A NOTE ON THE RELATIONSHIPS AMONG FINENESS,GARBLING, AND SUFFICIENCY FOR THE COMPARISON OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS*

Choice among competing information systems is an important problem for both the providers and users of information. When the attributes of the decision makers and decision problems for which information is produced are unknown or heterogeneous, it is difficult to choose among alternative information sources. Three criteria for such comparisons of information systems are available in the theory of information economics. These criteria may be distinguished by the differing restrictions that they impose on the generality of the studies in which they are used. This note explicates the relationships among these criteria and discusses the various limitations that they impose on generality.     

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT,USER INVOLVEMENT,AND THE USEFULNESS OF INFORMATION SYSTEMS*

This study investigates organizational factors related to user involvement in information system development and perceived system usefulness. Using a sample of 118 usermanagers in 34 companies, the results show that user involvement in design and implementation is related positively to users' perceptions of system usefulness. However, organizational factors were not found to be related significantly to user involvement, as had been originally hypothesized. Rather, organizational factors either had a direct relationship with perceived usefulness or moderated the relationship between involvement and usefulness. Two factors reflecting an MIS department's maturity (size and age) were found to reduce users' perceptions of system usefulness. Also, users at higher levels and those making more structured decisions found their systems more useful, although the user's level was found to moderate perceptions of system usefulness during the design stage. Three other organizational factors (level of MIS manager, MIS department scope, and decentralization of authority) also were found to have moderating effects.     

An Instrument for Assessing the Organizational Benefits of IS Projects

This paper reports the development of an instrument to measure the organizational benefits of IS projects. The basis for this instrument was a published framework that suggests three categories of such benefits: strategic, informational, and transactional. In a cross-sectional study of 178 IS projects proposed and approved for development, this framework was operationalized and empirically tested using the measurement model of LISREL. The analysis culminated in the validation and refinement of the these categories. The final instrument offers items under three separate subdimensions of strategic benefits: competitive advantage, alignment, and customer relations. Informational benefits are similarly comprised of information access, information quality, and information flexibility. Finally, transactional benefits are also shown to be of three types: communications efficiency, systems development efficiency, and business efficiency. Implications of this multidimensional instrument for IS practitioners and researchers are discussed.     

PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES IN THE USE OF GRAPHIC AND TABULAR DISPLAYS OF MULTIVARIATE DATA

It has been suggested that graphically displayed multivariate data help decision makers better understand information they are called on to analyze. This study compares judgments made from one recently suggested multivariate display technique with judgments made from traditional tabular displas of financial figures. Significant differences in task performance are found to be related both to differences in the stimulus sets and to individual differences among the subjects. Our results suggest that the relative contribution of graphic displays to decision making may vary considerably from situation to situation.     

Applications and Implementation DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS: AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT FOR DECISION MAKING

A laboratory experiment examined the effects of applying decision support system (DSS) technology to decision making in ill-structured problem environments under varying information conditions. Marketing executives participated in the experiment which investigated the effects of DSS availability, DSS training, and data availability on dependent variables that included: (1) the number of alternatives considered by a subject during decision making, (2) the period of time spent by a subject to complete the decision-making process, (3) the subject's perceived confidence in the decisions he or she had made, (4) the amount of data considered by a subject's during decision making, (5) the individual subject's decision processing, and (6) the subject's performance overall. Our results indicate that all three factors significantly affect the number of alternatives considered by subjects during the decision-making process. We therefore suggest that DSS training be coordinated with decision training in order to realize the potential of DSSs as described in the DSS literature.     

THE STRUCTURE OF EXECUTIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS: AN EXPLORATORY ANALYSIS

This paper reports on a study which attempted to identify the structure of executive information systems and evaluate their relationship to decision making. The study centered on answering the question: “Where and how do senior executives get their decision-making information?” The data, provided by five senior executives, were gathered by a variety of means which included personal interviews, questionnaires, and logs of the executives' incoming-information transactions for a two-week period. Our findings support beliefs that senior executives receive much information from the environment, that informal systems play a role equal to that of formal systems, and that computers do not provide much information directly to an executive. The study also found that internal information is important and that preferred sources and media vary with different decision roles. The authors suggest that the scope of MIS and DSS be broadened to match those information networks managers actually rely on in daily practice.     

