Journal of Management Information Systems

Volume 30 Number 1 2013 pp. 5-14

Editorial Introduction

Zwass, Vladimir

ABSTRACT:

WITH THE PRESENT ISSUE, the Journal of Management Information Systems is opening its 30th volume. This is certainly an occasion to celebrate. The field of information systems (IS) and the Journal have traveled a long path of everyday toil and uncommon discovery. The world, and its societies and organizations, have been transformed by information systems and by the technologies around which they are built. Our working and personal lives have been changed, have moved closer to each other, and are now lived on the world scene and at a more rapid pace. Indeed, our understanding of the life we lead has been transmogrified by our ability to connect and by the opportunities and challenges of cohabitation with the artifacts borne of information technologies. It falls to our discipline to help the world to understand and meet these challenges and to develop and exploit these opportunities.

Scholarly journals have been a primary means of disciplinary development for 350 years. They are a discipline's treasury. The leading journals of a discipline have the heavy responsibility of defining it as a research field. JMIS is consistently ranked as one of the top three IS journals. It has always been a key objective of the Journal to meet the expanding role of information technology (IT) with tche expansion of the profile of our IS discipline. Our scholarly field seeks to understand how systems can be organized, developed, and deployed effectively to manage information and knowledge toward specified outcomes, in order to support organizations, marketplaces, and products. Within this disciplinary commitment, we should range widely, I believe. Methodological pluralism is necessary to advance our knowledge and to advance our field. Further, we are not and we should not be importers and adapters of knowledge from other disciplines or aim at becoming major exporters as the measure of our success. We should realize that the embeddedness in the societies, organizations, practices, and products is in the very nature of information systems and technology. Consequently, we should not seek sharp boundaries, and we should see the value of interdisciplinary work centering on IT-based systems and their use to the world at large, to the advance of knowledge-and to our field.

Several important subfields and research streams of IS have originated with the scholarly work published in JMIS. Among the more important I can mention these: scholarly assessment of the business value of information systems, real options theory in IS, design science, negotiation support systems, and service science. We have been the early champion of economics research in our field. The work on collaboration and group support published in the Journal has set the agenda for this important research stream. Among other recent initiatives, the innovative Special Issue on Neuroscience and IS Research is currently being developed by its authoritative Guest Editorial Board. As IT moves to the ever new frontiers, so do we who wish to understand and develop the capabilities of information systems built around this technology conglomeration.

The two papers that open the 30th volume present empirical investigations of the role of senior IS executives in the firm's success and reputation. The first, by Elena Karahanna and David S. Preston, studies the effect of the three dimensions of social capital that emerges from the relationship between the chief information officer (CIO) and the top management team (TMT) on the IS strategic alignment and, consequently, on the firm's performance. The empirics are obtained in the setting of the U.S. hospital industry. The results clearly show the influence of the relationship between the CIO and TMT and, further, of the alignment between the business and IS strategies, on financial performance. The lens of social capital allows for a nuanced understanding of the wellsprings of that influence and performance.

With the strategic role of IS intensifying, a reputation for superior capability in that domain is desired by companies, if only in view of its influence on the capital markets and of the competitive image at large. Here, Jee-Hae Lim, Theophanis C. Stratopoulos, and Tony S. Wirjanto show empirically that this reputation depends on the culture of reciprocity between the TMT and the top IS executives of the firm in which these executives are accorded the power and visibility that helps them to execute their strategies for IS. The authors build their project on institutional theory. Taken together with the preceding work, the two papers offer distinct practical insights for the firms that increasingly depend on IS in successfully executing their business strategies.

An important contribution to our understanding of the role of IT in national productivity is made by the work presented by Jason Dedrick, Kenneth L. Kraemer, and Eric Shih. It had been shown before that IT investment is associated with productivity gains in developed countries. The present authors show that this is also true for a large upper layer of developing countries, consisting of 45 countries. They also show the factors that influence these productivity gains. The work not only offers us a much more hopeful view of the world, but also brings specific guidelines to the other developing countries. It contributes to the scholarly growth studies as well.

