ABSTRACT:
With e-business (an IBM-initiated synonym for e-commerce) entering a stage of early maturity, the value of specific business initiatives in this domain is being properly questioned. Although some of the established methods of assessing the value of information technology (IT) investments carry over into the new context, the Internet-enabled organizational environment requires that we revisit how the payoff is estimated. The Special Section on Measuring Business Value of Information Technology in E-Business Environments, which opens this issue, contains four papers that expand our broadly understood capabilities to assess this value. The Section’s guest editors, M. Adam Mahmood, Rajiv Kohli, and Sarv Devaraj, introduce to you the contribution of the papers. The subject matter will be continued in the Special Issue of the International Journal of Electronic Commerce, to appear as the fall 2004 issue, under the same guest editorship.
The investments in e-procurement have been a particularly weighty segment of business-to-business e-commerce. Surprisingly to many, e-procurement has not resulted in a wholesale shift to the open Web-based platform. The first paper in the general section of the issue develops a theoretical basis for removing the surprise. Extending the established transaction-cost perspective with the consideration of risks, Robert J. Kauffman and Hamid Mohtadi show that the coexistence of the open and proprietary platforms is indeed economically justified. Moreover, explicit tradeoffs and hybrid solutions are available to the firms in selecting such platforms and controlling the risks. Ironically, the options to control the risks with a greater certainty are generally available to the firms that are in a better position to assume these risks.
The firm-level analysis of the value of e-commerce capability is continued by Kevin Zhu. Adopting the resource-based approach, Zhu shows that the combination of e-commerce capability with established IT infrastructure creates complementarities leading to a superior performance of a firm. The implications for the strategic direction of corporate IT resources are derived. The resource-based approach taken in this work creates complementarities of its own with the transaction-cost perspective of the preceding paper.
“Analysis paralysis” is a well-known phenomenon in the development and adaptation of information systems. Knowing when to stop—and why—is crucial to performance during the system requirements elicitation. Mitzi G. Pitts and Glenn J. Browne investigate the stopping rules used by practicing systems analysts. The authors categorize these rules and empirically determine which of them are more effective in closing in on a complete set of system requirements. In addition to the theoretical contribution of the work, its practical use is readily apparent.
William J. Doll and his colleagues present and validate a parsimonious instrument for the measurement of the end-user computing satisfaction. The 12-item instrument has been broadly tested and found invariant with respect to the user’s position, application type, hardware platform, and development mode. The availability of this instrument is an important step in our ability to gauge the success of an information system.
The implementation of the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems is a well-known source of spectacular—and very costly—failures. Since extensive (and extended in time) customization of such a system is a part of the implementation process, a proper relationship needs to be developed between the customizing firm and the owner company. David Gefen argues here that a significant component in developing a successful relationship is the establishment of trust between the customizer and the users in the client firm. Deploying a well-known model of trust, the author finds that, once created, the trusting relationship produces benefits extending to the perceived usefulness of the ERP system itself.
As JMIS enters the third decade of publication, I would like to express my gratitude to our authors, our readers, the Editorial Board, and the technical editors of the Journal. The very special thanks go, as always, to our referees—the primary guarantors of quality. Here are the reviewers of the Journal of Management Information Systems:
Niv Ahituv
Pervaiz Alam
Paul Alpar
Murugan Anandarajan
Hayward P. Andres
Dorine Andrews
Solomon Antony
Yoris Au
Sulin Ba
Barbro Back
P.R. Balasubramanian
Dirk Baldwin
Donald P. Ballou
Reza Barkhi
Henri Barki
Stuart J. Barnes
Dinesh Batra
Irma Becerra-Fernandez
Salvatore Belardo
Skip Benamati
Michael Benaroch
François Bergeron
Anol Bhattacherjee
Sudip Bhattacherjee
M. Brian Blake
Indranil Bose
Carol V. Brown
Robert M. Brown
Glenn J. Browne
Jeffrey Butterfield
Terry A. Byrd
Edward G. Cale, Jr.
