "Informational influence in organizations: an integrated approach to knowledge adoption," Information Systems Research, Mar 2003, Vol. 14, issue 1, p. 47. Addresses the topic of Knowledge Management; applies the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM); classic structure for research paper.
8.       Skok, W. and Kalmanovitch, C., “Evaluating the role and effectiveness of an intranet in facilitating knowledge management: a case study at Surrey County Council,” Information & Management, 2005, Vol. 42, p. 731.
9.       Van der Aaist, W. and Kumar, A., "XML-based scheme definition for support of interorganizational workflow," Information Systems Research, Mar 2003, Vol. 14 issue 1, p.23. Papers based on actual program development are important in IS research. Besides, this paper addresses information management issues as well.
10.  Kohli, R. and Devaraj, S., "Measuring information technology payoff: a meta-analysis of structural variables in firm-level empirical research," Information Systems Research, June 2003, Vol. 14, issue 2, p. 127. This is one of many papers that address the "productivity paradox." It is also an example of a research paper done strictly as meta-analysis.
11.  Galliers, R. and Meadows, M., "A discipline divided: globalization and parochialism in information systems research," Communications of AIS, Vol. 2003 issue 11, p.108. This is discussion of the discipline of IS research (meta-research), not of a specific research issue. Very valuable for our course.
12.  Berthon, P.et al, "Potential research space in MIS: a framework for envisioning and evaluating research replication, extension, and generation," Information Systems Research, Dec. 2002, vol. 13, issue 4, p. 146. More meta-research. An issue of momentous importance and seldom addressed in our discipline – if an explanation is scientific, then the experiment can be replicated.
13.  Gefen, D., "What makes an ERP implementation relationship worthwhile: linking trust mechanisms and ERP Usefulness," Journal of Management Information Systems, Summer 2004, vol. 21, issue 1, p. 263. Topic of Enterprise Resource Planning systems, related to productivity paradox research – whether IS investment simply cannot be shown to be productive or whether we still are not doing the research correctly.
14.  Gattiker, T. and Goodhue, D., “What happens after ERP implementation: understanding the impact of inter-dependence and differentiation on plant-level outcomes,” MIS Quarterly, September 2005, Vol. 29, p. 559.
15.  Xue, Y. et al, “ERP implementation failures in China: case studies with implications for ERP vendors,” International Journal of Production Economics, 2005, Vol. 97, p. 279.
16.  Lightner, N., "What users want in e-commerce design: effects of age, education and income," Ergonomics, January 2003, vol. 46, issue 1-3, p. 153. Topic of user satisfaction.
17.  Kujala, S., "User involvement: a review of the benefits and challenges," Behaviour & Information Technology, Jan 2003, vol. 22, issue 1, p. 1. User satisfaction.
18.  Sobiesiak, R., "DB2 universal database: a case study of a successful user-centered design program," International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, September 2002, vol. 14 issue 3, p. 279. User satisfaction. Case study methodology example.
19.  Downing, C. et al, "The value of outsourcing: a field study," Information Systems Management, Winter 2003, vol. 20 issue 1, p. 86. Topic of outsourcing the IS function. Also example of field study methodology, although practitioner journal.
20.  Rajkumar, T. and Mani, R., "Offshore software development," Information Systems Management, Spring 2001, vol. 18 issue 2, p. 63.
21.  Zhu, K., "The complementarity of information technology infrastructure and e-commerce capability: a resource-based assessment of their business value," Journal of Management Information Systems, summer 2004, vol. 21 issue 1, p. 167. Topic of e-commerce. Also involves perspective of the "Resource Based View" of management.
22.  Filson, D, "The impact of e-commerce strategies on firm value: lessons learned from Amazon.com and its early competitors," Journal of Business, april 2004, vol. 77, p. 135.
Part V Some examples of taking systematic notes on refereed journal articles. Access the article on the library data base and note how these notes reflect the important content.
Example # 1
Authors: Harding, William T. Assoc. Prof. Texas A & M
Reed. Anita J., doctoral student U of S. Fla; Gray, Robed L., Chair IS W. New Engl College
Journal: Information Systems Management, Summer 2001, Vol. 18, Issue 3
Title: Cookies and Web Bugs: What They Are and How They Work Together
Journal Type: Refereed/Practitioner
9 pp. w/ references
Question: What is the technology; what benefits & what threats
Method: explains & demos the technology; quotes & summarizes spokespersons
Method details: none
Findings: Web bugs can be detected
Synchronized servers at marketer sites can read cookie data from cookies from other cookies on your hard drive; could make personal info available to those not authorized
Conclusion: Synchronized cookies may bring vast invasion of privacy
Action: Follow up their references
Do search on "Web bugs" and on "Synchronization"
Example # 2
Authors: Venkatesh, Viswanath, Asst. Prof of IT, U of Md, several good journals; Morris, Michael, Asst. Prof of IS, Wright-Patterson Inst, good journals
Journal: MIS Quarterly, March 00, Vol. 24, Issue 1
Title: Why Don't Men Ever Stop to Ask for Directions? Gender, Social Influence, and Their Role in Technology Acceptance and Usage Behavior
Journal Type: Refereed/Academic
12 pp plus tables & references
Question: How do gender, social influence, and usage over time impact the Technology Acceptance Model of Davis et al
Method: field study
Method details: 342 workers across 5 organizations being introduced to new info retrieval systems completed questionnaires during training, one month later, and three months later; also their usage of new systems tracked by number of log-ons; linear regression software (PLS) used to analyze statistical significance of six hypotheses
Findings:
Differences in organizations and personal data did not affect results
Initially men placed greater emphasis on Usefulness
Initially women placed greater emphasis on Ease of Use
Initially, Social Influence was significant for women but not for men
Over time, emphasis on Usefulness & Ease of Use continued
Over time, significance of Social Influence declined
Differences in actual usage were seen not to be influenced directly by attitudes about U or UOE, but only through Behavioral Intention
Conclusion: Perhaps Men and Women need different approaches in training in order to accept new technology, or at least individuals who differ in terms of sensitivity versus action-orientation do. This may be helpful with respect to the costly problem of unused new technology.
Action:
Search under "Gender" + "Technology acceptance"
Read Davis, MISQ, Vol 13, issue 3, 1989, pp. 319-339
Contact editors or authors – Means for Men vs Women on EOU appear reversed?
Gefen et al investigates gender and technology acceptance but NOT new technology.
There is no other gender-oriented research with respect to tech acceptance, to date!
 