In the present economy, ecosystems of cooperating firms organizing themselves into supply webs bring us complex products, often packaging together goods and services. These firm networks also incur cybersecurity risks stemming from the interdependence of their Internet-based interorganizational IS. Thus, firms lose control of their information security postures. The measures taken by a firm's partners can bear weighty negative or positive externalities. How should the firms manage such risks of interdependence? In a formal economic analysis, Xia Zhao, Ling Xue, and Andrew B. Whinston show the relative effectiveness of three solutions to the problem: cyberinsurance, risk pooling, and outsourced managed security services, deployed in various combinations. The work has immediate practical implications and will certainly be built upon in a further development of the theoretical base of incentive-compatible cybersecurity measures.

Online whistle-blowing systems have emerged as an apt medium for reporting organizational abuses and failures. It is important to ensure that these systems indeed facilitate the actual reporting. Paul Benjamin Lowry, Gregory D. Moody, Dennis F. Galletta, and Anthony Vance study the perceptual factors that can lead a firm's employees to engage in whistle-blowing with the use of these systems. This is certainly a case that if they build it, no one may show up. Beyond its immediate objective, the study also contributes to our understanding of the complexities of trust and anonymity.

Two subsequent papers investigate aspects of IS development (ISD). In the recognition of the frequent failure of ISD projects, Ravi Narayanaswamy, Varun Grover, and Raymond M. Henry study the factors that inhibit harmony between the project participants, working under many pressures, notably those of uncertainty engendered by changing system requirements. The authors construct and test a model of congruence between the perceptions of the project manager and those of the team members. In seeking common understanding through a variety of influence tactics surfaced by the authors, the loss of project control can be averted.

Mark Keith, Haluk Demirkan, and Michael Goul present a service-oriented methodology of ISD as well as a multiyear study of its deployment in the field. The methodology has its theoretical underpinnings in the coordination theory and is a contribution to both ISD and service science. The methodology is devised in the recognition of the fact that most ISD environments fall between the poles of stability and riskiness. Echoing the concerns and the solutions of the preceding paper, this work addresses the realities of the human processes surrounding the development of IT-based systems.

Co-creation of value by consumers and other nonemployees has been increasingly a factor in the success of many a firm, and communities are most frequently the locus of this co-creation, with much of the individual motivation emerging from their collectives. In the first of the two papers investigating this domain, Constance Elise Porter, Sarv Devaraj, and Daewon Sun compare the results obtained in sponsored and in autonomous co-creation. In other words, should a firm sponsor a customer community or should it let the customers develop their own communities, if they wish to do so? The authors devise theory-driven models of both types of communities and test their hypotheses by surveying consumers involved in numerous communities. Although value is co-created in both community types, sponsored co-creation is found to offer advantages.

Product reviews are one of the common outcomes of co-creation, subject to aggregation and becoming the electronic word-of-mouth. How credible are they in the perception of their readers? Matthew L. Jensen, Joshua M. Averbeck, Zhu Zhang, and Kevin B. Wright extend the language expectancy theory to the online setting in order to study how reader-expectancy violations result in greater or lower review credibility. In a nuanced discussion of their empirical findings, the authors highlight how reviews by strangers can exert-deserved or undeserved-influence on our behavior.

Digital supply chains and webs are the reality of today's global business. In this environment, various categories of risk emerge. How can these risks be mitigated? Ling Xue, Cheng Zhang, Hong Ling, and Xia Zhao draw on the systems and organizational theories to propose and test their hypotheses that relate the extent of supply-chain digitization by companies to the modularity of their IS and to the allocation of the decision rights to the firm's IS unit. It emerges that the modularization has to be properly harmonized with the IS governance in seeking risk mitigation.