DUAL-METRIC MEASUREMENT OF THE IMPACT OF COMPLEXITY ON DECISION QUALITY*

Both sophisticated and unsophisticated subjects were provided either a simple or a complex cue set at random on which to base decisions. A dual-metric approach that consisted of measuring interrater consistency and cross-item variance for each subject category was used to compare the decision quality of the subjects. Although complexity and decision quality were inversely related, the sophisticated subjects performed relatively better using the complex cue set; the unsophisticated subjects performed better using the simple cue set. These findings support the notion that decision-maker and task compatibility are important to the assessment of decision quality.     

CONTINUITY IN MIS/DSS LABORATORY RESEARCH: THE CASE FOR A COMMON GAMING SIMULATOR*

To date, case analyses and field studies have predominated in MIS/DSS research. Laboratory studies seem not to have been given the attention they deserve. This trend is partially due to: (1) the high costs associated with developing decision simulators and related software to support laboratory research and (2) difficult problems with external validity because of unrealistically simple simulated decision environments and DSS software. Since MIS/DSS laboratory research has been most successful when studies have occurred in an interrelated stream, the development of common, portable, and flexible simulators seems desirable. Common simulators would reduce the time and cost of developing experiments, provide for research continuity, comparability, and replication, and facilitate researcher-to-researcher communication. Sufficiently complex simulators and DSS software would reduce problems with external validity by providing more realistic laboratory models. This paper presents a software package that offers considerable potential as a common tool for DSS research.     

SCAT AND SPAT: LARGE-SCALE COMPUTER-BASED OPTIMIZATION SYSTEMS FOR THE PERSONNEL ASSIGNMENT PROBLEM

The personnel assignment problem involves the assignment of people to tasks, projects, etc., in a manner that maximizes a measure of aggregate utility for the assignees subject to several assignment constraints. In addition to computationally efficient solution algorithms, the effective implementation of mathematical models to solve the personnel assignment problem must include data processing systems with comprehensive error checking/resolution procedures, end user reports, documentation, and training. This paper summarizes two successful computer-based systems for solving large-scale personnel assignment problems that frequently occur in university settings. SCAT, the Student-Company Assignment Technique, assigns students to job interview slots. SPAT, the Student-Project Assignment Technique, assigns students to project teams in an MBA field project course. The SCAT and SPAT approaches can be generalized to a wide variety of personnel assignment problems in university, industry, government, and military settings.     

A Seasonal Index for Business

This paper explores the problem of obtaining a multiplicative seasonal index for forecasting sales from a small set of historical data (as is common in business applications) and in the presence of a trend. It is shown that the standard method for generating a seasonal index (from a centered moving average) contains a systematic error. This error is transmitted through to forecasts that use the seasonal index and causes higher than necessary safety stocks and other consequences. The paper presents two alternative consistent methods for estimating the seasonal index in the presence of a trend, one for a multiplicative (nonlinear) trend and one for an additive (linear) trend. These methods may be run easily on a spreadsheet program or on statistical software. The nonlinear method is suggested as a convenient alternative to the standard method in many circumstances.     

CATEGORY WIDTH COGNITIVE STYLE AS A FACTOR IN ACCOUNTANTS' PERCEPTIONS OF ACCOUNTING INFORMATION

This paper reports the findings of a laboratory experiment designed to investigate the relationship of category width (CW) cognitive style with accountants' perceptions of accounting information. Subjects drawn from large accounting firms in Sydney, Brisbane, and Melbourne, Australia, were classified into broad, medium, and narrow categories following the test devised by Pettigrew [19]. Subjects were requested to state their level of confidence in decisions they had made after receiving (1) conventional accounting information or (2) conventional accounting information and human resources accounting (HRA) information using a one-group pretest-posttest design. The results indicated a significant relationship between CW cognitive style and the accountants' confidence in their decisions. Furthermore, CW cognitive style moderated the accounting-information/decision-making relationship.     