 
Example # 3
Authors: Bharadwaj, Anandhi, Asst Prof of IT at Emory, several papers in quantitative journals of high quality
Journal: MIS Quarterly, Mar 00, Vol. 24, Issue 1
Title: A Resource-Based Perspective on Information Technology Capability and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation
Journal Type: Refereed/Academic
13 pp plus tables & references
Question(s): How can the resource-based view theoretical approach be applied to data to result in a reliable analysis of the relation between IT capability and business performance, in the face of inconclusive results to date
Method: the first part of the paper is a long theoretical exposition of what could be the components of organizational infrastructure needed for IT capability to give a firm sustained competitive advantage
The second part applies a matched-pairs statistical technique to existing data on two sets of firms, in order to test two hypotheses
Method details:
Variables to be compared are traditional accounting data, such as ROI, taken from the Compustat database
One set of firms selected for study because ranked by Information Week as having superior IT capability
The other set was matched with these by industry and average annual sales
Findings:
In each pair, profit ratios were significantly higher (statistically) for the IT leaders
In each pair, some costs of business were significantly lower for the IT leaders, but some were not
Conclusion: the fact that this study has partial success in demonstrating some empirical relations between IT capability and business performance can be construed as evidence for the view that other studies that fail to show this positive relationship are partly flawed in their research design
On 'practical' level, the study shows managers that the goal is not merely to invest in IT but rather to do so only with a strategy that shapes the role of IT as a part of the firm's unique capabilities
Action:
Follow up her references to papers that show inconclusive results for IT investment, and see if her critique of their research fits
 