Our anniversary is an occasion for the expression of gratitude. Profound thanks go to the IS community for the support JMIS has received over its first three decades. Thanks go to the present and past members of our Editorial Board, who have always been the thought leaders in our field. Thanks also go to our publisher, M.E. Sharpe, and to the editorial and technical team they have provided for us: they have been with us and for us for thirty years. Great thanks go to our referees-all of them, as I do not tire of saying-the primary guarantors of our quality. Here are the names of the JMIS referees:

Hyung Jun Ahn
Pervaiz Alam
Hossam Ali-Hassan
Muhammad Aljukhadar
Gove Allen
Omar Alnuaimi
Paul Alpar
Kemal Altinkemer
Naveen Amblee
Hayward P. Andres
Corey Angst
Ofer Arazy
Kursad Asdemir
Norman Au
Yoris Au
Benoit A. Aubert
Peter van Baalen
Barbro Back
Hyunmi Baek
Ainsworth Bailey
Akhilesh Bajaj
Hillol Bala
Dirk Baldwin
Subhajyoti Bandyopadhyay
Gaurav Bansal
Ravi Bapna
Indranil R. Bardhan
Reza Barkhi
Henri Barki
Stuart J. Barnes
Richard Baskerville
Dinesh Batra
David Bell
Skip Benamati
Michel Benaroch
Raquel Benbunan-Fich
Alexander Benlian
François Bergeron
Ganesh Bhatt
Anol Bhattacherjee
Sudip Bhattacharjee
Jesse Bockstedt
Wai Fong Boh
Antal van den Bosch
Indranil Bose
Nicola Breugst
Glenn J. Browne
Sebastian Bruque
Scott Buffett
Judee Burgoon
Andrew Burton-Jones
Ashley Bush
Terry A. Byrd
Jinwei Cao
Erran Carmel
Sangmi Chai
Susy Chan
Hsin-Lu Chang
Mohamed-Hédi Charki
Michael Chau
Patrick Chau
Ramnath K. Chellappa
Andrew Chen
Daniel Chen
Hong-Mei Chen
Hsinchun Chen
Jianqing Chen
Jin Chen
Kay-Yut Chen
Kuan Chen
Li Chen
Liwei Chen
Yan Chen
Yuanyuan Chen
Hsing Kenneth Cheng
Mike Cheung
Lei Chi
Robert T.H. Chi
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
Sergio De Cesare
Jason Dedrick
Chrysanthos Dellarocas
Didem Demirhan
Xuefei Deng
Sarv Devaraj
Soussan Djamasbi
Su Dong
Wenjing Duan
Peter Duchessi
Deborah E. Dunkle
Alexandra Durcikova
Kaushik Dutta
Robert Easley
Dana Edberg
Christophe Elie-Dit-Cosaque
Aaron Elkins
Omar A. El Sawy
Mike Eom
Sean B. Eom
J. Alberto Espinosa
Andrea Everard
Ming Fan
Patrick Fan
Xiaofen Fang
Yulin Fang
Steven Feiner
Jane Feng
Daniel R. Fesenmaier
Eliezer M. Fich
Robert Fichman
Jerry Fjermestad
Chris Forman
Chiara Francalanci
Brent Furneaux
John Gallaugher
Dale Ganley
Gordon Gao
Ina Garnefeld
Edward J. Garrity
Andrew Gemino
Michiel van Genuchten
Joey George
Anindya Ghose
Janis L. Gogan
Kim Huat Goh
Thomas Goh
Dale Goodhue
Anand Gopal
Ram D. Gopal
Nelson Granados
Dawn G. Gregg
Ulrike Gretzel
Robert K. Griffin
Michael D. Grigoriades
Bin Gu
Kemal Guler
Ken Guo
Zhiling Guo
Saurabh Gupta
Nicole Haggerty
Jungpil Hahn
Ingoo Han
Kunsoo Han
Khaled Hassenein
Jun He
Hemantha Herath
Tejaswini Herath
Traci Hess
Alan R. Hevner
Starr Roxanne Hiltz
Oliver Hinz
Richard Hoffman
Jason Hong
Weiyin Hong
John A. Hoxmeier
Pei-fang Hsu
Jeffrey Hu
Nan Hu
Paul Hu
Qing Hu
Chun-Yao Huang
Ming-Hui Huang
Wayne Huang
