As the formation of supply webs through strategic outsourcing has redefined the landscape of contemporary business, a deeper understanding of the long-term objectives of these relationships is emerging. Organizational learning is—or should be—a primary objective of the firms collaborating in information-technology (IT)–supported business-process outsourcing and in the outsourcing of IT itself. In realizing this objective, one needs to meet a challenge: learning can be impaired by outsourcing processes to other firms. Measures are needed to continuously learn from partner companies. In the opening paper of this issue of the Journal of Management Information Systems (JMIS), Deepa Mani and Anitesh Barua investigate the impact of organizational learning on the creation of value in outsourcing relationships. The authors parse this learning into two fundamental components, relational and procedural, and use the market data on outsourcing contracts to determine the differential effects of these two kinds of learning. The results point to the salutary value-creation effects of learning as firms tend properly to these aspects of outsourcing—and, indeed, to the need to tend to these aspects.
The disruption of business models of the traditional media by the Internet–Web compound is seen everywhere, perhaps most clearly in the newspaper industry. This package of content monetized largely by print advertising has been severely challenged. Is there a response? Jahangir Karimi and Zhiping Walter deploy the theory of disruptive innovation to establish which dynamic capabilities need to be mustered by a newspaper-owning firm to respond to such a survival-threatening challenge. Dynamic capabilities are in their essence the multifaceted capabilities for change through developing specialized and differentiating resources that are dispositive in the emerging competitive environment. Much of the required response that has surfaced in the authors’ research is of the “join-them” kind, but by far not all of it. As you will read, the proper deployment of IT to create these firm’s capabilities is central to the response.
Two subsequent papers focus on software development. Nikhil Mehta and Anandhi Bharadwaj study software development by vendor teams serving a client firm in an outsourcing relationship. Adopting the knowledge-integration lens, these authors investigate two boundary-spanning processes that control, respectively, the inflow of information to a team and the outflow of information from it. Collectively, these processes aim to help the software-development team to minimize external distractions and thus help its members to integrate their common stocks of knowledge toward salutary project outcomes. Based on the empirics they deploy, the researchers show that the role these processes play has a nonlinear effect on a team’s knowledge integration and is sensitive to the degree of the project’s uncertainty. The findings are not obvious and have important implications for the regulation of interactions between the team and its organizational environment.
Open source software (OSS) development has become a key development mode in the software industry. Communitarian in nature, it is often supported in various ways by major companies that benefit from the complementarities. Software innovation in this domain is therefore of great importance, as is the effective maintenance of the existing code base. Here, Orcun Temizkan and Ram L. Kumar adopt the software-artifact unit of analysis to seek the antecedents of ambidexterity in OSS development. They show that patch development and feature requests can serve as the respective proxies for exploitation and exploration activities in OSS development processes, and proceed to empirically determine which OSS team structures lead to success.
Information technology has served to enable a variety of team structures, dispersed in space and time. J. Alberto Espinosa, Ning Nan, and Erran Carmel posit that the effects of the latter distance, that is, of the temporal separation among the team members have not been investigated in-depth, important as these effects are. After all, limited work synchronicity can be expected to lower a team’s performance, whereas the ability to “follow the sun” offers efficiencies. Basing themselves on several theoretical perspectives, the researchers devised a controlled experiment to investigate the contradiction. The authors show that the received wisdom of speed-for-quality trade-off requires qualification and they offer well-grounded avenues to achieving both benefits in the work of temporally and spatially dispersed teams.
Four papers analyze various aspects of e-commerce. Gregory D. Moody and Dennis F. Galletta postulate maximizing information scent as a means of attracting users to a website and thus as a site design objective. Information scent is the set of visual, audio, and semantic cues that can be used to guide website users in accomplishing their informational or transactional task. The authors show the efficacy of latent semantic analysis in assessing the scent and, in turn, the scent’s value in reducing the stress and enhancing the positive attitude of the website user. Clear guidelines emerge for the site designers, in particular, in regard to the need to develop use scenarios and cases, and to scent the paths to their accomplishment. A similar objective—that of enhancing users’ attitude with respect to a website—is pursued by Alexander Benlian. He studies the effect of site-personalization cues on website stickiness and on users’ willingness to pay for the site’s offerings. The author differentiates between content and design personalization, and shows the distinctions in their effects, individually and jointly. The work relies on a model grounded in the stimulus–organism–response framework. Taken together, the two papers offer a rich store of theoretically grounded and empirically verified advice to website designers.