Sven Carlsson
Houston H. Carr
William J. Carroll
Robert P. Cerveny
Sergio de Cesare
Debabroto Chatterjee
Patrick Chau
Ramnath K. Chellappa
Andrew N.K. Chen
Hong-Mei Chen
Kuan Chen
Minder Chen
Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Robert T.H. Chi
Roger Chiang
Alina M. Chircu
William C. Chismar
Jong-min Choe
H. Michael Chung
Theodore H. Clark
Roger Clarke
Randolph Cooper
Qizhi Dai
Ronald Dattero
Donald L. Davis
Gordon Depledge
Sarv Devaraj
Rajiv M. Dewan
Gisela von Dran
Peter Duchessi
Omar A. El Sawy
Sean B. Eom
J. Alberto Espinosa
Ming Fan
Bijan Fazlollahi
Steven Feiner
Kirk Fiedler
Edmond P. Fitzgerald
Jerry Fjermestad
Steven W. Floyd
Chiara Francalanci
Dennis Galletta
Edward J. Garrity
Judith Gebauer
David Gefen
Paulo B. Goes
Janis L. Gogan
Thomas Goh
Dale Goodhue
Ram D. Gopal
Sanjay Gosain
Martin D. Goslar
Paul Gray
Saul Greenberg
Robert K. Griffin
Michael D. Grigoriades
Bin Gu
Alok Gupta
Jungpil Hahn
Barbara Haley
Ingoo Han
Bill C. Hardgrave
Paul Hart
Stephen Hayne
Ann Hickey
Starr Roxanne Hiltz
Rudy Hirschheim
Richard Hoffman
John A. Hoxmeier
Paul Hu
Qing Hu
Wayne Huang
Cary Hughes
Kai Lung Hui
Ard Huizing
E. Gerald Hurst
Zahir Irani
Gretchen I. Irwin
Tomas Isakowitz
Bharat A. Jain
James J. Jiang
Linda Ellis Johnson
Robert A. Josefek, Jr.
Kailash Joshi
Boris Jukic
Nenad Jukic
Charles Kacmar
Surinder Kahai
Timo Kakola
Ajit Kambil
P.K. Kannan
Jahangir Karimi
Michael Kattan
Timothy Kayworth
Mark Keil
Chris Kemerer
Julie E. Kendall
William J. Kettinger
Omar E.M. Khalil
Melody Y. Kiang
Ruth King
Rajiv Kishore
Gary Klein
Rajiv Kohli
Esther Koster
Marios Koufaris
Kenneth A. Kozar
Kenneth L. Kraemer
Allan Krebs
Ramayya Krishnan
Uday Kulkarni
Akhil Kumar
Ram Kumar
Mary C. Lacity
Simon S.K. Lam
Karl R. Lang
Tor J. Larsen
Kathy S. Lassila
Heeseok Lee
Ho Geun Lee
Jungwoo Lee
Yang Lee
Zoonky Lee
Dorothy Leidner
Richard Leifer
Katherine N. Lemon
Mary Jane Lenard
Hugo Levecq
Ting-Peng Liang
Nancy Lightner
John Lim
Kai Lim
Yihwa Irene Liou
Astrid Lipp
Henry C. Lucas, Jr.
Mark Lycett
Kalle Lyytinen
William McCarthy
Jane M. Mackay
Roy McKelvey
D. Harrison McKnight
Ephraim R. McLean
Poppy L. McLeod
Simha R. Magal
M. Adam Mahmood
Arvind Malhotra
Yogesh Malhotra
Ji-Ye Mao
Salvatore T. March
James R. Marsden
Ivan Marsic
Anne P. Massey
Charles H. Mawhinney
Jerrold H. May
Roberto J. Mejias
Shaila Miranda
Rajesh Mirani
Ali R. Montazemi
Ramiro Montealegre
Jeanette Moody
Steven Morris
Jolene Morrison
Michael D. Myers
Peter P. Mykytyn, Jr.
