Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2007), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 20 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2007.08820aaa.001

Editorial

Dear Readers,

We kick off this issue of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management with an interesting viewpoint written by Erwin Rausch on “The critical need for coverage of quality decision making in professional and management education”. Rausch argues the perspective that there are widespread shortcomings in the literature and in educational programmes, when it comes to helping students learn what it takes to make high-quality decisions in both professional and personal instances. He has observed that educational programmes may expose students to process steps for making decisions, but that these are mostly from a technical perspective. While on the other hand, other programmes approach decision making from a different angle, addressing issues such as environmental and psychological factors; encapsulating uncertainty and its impact on the decision process. However, neither literature nor textbooks (he argues) provide guidance on issues that Rausch believes a decision maker should consider for it to be a high quality one. Rausch goes onto to argue that a manager has to consider Control, Competence and Climate (3Cs) and what needs to be done so that all three are at the highest possible level. Rausch suggests a list of decision guidelines that can be drawn from an analysis of what is needed to achieve the highest possible level of the 3Cs. We hope the brief viewpoint will show how a list of guidelines or criteria from a non-technical aspect of decision making can support managers in taking high quality decisions.

The first paper in this issue is a technical one, and addresses aspects of decisions with a contribution by Amelia Maurizio, Louis Girolami and Peter Jones. Their paper is titled “EAI and SOA: factors and methods influencing the integration of multiple ERP systems (in a SAP environment) to comply with the Sarbanes-Oxley Act” (SOA). The focus of this paper is on the completion of this process within a SAP environment not withstanding the highlighting of issues that may cause concern across any ERP and EAI landscape. The authors identify integration points between the underlying ERP systems and EAI technologies, and then offer methods that are available to address these issues through the Standard Applications in SAP. In achieving the objective of their paper, the authors utilise earlier research, surveys and documentation, as well as information gathered from developers, auditors and compliance experts. The authors find that to comply with the SOA, it is advisable to look at the area of EAI. The challenge of configuring a landscape to comply with the SOA without EAI means that most of the links for data transfer would be interfaces versus integration, which was found not acceptable to compliance groups. In realising SOA requirements, including internal controls, testing, security, authorizations and consistency and speeds, there are tools available focused on the SAP environment. With the passing and implementation of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, companies are experiencing additional pressure to develop the means to constantly audit themselves to mitigate risk. As technology is the key to achieving this goal, organizations must prepare their IT infrastructures to support compliance and the IT departments to develop strategy. As SOA continues to take shape, further review and investigation of how these changes will affect the EAI environments must be undertaken and are broadly covered in this paper.

The next paper shifts attention to the recurring problem of evaluating and justifying investment in information technology. As a result of a technology push and competitive pull, IT spend grows in organisations (both public and private), and IT applications have major impacts on an organisation’s strategic positioning, operations and society at large. Throughout the 1980s the issue of “IS effectiveness measurement” and evaluation ranked in the top ten of managers’ concerns (Brancheau and Wetherbe, 1987), while the methods and processes of measurement were being experienced as highly problematic areas (Willcocks, 1989). IT investments remain very difficult to evaluate (Sharif et al., 2005), with numerous methods available (Irani and Love, 2002). The difficulties are both conceptual (what should be involved in evaluation) as well as conceptual (how to carry out evaluation). Despite the widespread availability of methods and techniques the problem continues to worry executives, researchers and the public alike (see Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 17 No. 4, Special Issue on IS Evaluation). The contribution by Michael Williams and Janet Williams takes a new look at an old problem with “A change management approach to evaluating ICT investment initiatives”. The authors present an evaluative framework, based upon theories of change corresponding to a three-phase model of change implementation. The authors endeavour to test the validity of the framework by applying it to a real-world instance of systems change. Their results indicate that although the framework is not a panacea it can assist in identifying areas of concern that have routinely caused problems in change management projects, and, if undetected, have the potential to develop into instances of technical or business related failure.

Lee Yao, Teresa Kam and Siew H. Chan investigate how culture, attitude, and barriers affect knowledge sharing in their paper “Knowledge sharing in the Asian public administration sector: the case of Hong Kong”. Their paper reviews the general concepts of knowledge management and in particular those related to public administration. The study that is based on interviews with IT systems administrators and senior management officials, as well as a survey clearly portrays that respondents were receptive to knowledge management and knowledge sharing within the empirical instance. Although informal and tacit knowledge sharing occurred, the Chinese culture remained as a barrier to knowledge sharing. The results of the research should alarm senior management in Asia, who should seek ways to help improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness to make use of the rich pool of knowledge workers in the public administration sector.

