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