Journal of Management Information Systems

Volume 25 Number 1 2008 pp. 5-12

Editorial Introduction

Zwass, Vladimir

ABSTRACT:

Journal of Management Information Systems is celebrating the twenty-fifth year of publication. The first quarter-century of JMIS has witnessed its rise to a leadership position among the scholarly publications in the field of information systems (IS). More important, these years have seen the IS field become a rightful member of the family of disciplines, with its core subject and a coherent body of knowledge within which we deliver theory-based answers to ever new questions. It brings me joy and satisfaction to see that the Journal has contributed prominently and consistently to our field. It has always been the objective of JMIS to interpret the contour of our discipline broadly, and indeed expand it as time marches on. Centering on the development, use, impacts, and products of IS, our research has gained particular salience as the value-delivery webs are enabled by IS, as dominant firms are organized around their IS, as they deliver products that are fully or in a large part digital, and as our societies evolve around electronic relationships and interactions. It is especially in the impacts domain that our field can contribute at various levels of analysis and with a great methodological variety. It is by studying the impacts that we can feed back the knowledge we gain in order to develop organizational and supraorganizational structures, systems, and modalities of use that will lead us to higher levels of performance. Shrinking from this broad field of action is not the way to success.

Several now prominent research streams saw their origins in the foundational paper published in the Journal. Among others, these are the assessment of the IS value (1986), real options theory in IS (1991), design science avant la lettre (1991), negotiation systems (1992), and structures of information technology (IT)--based supply webs (1993). Over the years, the Journal has offered leadership in championing the research on the economics of IS deployment, on the strategic use of IS, on the assessment of IS impacts, and on collaborative work--again, among others. Special issues and sections help us bring into focus and address in depth key problems. Thus, recently, we have published a special issue on trust in online environments that represents a significant benchmark in this relatively new IS subfield and contributes to the core understanding of what trust actually is. Always looking to the future, we have a call for papers out for a special issue on Information Systems in Services, which aims to firmly establish this vital line of research within our field. Considering the response to the call, it probably will.

There are many measures of a journal’s success. Wide communities of scholars have benefited not only from seeing the papers authored by thought leaders in the Journal but also from theirown active involvement in the creation, editing, and refereeing of the work in their domains fostered by JMIS. Consistently top ranked, the Journal has also been found (along with ISR) to be the most representative of the leading journals in the field; an admittedly imperfect measure, the impact factor (most recently, 1.818 in 2006) places JMIS among the very top journals publishing the work in the field. All of this has been accomplished thanks to the support of the vibrant IS research community, thanks to the authors of the papers we have published, and owing to the hard (and smart) work of the JMIS editorial board, guest editors, and of the broad corps of our referees, whom I always consider the primary guarantors of our quality. It truly brings me great pleasure to thank our reviewers at the conclusion of this introduction.

Thanks also go to our publisher, M.E. Sharpe, and the editorial personnel who have been helping us bring JMIS to you. Harry Briggs, Debra E. Soled, and Sharon Ray deserve special recognition.

Now that we have concluded the celebratory part, let me introduce to you the present issue of JMIS. The Special Section that opens the issue, guest edited by Robert O. Briggs, Jay F. Nunamaker Jr., and Ralph H. Sprague, addresses multiple aspects of online coordination and interaction in the global environment. The Special Section is notable for the use of multiple strong methodologies in the treatment of greatly diverse research issues by its constituent papers. The coordination of the world’s economic activity and the collaboration of its actors is indeed to a large degree underwritten by IS, as the papers included in the Special Section illustrate. The guest editors are introducing the papers to you.

The Internet--Web compound has opened an additional distribution channel that may be used by manufacturers, who may sell via traditional retailers, as well as via e‑tailers. What distribution channel, or channels, should a manufacturer adopt, depending on the nature of the product and on the nature of the information necessary for the consumer to select the product? Dazhong Wu, Gautam Ray, and Andrew B. Whinston study the issue by economic modeling. The authors arrive at very specific strategy recommendations regarding the use of the two alternative distribution channels by the manufacturers introducing a new product category. As the authors say, it will be interesting to see whether the study of the empirics of the market will bear out these formal results.

