Journal of Management Information Systems

Volume 21 Number 1 2004 pp. 5-10

Editorial Introduction

Zwass, Vladimir

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