 
 
Example # 4
Authors: Orlikowski, Wanda, frequent author, editor, MIT
Iacono, Suzanne, National Science Foundation
Journal: Information Systems Research, June 01, Vol. 12, Issue 2
Title: A Resource-Based Perspective on Information Technology Capability and Firm Performance: An Empirical Investigation
Journal Type: Refereed/Academic
13 pp plus references
Question(s): How can a research method be pursued that focuses on "the IT Artifact"?
Method: review of papers in ISR over past 10 years
Proposal of a new method of research
Argumentation
Method details:
188 articles were examined
Findings: Five views of IT were discovered in the literature -- IT as a tool; IT's measured as something else (proxy); IT as a form of system (ensemble); IT as computational processes; IT as a secondary topic (Nominal)
Conclusion: the systems approach, which is the only one that actually focuses on what constitutes IT, was used in only 12% of the articles
We need a focused theory of IT, and that theory will always be oriented to the social context of use of the particular system
Action: Contrast this study with patterns in other journals
 
 
 
 
 
 
Part VI Schedule of classes and assignments.
 
Week 1 30-Aug
1. Introduction to the course
1-Sept
2. Discuss assigned readings # 1,2
Determine review sequence (order in which students are reviewed) -- examine author & reviewer criteria
Week 2 6-Sept
3. Discuss and identify individual research topics
8-Sept
4. Discuss assigned readings # 3,4,5
Week 3 13-Sept
5. Discuss assigned readings # 6,7,8
15-Sept
6. Discuss assigned readings # 9,10,11
Week 4 20-Sept
7. Discuss readings from student # 1
22-Sept
8. Discuss readings from student # 2
Week 5 27-Sept
9. All students submit outlines.  Discuss readings from student # 3
29-Sept
10. Discuss readings from student # 4
Week 6 4-Oct
11. Preliminary discussion of reviews
6-Oct
12. Preliminary discussion of reviews
Week 7 11-Oct
13. reviews of outlines
13-Oct
14. reviews of outlines
Week 8 18-Oct  
15. Discuss assigned readings # 12, 13
20-Oct
16. Discuss assigned readings # 14, 15, 16
Week 9 25-Oct
17. TENTATIVE -- Discussion with Dr. Booth on preliminary planning of statistical tests when designing research
27-Oct
18. Discuss assigned readings # 17, 18, 19
Week 10 1-Nov
19. submit first drafts
TENTATIVE -- Discussion with Dr. Faley on design of survey research. Alternative for today is general discussion of progress and problems in papers.
3-Nov
20. Preliminary discussion of reviews
Week 11 8-Nov
21. I am serving as a poll worker – special election --  no class or meet on alternate day
10 Nov
22. Preliminary discussion of reviews
 
Week 12 15-Nov
22. reviews of first drafts
18-Nov
23. I am out of state enrolled in a workshop --  no class or meet on alternate day
Week 13 22-Nov
24. reviews of first drafts
 
24-Nov
Thanksgiving -- no class
Week 14 29-Nov
25. final drafts submitted
Discuss assigned readings # 20, 21, 22
1-Dec
26. Preliminary discussion of reviews
Week 15 6-Dec
27. Preliminary discussion of reviews or reviews of second drafts, as appropriate
 
8-Dec
28. reviews of final drafts
Class meets from 1:00 to 3:00
Finals Week 13-Dec
reviews of second drafts as needed
classroom reserved from 1:00 to 4:00
15-Dec
 
 
Part VII.   Important note on requirements for completion of research paper.
If this is your first semester in our doctoral program, and the design of your research requires data gathering that cannot reasonably be completed during the semester (administering a survey, conducting interviews, carrying out experiments), you are not required to complete that part of the paper.  You will be required to complete the literature review, a research model, and a research design, all of which properly reference expected completion of the actual data gathering.  In a minority of instances, for example, if your research is a meta-analysis, you may be able to complete the actual data gathering. 
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