As innovation drives competition and profits, and as the means of production and the products themselves have moved to a great degree into the digital domain and are subject to easy reproduction, the intellectual property (IP) issues have moved into the domain of concerns of our discipline. In particular, massive databases are openly available over the Web, many of them not subject to copyrights and amenable to various modes of repurposing with the existing and emerging data-extraction technologies. As it generally is with IP, the incentive for the creators of the publicly available databases needs to be combined with the ability of others to access them and create further value. What are the socially beneficial parameters of this combination? Here, Hongwei Zhu, Stuart E. Madnick, and Michael D. Siegel offer an economic analysis of this issue in a rich legal context. The analysis surfaces results actionable in the realm of policy setting and legislation, as well as for competitive marketplace positioning.

Electronic markets offer clear advantages in the financial industry. Yet almost the entire volume of fixed-income securities is traded by phone or squawk box (a form of intercom)--in other words, not through electronic trading systems (ETS). The analysis of barriers to the adoption of ETS, if followed by the measures aiming at lowering these barriers, will clearly pay off to all but some of the intermediaries who do the trading. Ali Reza Montazemi, John J. Siam, and Akbar Esfahanipour present such an empirical analysis, based on the network-relations model and a thorough on-the-ground investigation of the fixed-income industry practices. Here is indeed the case of an industry where the adoption of IT has remained --a challenge-- for decades. Here is the theory-based and highly contextual analysis that may help in changing the detrimental situation.

The next paper in the issue moves the discourse about user motivation in IT adoption away from the extrinsic-intrinsic dichotomy of the mutually exclusive motivations imposed externally or by personal volition. A deeper analysis of the users’ own feelings of autonomy, freedom, conflict, or external pressure is the subject of investigation. Yogesh Malhotra, Dennis F. Galletta, and Laurie J. Kirsch present their theory-grounded model of such endogenous motivation and validate the model in a field study. The appeal of the new approach is both in the fact that the user becomes more of the active locus of causality rather than a playground of largely external forces, and in the organizational policies that may be engendered to actually make the user be that way -- and be more effective.

User participation in information systems development (ISD) has been the subject of many and various studies. Conflicting recommendations as to the beneficial degree and nature of this participation have ensued. The area is clearly in need of a generalization of results by meta-analysis. In the concluding paper of the issue, June He and William R. King present such a work. Their findings are rather strong: this participation has only a modest, if beneficial, effect on both the behavioral and productivity outcomes. The authors place the work in the context of the general research findings regarding employees’ participation in organizational decision making, which are similar. One could posit that IS users have more to offer to the success of ISD projects and of their products than employees contributing to an organizational decision in a general context. The authors conclude that user participation per se is not enough. More nuanced, goal-oriented, and contextualized measures need to be designed for specific projects to ensure that user participation has a stronger effect on the ISD outcomes.

As I said at the beginning of this introduction, the opening of our anniversary twenty-fifth volume is a particular occasion to express gratitude to the JMIS referees, always the primary guarantors of the Journal’s quality. Here are the names of the JMIS referees:

Niv Ahituv

Pervaiz Alam

Gove Allen

Paul Alpar

Naveen Amblee

Hayward P. Andres

Dorine Andrews

Yoris Au

Benoit A. Aubert

Sulin Ba

Barbro Back

Akhilesh Bajaj

Dirk Baldwin

Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay

Ravi Bapna

Indranil R. Bardhan

Reza Barkhi

Henri Barki

Stuart J. Barnes

Anitesh Barua

Richard Baskerville

Dinesh Batra

Irma Becerra-Fernandez

Skip Benamati

Michel Benaroch

Raquel Benbunan-Fich

François Bergeron

Hemant Bhargava

Ganesh Bhatt

Anol Bhattacherjee

Sudip Bhattacherjee

Jesse Bockstedt

Wai Fong Boh

Indranil Bose

Glenn J. Browne

Jacek Brzezinski

Scott Buffett

Kelly Burke

Brian Butler

Terry A. Byrd

Jinwei Cao

Sven Carlsson

William J. Carroll

Huseyin Cavusoglu

Susy Chan

Jerry Cha-Jan Chang

Debabroto Chatterjee

Patrick Chau

Ramnath K. Chellappa

Hong-Mei Chen

Kay-Yut Chen

Kuan Chen

Yuanyuan Chen

Hsing Kenneth Cheng

Lei Chi

Robert T.H. Chi

Roger Chiang

Alina M. Chircu

Jong-min Choe

Vidyanand Choudhary

H. Michael Chung

Wingyan Chung

Theodore H. Clark

Randolph Cooper

Kevin Crowston

Dianne Cyr

Qizhi Dai

Ronald Dattero

Sergio De Cesare

Bruce Dehning

Didem Demirhan

Sarv Devaraj

Rajiv M. Dewan

Debabrata Dey

Peter Duchessi

Deborah E. Dunkle

Alexandra Durcikova

Kaushik Dutta

Omar A. El Sawy

Sean B. Eom

J. Alberto Espinosa

Ming Fan

Patrick Fan

Xiaofen Fang

Steven Feiner

Jane Feng

Eliezer M. Fich

Kirk Fiedler

Edmond P. Fitzgerald

Jerry Fjermestad

Chiara Francalanci

Mark Fuller

Brent Furneaux

Michael R. Galbreth

John Gallaugher

Dennis Galletta

Dale Ganley

Edward J. Garrity

Judith Gebauer

David Gefen

Michiel van Genuchten

Anindya Ghose

Sanjay Goel

Janis L. Gogan

Thomas Goh

Dale Goodhue

Ram D. Gopal

Nelson Granados

Peter Gray

Stefano Grazioli

Saul Greenberg

Robert K. Griffin

Michael D. Grigoriades

Bin Gu

Kemal Guler

Jungpil Hahn

Kunsoo Han

Barbara Haley

James A. Hall

Ingoo Han

Paul Hart

Khaled Hassenein

Stephen Hayne

Mohamed Hédi

Alan R. Hevner

Ann Hickey

Starr Roxanne Hiltz

Richard Hoffman

John A. Hoxmeier

Pei-fang Hsu

Paul Hu

Qing Hu

Ming-Hui Huang

Wayne Huang

Cary Hughes

Kai Lung Hui

Wendy Hui

Ard Huizing

Yujong Hwang

Ghiyong Im

Zahir Irani

Gretchen I. Irwin

Bala Iyer

Varghese Jacob

Bharat A. Jain

Matthias Jarke

Bao-Jun Jiang

James J. Jiang

Alice Johnson

Linda Ellis Johnson

Joni Jones

K.D. Joshi

Emmanuel Josserand

Surinder Kahai

Timo Kakola

Ajit Kambil

Atreyi Kankanhalli

P.K. Kannan

Jahangir Karimi

Michael Kattan

Varol Kayhan

Timothy Kayworth

William J. Kettinger

Omar E.M. Khalil

Moutaz Khouja

Melody Y. Kiang

Sia Siew Kien

Dan J. Kim

Ruth King

Rajiv Kishore

Gary Klein

Dong-Gil Ko

Cenk Kocas

Chang Koh

Rajiv Kohli

Sherrie Komiak

Marios Koufaris

Kenneth A. Kozar

Kenneth L. Kraemer

Ramayya Krishnan

Uday Kulkarni

Akhil Kumar

Chetan Kumar

Ram Kumar

Vineet Kumar

Atanu Lahiri

Simon S.K. Lam

Karl R. Lang

Tor J. Larsen

Gwanhoo Lee

Heeseok Lee

Ho Geun Lee

Jungwoo Lee

Thomas Lee

Yang Lee

Zoonky Lee

Richard Leifer

Jan Marco Leimeister

Katherine N. Lemon

Mary Jane Lenard

Hugo Levecq

Natalia Levina

Dahui Li

Xiaotong Li

Ting-Peng Liang

Paul Licker

Stephen L. Liedtka

John Lim

Kai Lim

Ming Lin

Yihwa Irene Liou

Jacqueline Lipton

Ying Liu

Alexandre Lopes

Paul B. Lowry

Henry C. Lucas Jr.

Mark Lycett

Jane M. Mackay

Simha R. Magal

M. Adam Mahmood

Arvind Malhotra

Yogesh Malhotra

Arti Mann

Ji-Ye Mao

Salvatore T. March

Nelson Massad

Charles H. Mawhinney

Jerrold H. May

William McCarthy

Roy McKelvey

Ephraim R. McLean

Nigel Melville

Shaila Miranda

Rajesh Mirani

Dinesh Mirchandani

Abhay Nath Mishra

Prasenjit Mitra

William Money

Ali R. Montazemi

Ramiro Montealegre

Jolene Morrison

Michael D. Myers

Peter P. Mykytyn Jr.