Kai Lung Hui
Wendy Hui
Ard Huizing
Yujong Hwang
Ghiyong Im
Gretchen I. Irwin
Anja Ischebeck
Varghese Jacob
Bharat A. Jain
Radhika Jain
Jeevan Jaisingh
Dietmar Jannach
Matthew Jensen
Anand Jeyaraj
Bao-Jun Jiang
James J. Jiang
Zhengrui Jiang
Alice Johnson
Eric Johnson
Emmanuel Josserand
Surinder Kahai
Arnold Kamis
Atreyi Kankanhalli
Karthik Kannan
P.K. Kannan
Jahangir Karimi
Evangelos Katsamakas
Michael Kattan
Timothy Kayworth
Weiling Ke
William J. Kettinger
Moutaz Khouja
Melody Y. Kiang
Sia Siew Kien
Byung Cho Kim
Dan J. Kim
Dongmin Kim
Gimun Kim
Seung Hyun Kim
Young-Gul Kim
Ruth King
Rajiv Kishore
Gary Klein
Richard Klein
Cenk Kocas
Chang Koh
Rajiv Kohli
Tobias Kollman
Sherrie Komiak
Praveen K. Kopalle
Marios Koufaris
Kenneth A. Kozar
Ramayya Krishnan
Gillian Ku
Uday Kulkarni
Akhil Kumar
Ram Kumar
Jason Kuruzovich
Atanu Lahiri
Simon S.K. Lam
Guido Lang
Karl R. Lang
Nancy Lankton
Kai R. Larsen
Gwanhoo Lee
Heeseok Lee
Ho Geun Lee
Jong Seok Lee
Jungwoo Lee
Thomas Lee
Yang Lee
Yen-Hsien Lee
Younghwa (Gabe) Lee
Pierre-Majorique Léger
Jan Marco Leimeister
Natalia Levina
Chen Li
Dahui Li
Ting Li
Xiaotong Li
Xin Li
XinXin Li
XiXi Li
Ting-Peng Liang
Paul Licker
John Lim
Fu-ren Lin
Lihui Lin
Ming Lin
Yihwa Irene Liou
Ying Liu
Yipeng Liu
Alexandre Lopes
Paul B. Lowry
Henry C. Lucas Jr.
Mark Lycett
Jane M. Mackay
Pruthikrai Mahatanankoon
M. Adam Mahmood
Bin Mai
Yogesh Malhotra
Michael V. Mannino
Ravi Mantena
Ji-Ye Mao
Salvatore T. March
Kent Marett
Likoebe M. Maruping
Jerrold H. May
William McCarthy
Kristina McElheran
Roy McKelvey
Harrison McKnight
Ephraim R. McLean
Nirup Menon
Randy Minas
Shaila Miranda
Dinesh Mirchandani
Abhay Nath Mishra
Sunil Mithas
Prasenjit Mitra
William Money
Ali R. Montazemi
Ramiro Montealegre
Alan Montgomery
Jolene Morrison
Benjamin Mueller
Michael D. Myers
Peter P. Mykytyn Jr.
Barin N. Nag
Fiona Nah
Derek Nazareth
Matthew Nelson
R. Ryan Nelson
Boon Siong Neo
Derrick Neufeld
Michael Newman
Andreas I. Nicolaou
Ralitza Nikolaeva
Mark Nissen
Dmitri Nizovtsev
Oded Nov
Lih-Bin Oh
Wonseok Oh
Bob O'Keefe
Lorne Olfman
James Oliver
Benoit Otjacques
Peter Otto
Yasin Ozcelik
Zafer D. Ozdemir
Carl Pacini
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
Paul A. Pavlou
Kenneth Peffers
Robin Pennington
Stacie C. Petter
Roger A. Pick
Selwyn Piramuthu
Huseyin Polat
Jean-Charles Pomerol
Jaana Porra
Gerald Post
John H. Prager
David Preston
Lingyun Qiu
Wen Guang Qu
Arik Ragowsky
Rex Kelly Rainer Jr.
Vandana Ramachandran
K. Ramamurthy
Arkalgud Ramaprasad
B. Ramesh
Richard G. Ramirez
H.R. Rao
R. Ravichandran
Gautam Ray
Louis Raymond
Blaize Horner Reich
Bruce Reinig
Yuqing Ren
Paul Resnick
Hyuen-Suk Rhee
William B. Richmond
Christoph Riedl
René Riedl
Lionel Robert
Nicholas Roberts
Daniel Robey
Michael Rogich
Nicholas C. Romano Jr.
Huaxia Rui
Sherry D. Ryan
Young U. Ryu
Khawaja Saeed
Otavio Sanchez
G. Lawrence Sanders
Radhika Santhanam
Pallab Sanyal
Nilesh Saraf
Saonee Sarker
Surendra Sarnikar
Pallab Sanyal