We continue this issue with the second batch of papers from the European and Mediterranean Conference on Information Systems (EMCIS) (see www.emcis.org), selected by Dr Tony Elliman of Brunel University’s School of Information Systems and Computing. The authors of the papers selected have worked hard to expand their research, following feedback received at the conference. The first of the three papers selected looks at different managerial activities related to enterprise information systems and explores related strategic issues. However, the EMCIS Conference covered a broad range of topics, and the last paper looks at a more technical issue related to web server efficiency, clearly demonstrating the broad coverage of EMCIS – human, organisational and technical.

In the first paper, McBride et al. take a challenging look at the process of software project management in their paper “Software development as a design or a production project: an empirical study of project monitoring and control”. Traditional engineering management tends to focus on controlling the production of a product by identifying tasks and dependencies between assembly processes. This can be managed by tracking tasks and checking progress against a production and assembly plan. However, information systems projects are notorious for being late or delayed despite the many years of experience of using this management approach successfully. In their research, McBride et al. postulate that at least some software development projects should be seen as a research and development tasks with a need for a different management approach. This analysis is supported by an empirical study, which leads to the development of a simple test that can be applied to determine whether a project can be treated as a production or research activity. As part of an initial project planning activity, this test has the potential to enable more appropriate management techniques to be adopted.

More and more information systems are being developed in an open B2B e-business environment that depends critically on the adoption of appropriate standards. Rodon et al. present a distinctive view of the standard establishment process by examining the interplay between different stakeholders, in their paper titled “A process-stakeholder analysis of B2B industry standardisation”. Rather than focus on technology issues they examine the behaviour and attitudes of the different participants in a case study of a local port authority’s standards committee. The use of stakeholder theory and notions of power, legitimacy and urgency (Mitchell et al., 1997) reveal interesting lessons about the factors that frustrate or expedite the standards process. All too often, critics of standardisation attribute ulterior motives and hidden agendas to powerful stakeholders. However, in this study, appropriate management and leadership from the dominant stakeholder are shown to be capable of preventing the process becoming a protracted series of iterations through successive versions. This paper received one of the conference’s best paper awards, and if you are involved in standards processes, this paper is a must for your reading list.

The third paper turns to a broader corporate strategy problem. Ezingeard et al. address the question of Information Assurance (IA) within an organisation and its fit with business strategy in a paper titled “Mastering the art of corroboration: a conceptual analysis of information assurance and corporate strategy alignment”. IA is emerging as the preferred terminology for the range of activities an organisation takes to secure and protect its information assets. This goes beyond physical and IS security to include responsibility for the appropriateness and integrity of the information content. In this conceptual paper, Ezingeard et al. present a comprehensive analysis of the growing literature in the area, which leads to the development of an appropriate conceptual model. Building on Henderson and Venkatraman (1993) they analyse the relationship between IA and organisational strategy. However, Ezingeard et al. conclude that the topic is still in its infancy, with some disparity between the concerns of academic researchers and practitioners in the field. With growing numbers of commercial organisations dependent on their information assets simply to continue to survive as business entities, this is an important area of work with potentially far-reaching implications.

The final paper from de Korvin et al. on “Information preloading strategies for e-government sites bases on user’s stated preference” is an unusual one for the Journal of Enterprise Information Management because we do not usually publish such mathematical analyses of IS problems. However, the question of performance efficiency for high-volume internet server sites is an important one. Way back in 1981, Stonebraker (1981) showed that the virtual memory management strategies incorporated within standard operating systems were inappropriate for specialist applications like database managers. The same problems are also true of WWW servers, and in this paper, de Korvin et al. examine pre-fetch strategies tuned to the needs of users browsing a busy website. Based on the use of historical data, the authors derive a model that seeks to classify the move from current page (x) to next page (y) as expected, possible or unlikely. This information is then used to determine the set of pages {y₁, y₂, y₃, …} that are preloaded when a user arrives at page x. A critical side effect of this approach is a reduction in the need to create identifiable user profile data and thus a reduction in the system’s incursion into privacy issues.

The EMCIS conference series has established a forum that brings together a rich collection of IS researchers, and hopefully they will deliver more interesting contributions to JEIM in the future. All the papers in this issue illustrate the wide range of concerns that legitimately make up the area of enterprise information management. On the one hand they have looked at technology issues like B2B standards, IS security and server performance, factors and methods influencing the integration of multiple ERP systems in a SAP environment. On the other they have addressed project management, stakeholder theory, corporate strategy, knowledge sharing and a fresh approach to ex ante evaluation based on change management theories.

Issue 2 of Volume 20 has been edited by Professor Cengiz Kharaman.

We hope you enjoy reading both these issues.

Zahir IraniEditorOmiros D. SarikasEditorial Assistant