Price dispersion online is a well-established fact, contra the early expectations of a one-price environment. There are two ways to assess this dispersion, as stated by Kexin Zhao, Xia Zhao, and Jing Deng, the authors of the next paper in the issue. One can focus on the supply side and thus the listing prices posted by sellers, or on the demand side, that is, the transaction prices, actually paid by the buyers. The difference in the two price aggregates exists because many transactions are realized at lower listing prices and the higher listing prices would thus appear less frequently as transaction prices. Using the data sets of actual prices, the authors show that the drivers of price dispersion are different on the supply and demand sides of the market. Notably, they also show that the dispersion of transaction prices is three times lower than that of listing prices. This is an important finding: whereas we do not see one price on the buying side, we are actually much closer to that than we would think when looking at the listing prices.
Using a formal game-theoretic economic model, Dan Ma investigates the impact of push-type delivery of online content as compared to the pull of content by website users. A common realization of this delivery mode is really simple syndication (RSS). The impact is measured as profitability of the site and the competitive advantage of the owner. The anecdotal evidence from the push-versus-pull practice of content delivery has been contradictory, dependent as it is on various factors, including the motivation for disclosure of the attributable revenues. Do RSS and similar push-oriented modes of content delivery add value to a website? The author uncovers a nuanced response to this question and shows that this response answers some more general questions, too.
A paper that generalizes empirically much of our knowledge about the exploration of complex information systems by organizational users closes this issue of JMIS. Huigang Liang, Zeyu Peng, Yajiong Xue, Xitong Guo, and Nengmin Wang triangulate system-exploration behavior into three factor sets: task, system, and organizational environment. The authors proceed to build a theoretically grounded model of employee-exploration behavior and use an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system as an exemplar in their empirical verification of the model. Based on this, they are in a position to provide a rich set of guidelines for employers aiming to foster comprehensive and effective use of complex information systems, and their infusion into innovative organizational practices.
As is our tradition at the outset of a new volume, I wish to thank our referees, the primary guarantors of the quality of our papers. Here are the names of the JMIS referees:
Hyung Jun Ahn
Pervaiz Alam
Oliver Alexy
Muhammad Aljukhadar
Gove Allen
Paul Alpar
Niek Altuizen
Kemal Altinkemer
Naveen Amblee
Ofer Arazy
Kursad Asdemir
Norman Au
Yoris Au
Benoit A. Aubert
Peter van Baalen
Hyunmi Baek
Ainsworth Bailey
Akhilesh Bajaj
Hillol Bala
Dirk Baldwin
Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Gaurav Bansal
Reza Barkhi
Henri Barki
Stuart J. Barnes
Richard Baskerville
Dinesh Batra
Daniel Beimborn
Skip Benamati
Michel Benaroch
Raquel Benbunan-Fich
Alexander Benlian
François Bergeron
Ganesh Bhatt
Sudip Bhattacharjee
Eva Bittner
Jesse Bockstedt
Riccardo Bonazzi
Antal van den Bosch
Indranil Bose
Randy Bradley
Tobias Brandt
Nicola Breugst
