ABSTRACT:
BUSINESS REENGINEERING, AND BUSINESS PROCESS REDESIGN AND IMPROVEMENT are, respectively, more or less radical elements of business process change enabled by information technology. Two years ago, Varun Grover and William Kettinger guest-edited a Special Section of this Journal, investigating the theory of business process change. Fittingly, they now present a Special Section of five papers that analyze the actual impact of the change as experienced by the changing organizations. I will not try to preempt here the Guest Editors and the authors in presenting to you the many lessons they will help you learn.
In the first paper of the general section, Alan R. Dennis, Craig K. Tyran, Douglas R. Vogel, and Jay F. Nunamaker, Jr., examine the application of a widely used group support system (GSS) to strategic planning, based on the first-use experience by thirty firms. The authors study the impact of four GSS dimensions, two of them task-related and two process-related, on the three sets of capabilities germane to the success of strategic planning. The authors report the success factors in the use of GSS for strategic planning, which will serve the many firms that will no doubt pursue such use in the future. They also outline the emerging research issues, notably stemming from the mutual influences between the evolving managerial processes and the evolution of information technology that supports communications and organizational memory.
The next paper addresses strategic planning issues as well. Thompson S.H. Teo and William R. King study the characteristics of the four types of integration between business planning and information systems planning. The model the authors propose and investigate demonstrates an evolution through these types as the stages on the road to full integration. The authors also identify the contingency factors of the progress, with the business savvy of the top MIS executive heading the list.
Two subsequent papers concentrate on information technology. Data modeling, or logical design, with existing methods (such as entity-relationship diagramming) presents difficulties to less experienced designers. Dinesh Batra offers a method for data modeling based on the set of the application's user views, readily available from its inputs (e.g., forms) and outputs (e.g., reports). A theoretical foundation for the relatively simple yet rigorous method is offered, showing that it leads to a normalized solution.
Information systems would appear to be ideally suited to assist an organization during a crisis, when a prompt and informed response is of the utmost importance and when the entire organization needs to speak in a single voice. Yet such systems are not available. Joanne Hale, in the final paper in this issue, offers a layered architecture for a distributed crisis-response information system. The system makes it possible to bring to bear the organizational memory of previous relevant experiences and enables the appropriate group processes within the firm.
As we enter the fourteenth year of this Journal's publication, I once again thank the Editorial Board, authors, readers, and the entire MIS community for their contributions and support. As always, it is a special privilege and pleasure to thank the Journal's reviewers, the primary guarantors of its quality.
These are the reviewers of the Journal of Management Information Systems:
Tarek K. Abdel-Hamid
Mark Ackerman
Ritu Agarwal
Rakesh Agrawal
Pervaiz Alam
Donald L. Amoroso
Joon An
Urton Anderson
Lynda M. Applegate
Gad Ariav
Yiorgos D. Athanassatos
Paul Attewell
Barbro Back
Yannis Bakos
P.R. Balasubramanian
Dirk Baldwin
Rajiv D. Banker
A. James Baroody, Jr.
Dinesh Batra
Salvatore Belardo
Michael Benaroch
Francois Bergeron
David Bodoff
Bijoy Bordoloi
Bruce E. Breeding
Carol V. Brown
Robert M. Brown
Terry A. Byrd
Anthony G. Cahill
Edward G. Cale, Jr.
John V. Carlis
Judith Carlisle
Erran Carmel
Houston H. Carr
William J. Carroll
Robert P. Cerveny
Patrick Chau
Hong-Mei Chen
Minder Chen
Ye-Sho Chen
Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Robert T.H. Chi
Roger Chiang
William C. Chismar
Jong-min Choe
Joobin Choobineh
Danial Clapper
Jon D. Clark
Roger Clarke
Sue Conger
Timothy P. Cronan
David C. Croson
Paul Cule
Robert M. Daniels, Jr.
Ronald Dattero
Prabu Davamanirajan
Donald L. Davis
Sandra Dewitz
Ali Dogramaci
Brian L. Dos Santos
Peter Duchessi
Kathie Duliba
Omar A. El Sawy
Gregg Elofson
Hyun B. Eom
Mary Helen Fagan
Jesus Favela
Steven Feiner
Frederick Ferront
Kirk Fiedler
Michael Flam
Steven W. Floyd
Peter Foltz
Edward Fox
Nelson Fraiman
Richard Furuta
Michael J. Gallivan
Edward J. Garrity
Amy W. Gatian
Bezalel Gavish
Erol Gelenbe
Mark Ginsburg
Bonnie Glassberg
Janis L. Gogan
David K. Goldstein
Jerry Golub
Martin D. Goslar
Michael Goul
Paul Gray
Gary I. Green
Saul Greenberg
Robert K. Griffin
Michael D. Grigoriades
Varun Grover
Tor Guimaraes
Jatinder N.D. Gupta
Gary Hackbarth
Joanne E. Hale
Jacob Hagouel
Il-Horn Hann
Warren Harrison
Glenda Hayes
Stephen Hayne
Krishna Hegde
James O. Hicks, Jr.