Barin N. Nag
Murli Nagasundaram
R. Ryan Nelson
Boon Siong Neo
Fred Niederman
Mark Nissen
Rosalie Ocker
Wonseok Oh
Bob O’Keefe
Lorne Olfman
James Oliver
Levent Orman
Carl Pacini
Jonathan W. Palmer
Raymond R. Panko
Michael Parent
Jeffrey Parsons
David J. Pauleen
Paul A. Pavlou
Kenneth Peffers
Norman Pendegraft
Mark Pendergast
Robin Pennington
Roger A. Pick
Leo L. Pipino
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Gerald Post
John H. Prager
G. Premkumar
Sandeep Purao
Jim J. Quan
S. Raghunathan
Arik Ragowsky
T.S. Ragu-Nathan
Arun Rai
Rex Kelly Rainer, Jr.
K. Ramamurthy
K.S. Raman
B. Ramesh
Neil C. Ramiller
Richard G. Ramirez
Bharat Rao
H.R. Rao
R. Ravichandran
T. Ravichandran
Sury Ravindran
Amy W. Ray
Louis Raymond
Paul Resnick
William B. Richmond
Frederick Riggins
Suzanne Rivard
Daniel Robey
Michael B. Rogich
Nicholas C. Romano, Jr.
Sherry D. Ryan
Young U. Ryu
Timo Saarinen
Rajiv Sabherwal
Naveed Saleem
G. Lawrence Sanders
Radhika Santhanam
Carol Saunders
George Schell
Petra Schubert
Judy Scott
Ravi Sen
Kishore Sengupta
Vikram Sethi
Theresa M. Shaft
Jim Sheffield
Olivia Sheng
Morgan M. Shepherd
Michael Shields
Siew Kien Sia
Atish P. Sinha
Sumit Sircar
H. Jeff Smith
Michael D. Smith
Charles A. Snyder
William E. Spangler
Rajendra P. Srivastava
Thomas F. Stafford
Sandy Staples
Eric W. Stein
Dick Stenmark
Lee Stepina
John M. Stevens
Mani Subramani
Girish Subramanian
Ramesh Subramanian
Robert T. Sumichrast
Shankar Sunarajan
Arun Sundararajan
Tae Kyung Sung
Roderick I. Swaab
Edward J. Szewczak
Paul P. Tallon
Kar Yan Tam
Bernard C.Y. Tan
Yao-Hua Tan
Mohan R. Tanniru
Alfred Taudes
Angsana A. Techatassanasoontorn
David P. Tegarden
Gary F. Templeton
James T.C. Teng
Hock-Hai Teo
Thompson Teo
Jason B. Thatcher
Matthew Thatcher
Ron Thompson
James Y.L. Thong
John Tillquist
Leon van der Torre
Jonathan K. Trower
Duane Truex
Gregory E. Truman
Ilkka Tuomi
Brad Tuttle
Tuure Tuunanen
N.S. Umanath
Rustam Vahidov
Yaniv Vakrat
Vasja Vehovar
Viswanath Venkatesh
Michael Wade
Steven Walczak
Bin Wang
Michael S. Wang
Shouhong Wang
Y. Richard Wang
Carol Watson
Mary Beth Watson-Manheim
Bruce W. Weber
Thomas Weber
Chih-Ping Wei
Charles E. Wells
Larry West
J. Christopher Westland
Seungjin Whang
Michael E. Whitman
George Widmeyer
Fons Wijnhoven
Charles Willow
Barbara Wixom
Charles A. Wood
Hans Wortmann
D.J. Wu
Mu Xia
Christopher Yang
Byungjoon Yoo
Han Zhang
Ping Zhang
J. Leon Zhao
Lina Zhou
Kevin Zhu
Ilze Zigurs
Moshe Zviran
Wishing you—and JMIS—a good decade,
Vladimir Zwass
Editor-in-Chief