Glenn J. Browne
Sebastian Bruque
Scott Buffett
Judee Burgoon
Andrew Burton-Jones
Ashley Bush
Brian Butler
Terry A. Byrd
Jinwei Cao
Lan Cao
Erran Carmel
Hasan Cavusoglu
Sangmi Chai
Hsin-Lu Chang
Young Bong Chang
Mohamed-Hédi Charki
Sutirtha Chatterjee
Michael Chau
Patrick Chau
Aihui Chen
Andrew Chen
Daniel Chen
Hong-Mei Chen
Hsinchun Chen
Jianqing Chen
Jin Chen
Kay-Yut Chen
Kuan Chen
Li Chen
Liwei Chen
Yan Chen
Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Mike Cheung
Robert T.H. Chi
Robert Chiang
Roger Chiang
Benjamin Chiao
Ananth Chiravuri
Alina M. Chircu
Chaochang Chiu
Jong-min Choe
H. Michael Chung
Wingyan Chung
Theodore H. Clark
Randolph Cooper
Kevin Crowston
Dianne Cyr
Qizhi Dai
Yan Dang
John D’Arcy
Ronald Dattero
Gregory Dawson
Jason Dedrick
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
Haluk Demirkan
Xuefei Deng
Sarv Devaraj
Sanjeev Dewan
Debabrata Dey
Soussan Djamasbi
Su Dong
Line Dubé
Peter Duchessi
Alina Dulipovici
Deborah E. Dunkle
Kaushik Dutta
Robert Easley
Dana Edberg
Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque
Omar A. El Sawy
Mike Eom
Sean B. Eom
J. Alberto Espinosa
Andrea Everard
Kelly Fadel
Ming Fan
Patrick Fan
Xiaofen Fang
Yulin Fang
Jane Feng
Daniel R. Fesenmaier
Eliezer M. Fich
Thomas A. Fischer
Jerry Fjermestad
Chris Forman
Chiara Francalanci
Brent Furneaux
John Gallaugher
Dale Ganley
Gordon Gao
Monica Garfield
Ina Garnefeld
Edward J. Garrity
Xianjun Geng
Michiel van Genuchten
Janis L. Gogan
Kim Huat Goh
Thomas Goh
Dale Goodhue
Anand Gopal
Ram D. Gopal
Nelson Granados
Dawn G. Gregg
Shirley Gregor
Ulrike Gretzel
Robert K. Griffin
Michael D. Grigoriades
Bin Gu
Ken Guo
Zhiling Guo
Saurabh Gupta
Nicole Haggerty
Jungpil Hahn
Ingoo Han
Kunsoo Han
Shu Han
Il-Horn Hann
Matthew Hashim
Jun He
Raymond Henry
Hemantha Herath
Tejaswini Herath
Thomas Hess
Traci Hess
Alan R. Hevner
Oliver Hinz
Susanna Ho
Richard Hoffman
Christian P. Hoffmann
Jason Hong
Weiyin Hong
John A. Hoxmeier
Han-Fen Hu
Jeffrey Hu
Nan Hu
Paul Hu
Petra Hu
Qing Hu
Chun-Yao Huang
Ming-Hui Huang
Wayne Huang
Xiaowen Huang
Thomas Huber
Kai Lung Hui
Wendy Hui
Ard Huizing
Ghiyong Im
Gretchen I. Irwin
Anja Ischebeck
Varghese Jacob
Bharat A. Jain
Hemant Jain
Radhika Jain
Jeevan Jaisingh
Dietmar Jannach
Matthew Jensen
James J. Jiang
Qiqi Jiang
Zhengrui Jiang
Zhenhui Jiang
Monica Johar
Alice Johnson
Eric Johnson
Emmanuel Josserand
Surinder Kahai
Arnold Kamis
Atreyi Kankanhalli
Karthik Kannan
P.K. Kannan
Jahangir Karimi
Michael Kattan
Timothy Kayworth
Weiling Ke
Mark Keith
Peter Kenning
William J. Kettinger
Lara Khansa
Moutaz Khouja
Melody Y. Kiang
Byung Cho Kim
Dan J. Kim
Dongmin Kim
Gimun Kim
Hee-Woong Kim
Keongtae Kim
Kihoon Kim
Seung Hyun Kim
Young-Gul Kim
Ruth King
Rajiv Kishore
Gary Klein
Richard Klein
Sven Kleinknecht
Cenk Kocas
Chang Koh
Rajiv Kohli
Tobias Kollman
Praveen K. Kopalle
Marios Koufaris
Kenneth A. Kozar
Ramayya Krishnan
Gillian Ku
Uday Kulkarni
Akhil Kumar
Ram Kumar
Subodha Kumar
Jason Kuruzovich
Juhee Kwon
Atanu Lahiri
Simon S.K. Lam
Guido Lang
Karl R. Lang
Kai R. Larsen
Dong-Joo Lee
Gwanhoo Lee
Heeseok Lee
Ho Geun Lee
Jong Seok Lee
Jungwoo Lee
Thomas Lee
Yang Lee
Yen-Hsien Lee
Young-Jin Lee
Pierre-Majorique Léger
Jan Marco Leimeister
Natalia Levina
Chen Li
Dahui Li
Jiexun Li
Seth Li
Ting Li
Xiaotong Li
Xin Li
XinXin Li
XiXi Li
Huigang Liang
Ting-Peng Liang
Paul Licker
John Lim
Aleck Lin
Fu-ren Lin
Lihui Lin
Mei Lin
Charles Zhechao Liu
Ying Liu
Yipeng Liu
Alexandre Lopes
Paul B. Lowry
Henry C. Lucas Jr.