ASSESSING INFORMATION SYSTEM VALUE: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY

Linear models of information system value that are a function of information attributes are empirically studied by having managers in two firms make assessments of the importance of attributes, the level of satisfaction produced by various levels of each attribute, and the overall value of total systems. The results verify that such models may be quite useful in information system design. It is also shown that ordinally ranked attributes work as well as the interval-scaled attributes in the linear model. Since ordinal measures are easier to obtain, this suggests that “linear ordinal” models may be the most practical method of quantifying information systems value.     

PERCEIVED USEFULNESS OF INFORMATION: A PSYCHOMETRIC EXAMINATION*

The perceived usefulness of information is an important construct for the design of management information systems. Yet an examination of existing measures of perceived usefulness shows that the instruments developed have not been validated nor has their reliability been verified. In this paper a new instrument for measuring two dimensions of perceived usefulness is developed. The results of an empirical study designed to test the reliability and construct validity of this instrument in a capital-budgeting setting are presented.     

Does IO Economics Really Make the Case for Investments in IT: A Rejoinder

The preceding critique [1] of the paper “The Information Problems in Organizations: A Research Model for the Value of Information and Information Systems” [3], reaches general conclusions with respect to the original paper and the applicability of economics to MIS research. These conclusions are based on arguments developed at a different level of analysis than that used in the original paper, and without considering the goals and intent of the original paper. The differences between the critique and the original paper are highlighted.     

REQUIREMENTS PLANNING FOR CONTROL OF INFORMATION RESOURCES

Producing reports assembled from files, records, and raw data is a major function of the computer in modern organizations. Transaction processing, records management, file organization, and data-base management are aspects of the information production function that have received a good deal of attention. But planning, scheduling, and controlling the production of information products have been neglected. For complex applications involving assembly of reports from multilevel information sources, the requirements planning model is suggested as an effective alternative to present methods. Thus, our suggestion is that the computer be used to plan, schedule, and control computer production of information products. Presently available material requirements planning software may be employed with minor modifications that depend on the given information system characteristics. In this paper an example of requirements planning as applied to production of information in a satellite control system is presented.     

Task-Structure Relationship of Information Systems Development Subunit: A Congruence Perspective*

Several studies have examined the influence of organizational context (e.g., organization size, environment, strategy) on information systems (IS) performance/success. But very few studies have examined IS structure, and those studies have focused on a particular element of IS structure (e.g., decentralization). Thus, the multidimensional structural configuration of IS as an organizational subunit has escaped research attention. Further, the nature of the task to be performed by the IS subunit as a contextual factor has been virtually ignored in the IS research literature. In this paper, we first develop a congruence model for the task-structure relationship in an information systems development (ISD) subunit setting. Then we test this model as a multivariate relationship followed by subordinate bivariate analyses. Analysis of data from 41 hospitals’ ISD subunits reveals that a congruence relationship between task context and the structure of an ISD subunit is present. Our findings also show that an exclusive association exists between uncertainty in the task environment and the decision-making structure. Likewise, the association between equivocality of task content and the control structure of the ISD subunit is also exclusive. Implications of these findings for decision makers and researchers are discussed.     

Construct Measurement in Information Systems Research: An Illustration in Strategic Systems

This study seeks to highlight construct measurement issues in information systems (IS) research. It describes the normative process of construct measurement and identifies the difficult problems involved in measurement and some ways in which these difficulties may be overcome. An illustrative construct-operationalization study in the area of strategic systems outlines how the normative guidelines may be applied to IS. Some specific recommendations for IS include developing a preliminary model of the construct even if there is little previous measurement research, devoting greater attention to predictive validity because a lack of theories in IS precludes the examination of nomological validity, verifying the assumptions underlying the computation of an overall index, and examining the measurement properties of the index.     

Developing Measures for Assessing the Organizational Impact of Information Technology: A Comment on Mahmood and Soon's Paper

In a recent study, Mahmood and Soon [26] identified and operationalized a set of variables that can be potentially impacted by information technology. The lack of factor analysis to verify the dimensionality of different variables is a notable omission in the study. This paper describes and employs the limited-information factor analysis approach and the minimum average partial criterion for testing the unidimensionality of different variables in the Mahmood and Soon study. While reconfirming the construct validity of eight variables, our results question the unidimensionality of two original variables. Further testimony is provided in favor of our results by citing previous research studies.