Lorin Hitt
Richard Hoffman
Tony Holden
Cary T. Hughes
E. Gerald Hurst
Tomasz Imielinski
Gretchen I. Irwin
Thomas Isakowitz
Bharat A. Jain
Marius A. Janson
Matthias Jarke
Per V. Jenster
Hardeep Johar
Linda Ellis Johnson
Stef Joosten
Kailash Joshi
Charles Kacmar
Ajit Kambil
Jahangir Karimi
Michael Kattan
Robert J. Kauffman
Mark Keil
Robert T. Keim
Chris Kemerer
Julie E. Kendall
Omar E.M. Khalil
Melody Y. Kiang
Gary Klein
Henry Kon
Kenneth A. Kozar
Uday Kulkarni
Rachna Kumar
Ram Kumar
Mary C. Lacity
Laura Lally
Gwynne Larsen
Tor J. Larsen
Steven M. Lathrop
Hon-Shiang Lau
Ho Geun Lee
Jungwoo Lee
Ronald M. Lee
Dorothy Leidner
Richard Leifer
Mary Jane Lenard
Hugo Levecq
Ting-Peng Liang
Paul S. Licker
Jack M. Ligon
Yihwa Irene Liou
Astrid Lipp
Geoffrey Liu
Gary A. Lombardo
Henry Lucas
William McCarthy
Roy McKelvey
Ephraim R. McLean
Poppy L. McLeod
R. Madhavan
Simha R. Magal
Radha K. Mahapatra
Mo A. Mahmood
David Maier
Michael Mannino
Ji-Ye Mao
Salvatore T. March
Anne P. Massey
Charles H. Mawhinney
Roberto J. Mejias
Robert Minch
Shaila Miranda
Rajesh Mirani
William H. Money
Ali R. Montazemi
Ajay S. Mookerjee
Scott Moore
Kathleen Mykytyn
Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr.
Barin N. Nag
Murli Nagasundaram
R. Ryan Nelson
Sarma Nidumolu
Rosalie Ocker
Lorne Olfman
James Oliver
Levent Orman
Richard Orwig
Lee Papayanopoulos
Diane Parente
Kenneth Peffers
Norman Pendegraft
Mark Pendergast
Roger A. Pick
Alain Pinsonneault
Leo L. Pipino
Steven Poltrock
Gerald Post
Jayesh Prasad
G. Premkumar
Sandeep Purao
S. Raghunathan
T.S. Raghunathan
Arik Ragowsky
Arun Rai
Rex Kelly Rainer, Jr.
Sudha Ram
K.S. Raman
B. Ramesh
Richard G. Ramirez
Renu Ramnarayanan
H.R. Rao
R. Ravichandran
Sury Ravindran
Louis Raymond
Paul Resnick
William B. Richmond
Frederick Riggins
Daniel Robey
Michael C. Row
David Rozenshtein
David L. Russell
Young U. Ryu
Timo Saarinen
Rajiv Sabherwal
Sharon Salveter
G. Lawrence Sanders
Radhika Santhanam
John Satzinger
Carol Saunders
Naveed Saleem
George Schell
Irmtraud S. Seeborg
Arie Segev
Arun Sen
Kenneth C. Sevcik
Dennis G. Severance
Theresa M. Shaft
Barry Shane
Ben Shao
Steven Sheetz
Jim Sheffield
Olivia Sheng
Michael Shields
J.P. Shim
Chris Shull
Mark S. Silver
Atish P. Sinha
Peggy C. Smith
Charles A. Snyder
Eric W. Stein
John M. Stevens
Veda Storey
Ashok Subramanian
Girish Subramanian
Ramesh Subramanian
Ephraim Sudit
Robert T. Sumichrast
Shankar Sunarajan
Julius Surkis
Edward J. Szewczak
Kar Yan Tam
Bernard C.Y. Tan
Mohan R. Tanniru
David P. Tegarden
James T.C. Teng
Hock-Hai Teo
Thompson Teo
Matthew Thatcher
Ron Thompson
James Y.L. Thong
John Tillquist
Leon van der Torre
Jonathan K. Trower
Duane Truex
Jon A. Turner
Brad Tuttle
N.S. Umanath
Ari Vepsalainen
Boris S. Veroy
Iris Vessey
Ajay Vinze
Eric Wang
Jason Wang
Michael S. Wang
Y. Richard Wang
Yu-ming Wang
Carol Watson
Richard Watson
Aaron Watters
Bruce Weber
Peter Weill
Jay-Louise Weldon
Charles E. Wells
Larry West
J. Christopher Westland
Seungjin Whang
Michael E. Whitman
George Widmeyer
Uffe Wiil
Kristoff K. Wolyniec
Bill Wooldridge
Hans Wortmann
Hao Xialong
Surya B. Yadav
Beck Yang
Chee Sing Yap
Evangelos Yfantis
Ilze Zigurs
Moshe Zviran
VLADIMIR ZWASS
Editor-in-Chief