Carol Saunders
George Schell
Hans J. Scholl
Petra Schubert
Judy Scott
Ravi Sen
Sagnika Sen
Sylvain Sénécal
Nainika Seth
Vikram Sethi
Theresa M. Shaft
Michael Shaw
Jim Sheffield
Hong Sheng
Morgan M. Shepherd
Michael Shields
Choon Ling Sia
Siew Kien Sia
Keng Siau
Mark Silver
Param Vir Singh
Atish P. Sinha
Sumit Sircar
Stefan Smolnik
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
Mani Subramani
Chandra Subramaniam
Ramanath Subramanyam
Heshan Sun
Arun Sundararajan
Shankar Sundaresan
Tae Kyung Sung
Ali Tafti
Paul P. Tallon
Prasanna Tambe
Vaughn Tan
Yao-Hua Tan
Qiuan Tang
Xinlin Tang
Mohan R. Tanniru
Monideepa Tarafdar
Nolan Taylor
Gary F. Templeton
Hock Hai Teo
Thompson Teo
Jason B. Thatcher
Matthew Thatcher
Dominic Thomas
Ron Thompson
James Y.L. Thong
Gregory E. Truman
Yanbin Tu
Ilkka Tuomi
Ofir Turel
Tuure Tuunanen
N.S. Umanath
Andrew Urbaczewski
Rustam Vahidov
Ganesan Vaidyanathan
Anthony Vance
Viswanath Venkatesh
Goetz Viering
Padmal Vitharana
Radu Vlas
Douglas Vogel
Steven Walczak
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
Molly Wasko
Mary Beth Watson-Manheim
Sunil Wattal
Thomas Weber
Chih-Ping Wei
Bruce Weinberg
Charles E. Wells
John Wells
Larry 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
Lizhen Xu
Peng Xu
Yunjie (Calvin) Xu
Ling Xue
Yinping Yang
Zhiyong Yang
Oliver Yao
Ulku Yaylacicegi
Byungjoon Yoo
Yufei Yuan
Wei T. Yue
Fatemeh Zahedi
Chun Zeng
Dongsong Zhang
Han Zhang
Jennifer Zhang
John Zhang
Michael Zhang
Ping Zhang
Xiaoquan Zhang
Yulei Zhang
Zuopeng Zhang
Huimin Zhao
J. Leon Zhao
Kexin Zhao
Dmitry Zhdanov
Lina Zhou
Yilu Zhou
Zhongyun Zhou
Hongwei Zhu
Youlong Zhuang
J. Christopher Zimmer
Moshe Zviran

At this time, we want remember two individuals who have contributed greatly to our field and who have also contributed to JMIS.

Douglas C. Englebart, one of JMIS?'s authors, is, of course, much more famous as the inventor of the computer mouse. He was far more than that. A visionary, he saw the future computing environment already six decades ago as an augmentation of human intellect and as a vast medium of human collaboration. A practitioner, he implemented, against the great odds set by the early computing ecosystem, some of what he envisioned. Combining the insight and experience of several leading researchers, the programmatic paper Douglas Englebart coauthored in JMIS (vol. 18, no. 4, spring 2002) lays out the architectural principles of a system of knowledge evolution to support virtual communities. We all live in his world.

Robert W. Blanning served for many years on the Editorial Board of JMIS. His work in the areas of decision support and in model management in particular is foundational and well known. As one of our editors, he has contributed to the final shape of papers in his domain that have appeared in the Journal. Our field, and our journal, will miss Bob Blanning.

And now-on to the fourth decade of JMIS. Please read the papers.

Vladimir Zwass
Editor-in-Chief