Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management, Volume 2

Citation

Mason, D. (2003), "Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management, Volume 2", Online Information Review, Vol. 27 No. 6, pp. 451-451. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520310510109

This book is the second in a series called Advanced Topics in Information Resource Management. It consists of 16 academic articles exploring issues associated with IRM. Four of the articles were previously published in Information Resources Management Journal, but the others are original.

In general the quality of writing and research is very high, reflecting the fact that some widely respected researchers have contributed to this volume. Only a handful of the authors are recent PhDs or junior faculty, and despite the fact that only one of the contributors is listed as a non‐academic most of the articles show a closer relationship with industry than found in the first volume. Unusually for collections of this type, only two of the articles are based on surveys of students.

The articles cover a wide range of topics. Some tackle the standard operational IRM topics; two are on virtual working, three are on knowledge management and there is one each on IT investment, technology adoption, and IT outsourcing. On the other hand, there are three articles dealing with policy issues of technology in society, and then three are even more theoretical pieces: on chaos theory as a means of studying information systems, morality as a driver of information systems security, and a postmodernist interpretation of one company's mission statement. Two articles examine IT in education. One is a rather superficial survey of students' attitudes to using a groupware product to do assignments. The other, by contrast, is a rigorous evaluation of approaches to teaching using different levels of multimedia, but its relevance to IRM is not immediately obvious.

The research approaches used in the collection are also very diverse. Five of the articles are standard surveys and statistical treatments. One of these is notably above the others, the KM article by Bock and Kim, which looks at the role of rewards in knowledge sharing. The IT and society articles together provide an extensive review of the literature and are well researched. There are three case study treatments that will appeal to IT managers. The article on IT investment applies financial investment theory directly information systems, and uses a single case to illustrate its point.

Overall, this is an interesting collection of articles. There is a good mix of subjects and methodologies, the articles are theoretically sound and well researched and offer the reader both standard IRM subjects and distinctly unusual treatments. Both academics and IS managers will find something of interest in this collection.