Xueming Luo
Christoph Lutz
Mark Lycett
Dan Ma
Xiao Ma
Jane M. Mackay
Massimo Magni
Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon
M. Adam Mahmood
Rolf Mahnke
Bin Mai
Yogesh Malhotra
Deepa Mani
Ravi Mantena
Salvatore T. March
Kent Marett
Panos Markopoulos
Likoebe M. Maruping
Sabine Matook
Kurt Matzler
Jerrold H. May
Kristina McElheran
Roy McKelvey
Ephraim R. McLean
Nigel Melville
Nirup Menon
Thomas Meservy
Randy Minas
Shaila Miranda
Dinesh Mirchandani
Abhay Nath Mishra
Stephanie Missonier
Sunil Mithas
Prasenjit Mitra
Kannan Mohan
Peter N.C. Mohr
William Money
Ali R. Montazemi
Ramiro Montealegre
Alan Montgomery
Greg Moody
Jolene Morrison
Michael D. Myers
Peter P. Mykytyn Jr.
Barin N. Nag
Fiona Nah
Ravi Narayanaswamy
Derek Nazareth
Matthew Nelson
R. Ryan Nelson
Boon Siong Neo
Derrick Neufeld
Dirk Neumann
Dorit Nevo
Michael Newman
Mark Nissen
Dmitri Nizovtsev
Oded Nov
Lih-Bin Oh
Wonseok Oh
Bob O’Keefe
Lorne Olfman
James Oliver
Ana Ortiz de Guinea
Benoit Otjacques
Peter Otto
Eric Overby
Zafer D. Ozdemir
Raymond R. Panko
Gautam Pant
Manoj Parameswaran
Michael Parent
Insu Park
Sungjune Park
Craig Parker
Bhavik K. Pathak
Praveen Pathak
Ravi Patnayakuni
Souren Paul
David J. Pauleen
Kenneth Peffers
Zeyu Peng
Robin Pennington
Chee-Wei Phang
Roger A. Pick
Selwyn Piramuthu
Huseyin Polat
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Jaana Porra
Constance Porter
Gerald Post
John H. Prager
David Preston
Sandeep Purao
Liangfei Qiu
Lingyun Qiu
Wen Guang Qu
Arik Ragowsky
Rex Kelly Rainer Jr.