Barin N. Nag

Murli Nagasundaram

Fiona Nah

Matthew Nelson

R. Ryan Nelson

Boon Siong Neo

Fred Niederman

Mark Nissen

Dmitri Nizovtsev

Rosalie Ocker

Wonseok Oh

Bob O’Keefe

Lorne Olfman

James Oliver

Benoit Otjacques

Carl Pacini

Raymond R. Panko

Manoj Parameswaran

Michael Parent

Sungjune Park

Craig Parker

Bhavik K. Pathak

Ravi Patnayakuni

Souren Paul

David J. Pauleen

Paul A. Pavlou

Kenneth Peffers

Robin Pennington

Francis Pereira

Roger A. Pick

Huseyin Polat

Jean-Charles Pomerol

Gerald Post

John H. Prager

Sandeep Purao

S. Raghunathan

Arik Ragowsky

T.S. Ragu-Nathan

Arun Rai

Rex Kelly Rainer Jr.

K. Ramamurthy

K.S. Raman

Arkalgud Ramaprasad

B. Ramesh

Richard G. Ramirez

H.R. Rao

R. Ravichandran

T. Ravichandran

Sury Ravindran

Gautam Ray

Louis Raymond

Blaize Horner Reich

Yuqing Ren

Paul Resnick

Hyuen-Suk Rhee

William B. Richmond

Frederick Riggins

Daniel Robey

Nicholas C. Romano Jr.

Sherry D. Ryan

Young U. Ryu

Timo Saarinen

Naveed Saleem

Otavio Sanchez

G. Lawrence Sanders

Sunanda Sangwan

Radhika Santhanam

Suprateek Sarker

Surendra Sarnikar

Pallab Sanyal

Carol Saunders

George Schell

Petra Schubert

Judy Scott

Ravi Sen

Kishore Sengupta

Nainika Seth

Vikram Sethi

Theresa M. Shaft

Michael Shaw

Jim Sheffield

Olivia Sheng

Morgan M. Shepherd

Michael Shields

Siew Kien Sia

Keng Siau

Mark Silver

Atish P. Sinha

Sumit Sircar

H. Jeff Smith

Michael D. Smith

Toni M. Somers

Jai-Yeol Son

Jaeki Song

Ryan Sougstad

Scott Spangler

William E. Spangler

Valerie K. Spitler

Rajendra P. Srivastava

Thomas F. Stafford

Stephen Standifird

Sandy Staples

Eric W. Stein

Dick Stenmark

Katherine Stewart

Mani Subramani

Chandra Subramaniam

Girish Subramanian

Ramesh Subramanian

Ramanath Subramanyam

Robert T. Sumichrast

Shankar Sunarajan

Arun Sundararajan

Shankar Sundaresan

Tae Kyung Sung

Anjana Susarla

Edward J. Szewczak

Paul P. Tallon

Kar Yan Tam

Bernard C.Y. Tan

Yao-Hua Tan

Xinlin Tang

Mohan R. Tanniru

Monideepa Tarafdar

Alfred Taudes

Nolan Taylor

David P. Tegarden

Gary F. Templeton

James T.C. Teng

Thompson Teo

Jason B. Thatcher

Matthew Thatcher

Ron Thompson

James Y.L. Thong

Amrit Tiwana

Kerem Tomak

Leon van der Torre

Jonathan K. Trower

Gregory E. Truman

Yanbin Tu

Ilkka Tuomi

Ofir Turel

Brad Tuttle

Tuure Tuunanen

N.S. Umanath

Andrew Urbaczewski

Rustam Vahidov

Anthony Vance

Vasja Vehovar

Viswanath Venkatesh

Roumen Vragov

Michael Wade

Steven Walczak

Zhiping Walter

Bin Wang

Eric T.G. Wang

Jingguo Wang

Michael S. Wang

Shouhong Wang

Weiquan Wang

Y. Richard Wang

Molly Wasko

Mary Beth Watson-Manheim

Thomas Weber

Chih-Ping Wei

Charles E. Wells

John Wells

Larry West

J. Christopher Westland

Seungjin Whang

Michael E. Whitman

Jeffrey L. Whitten

George Widmeyer

Rolf Wigand

Fons Wijnhoven

Christopher Wolfe

Charles A. Wood

Hans Wortmann

Dazhong Wu

Mu Xia

Weidong Xia

Hongjiang Xu

Peng Xu

Christopher Yang

Mun Yi

Byungjoon Yoo

Wei T. Yue

Fatemeh Zahedi

Dongsong Zhang

Han Zhang

Jennifer Zhang

Michael Zhang

Ping Zhang

Zuopeng Zhang

Huimin Zhao

Kexin Zhao

J. Leon Zhao

Lina Zhou

Yilu Zhou

Kevin Zhu

Youlong Zhuang

J. Christopher Zimmer

Moshe Zviran

Let us now turn our attention to the actual first issue of the anniversary volume.

Vladimir Zwass

Editor-in-Chief