Balaraman Rajan
Vandana Ramachandran
K. Ramamurthy
Arkalgud Ramaprasad
Bala Ramesh
H.R. Rao
R. Ravichandran
Gautam Ray
Louis Raymond
Blaize Horner Reich
Bruce Reinig
Yuqing Ren
Paul Resnick
Hyuen-Suk Rhee
Amir Riaz
William B. Richmond
Christoph Riedl
René Riedl
Lionel Robert
Nicholas Roberts
Daniel Robey
Michael Rogich
Huaxia Rui
Sherry D. Ryan
Young U. Ryu
Khawaja Saeed
Otavio Sanchez
G. Lawrence Sanders
Radhika Santhanam
Pallab Sanyal
Saonee Sarker
Surendra Sarnikar
Carol Saunders
George Schell
Hans J. Scholl
Petra Schubert
Judy Scott
Ravi Sen
Sagnika Sen
Sylvain Sénécal
Nainika Seth
Vikram Sethi
Theresa M. Shaft
Tushar Shanker
Michael Shaw
Jim Sheffield
Hong Sheng
Zhan Shi
Hung-Pin Shih
Choon Ling Sia
Siew Kien Sia
Keng Siau
Mark Silver
Param Vir Singh
Atish P. Sinha
Kingshuk Sinha
Sumit Sircar
Laura Smarandescu
Stefan Smolnik
Manuel Sojer
Jaeki Song
Ryan Sougstad
Scott Spangler
William E. Spangler
Rajendra P. Srivastava
Shirish C. Srivastava
Thomas F. Stafford
Eric W. Stein
Dick Stenmark
Theofanis C. Stratopoulos
Diane M. Strong
Besiki Stvilia
Daewon Su
Mani Subramani
Chandra Subramaniam
Ramanath Subramanyam
Eung-Kyo Suh
Heshan Sun
Arun Sundararajan
Shankar Sundaresan
Paul P. Tallon
Yong Tam
Prasanna Tambe
Yao-Hua Tan
Qiuan Tang
Xinlin Tang
Mohan R. Tanniru
Monideepa Tarafdar
Nolan Taylor
Orkun Temizkan
Gary F. Templeton
Hock Hai Teo
Thompson Teo
Matthew Thatcher
Dominic Thomas
Ron Thompson
James Y.L. Thong
Ryad Titah
Yanbin Tu
Ofir Turel
Tuure Tuunanen
Doug Twitchell
Nathan W. Twyman
N.S. Umanath
Rustam Vahidov
Ganesan Vaidyanathan
Anthony Vance
Viswanath Venkatesh
Goetz Viering
Padmal Vitharana
Radu Vlas
Douglas Vogel
Sebastian Voigt
Jan vom Brocke
Heinz-Theo Wagner
Steven Walczak
Joseph Walls
Zhiping Walter
Bin Wang
Eric T.G. Wang
Jingguo Wang
Michael S. Wang
Qiu-Hong Wang
Shouhong Wang
Sophia Wang
Weiquan Wang
Yinglei Wang
Y. Richard Wang
Sidne Ward
Mary Beth Watson-Manheim
Sunil Wattal
Thomas Weber
Chih-Ping Wei
Tim Weitzel
John Wells
Robert West
J. Christopher Westland
Jonathan Whitaker
Michael E. Whitman
Jeffrey L. Whitten
George Widmeyer
Rolf Wigand
Fons Wijnhoven
Christopher Wolfe
Christina Wong
Charles A. Wood
Hans Wortmann
Ryan Wright
Dazhong Wu
Mu Xia
Weidong Xia
Mingdi Xin
Heng Xu
Hongjiang Xu
Kefeng Xu
Lizhen Xu
Peng Xu
Yunjie (Calvin) Xu
Ling Xue
Lucy Yan
Yinping Yang
Zhiyong Yang
Oliver Yao
Ulku Yaylacicegi
Cheng Yi
Denny Yin
Byungjoon Yoo
Yufei Yuan
Wei T. Yue
Fatemeh (Mariam) Zahedi
Chun Zeng
Dongsong Zhang
Han Zhang
Jennifer Zhang
John Zhang
Ping Zhang
Xiaoquan Zhang
Yulei Zhang
Zhu Zhang
Huimin Zhao
Kexin Zhao
J. Leon Zhao
Xia Zhao
Dmitry Zhdanov
Lina Zhou
Yilu Zhou
Zhongyun Zhou
Hongwei Zhu
Youlong Zhuang
Moshe Zviran
I would also like to welcome two new members of our Editorial Board, Sunil Mithas of the University of Maryland and Joseph S. Valacich of the University of Arizona. I would like to thank two outgoing board members, Alan Dennis and Alok Gupta, for their contribution over the years of service to JMIS.