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Winter 2008-2009 (Vol 49, Issue 2) Table of Contents THE OPEN SOURCE MOVEMENT: A REVOLUTION IN SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT The open source movement is based on a radical retake on copyright law to create high quality software whose use and development are guaranteed to the public. In this article we trace the history of the movement, highlighting its interaction with intellectual property law. The movement has spawned open source software (OSS) communities where developers and users meet to create software that meets their needs. We discuss the demographic profile of OSS participants, their ideology, their motivations, and the process of OSS development. Then we examine the impacts of OSS on society as a whole from the perspective of the information society, discussing the effects on OSS developers, users of OSS, and society at large, particularly in developing countries. Keywords: Open source software; Virtual communities; Social impacts of computing; Software development methodologies; Software engineering AGILE PROJECT MANAGEMENT - AGILISM VERSUS TRADITIONAL APPROACHES For decades now, corporations have been changing from a hierarchical approach to project management to being more collaborative as knowledge work has grown in importance. In the center of increased globalization is the need for project managers to have flexibility in a project system in order to be able to adjust constantly to emerging challenges and opportunities. The need to distribute responsibility and initiative in support of adaptation to change is familiar territory to "agile" approaches to projects. In this paper, Agile Project Management will be examined from its historical practices and applicability of this style of project management to more traditional approaches to project management. Agile Project Management has proven to be a useful tool for today's knowledge worker and the project managers in the new economy which is characterized by more complex and uncertain project situations. This paper presents fundamental information about the agile methodology to encourage its implementation by professionals. Keywords: Project Management, Agile Strategies, Patterns of Organization, Software Project Management, Traditional Management Approaches VIRTUAL TRANSFER PRICE NEGOTIATIONS: UNINTENDED INTERACTIONS WITH INCENTIVE SYSTEMS Despite decades of research concerning the impact of computer-mediated communication (CMC) on decision-making, the potential interaction with the organization's management control system has just recently received attention. Media naturalness theory is used to develop hypotheses concerning the interactions of communication medium with the incentive pay scheme, a ubiquitous aspect of management control systems. A laboratory experiment was used to examine the interactions between two treatments: face-to-face negotiations versus virtual (computer-mediated) negotiations and cooperative versus competitive incentive pay schemes. Buyer-seller dyads negotiated the price and quantity of the transferred goods. Results indicate that while virtual negotiations are more efficient in terms of time than face-to-face negotiations, there is not a significant interaction with the incentive pay scheme for efficiency. However, results also indicate that virtual negotiations are less effective in terms of optimal quantity (organizational profit) than face-to-face, and that there is a significant interaction with the incentive pay scheme. Virtual negotiations have the unintended consequence of reducing the effectiveness (organizational profitability) of the negotiations. Keywords: Computer-mediated Communication, Virtual Negotiations,Transfer Pricing, Media Naturalness Theory TRENDS IN NAMES OF UNDERGRADUATE COMPUTER-RELATED MAJORS IN AACSB-ACCREDITED SCHOOLS OF BUSINESS IN THE USA Information systems, management information systems, computer information systems, business information systems, and information technology are some of the names referring to a relatively new discipline in traditional business school offerings. Professionals and educators in this discipline want to assure that such programs continue to meet the needs of their stakeholders. As a first step in researching the trends in IS education, the authors investigated the incidence of computer-related majors in accredited business schools and their names, then compared the data with that of three years ago. The results provide evidence that although information systems programs remain common, there is no move toward standardization of the majors’ names. Keywords: Curriculum, Management Information Systems, Computer Information Systems, Information Systems, Information Technology, Degree Name, Major Name MANAGING KNOWLEDGE AT MULTIPLE ORGANIZATIONAL LEVELS USING FACETED ONTOLOGIES Despite the relative maturity of knowledge management the problem of facilitating knowledge creation and sharing at multiple levels (personal, team, organizational and inter-organizational) in a uniform way is still crucial. Moreover, managing knowledge at each organizational level implies a number of critical heterogeneities (representational, semantic, etc) which current solutions cannot address successfully. In this paper we present a faceted ontology which addresses the content, context, community, domain and business issues of knowledge management. We describe the ontology, its applicability and its benefits in knowledge management situations using three Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs) that we have developed: Know-Net, an intranet-based organizational KMS; SPONGE, a personal and team KMS; and INKASS, an inter-organizational KMS. Keywords: Knowledge Management; Ontology Management; Content Management; Semantic Web web SITE QUALITY IN THE UK AIRLINE INDUSTRY: A LONGITUDINAL EXAMINATION Web site quality is now considered a critical factor to attract customers’ attention and build loyalty. Based on a review of the literature, this study focuses on five dimensions of Web quality — usability, web site design, service quality, information quality, and enjoyment. The aim of this research is to identify the development of Web site quality in four UK airlines based on the research dimensions during the period from 1999 to 2005. For this purpose, the survey utilised the Web archive (www.archive. org) for retrospective analysis (n=120). According to the findings, the four airlines have improved their Web site quality on the four dimensions in quite different ways during the period from 1999 to 2005. One of the main conclusions of this study is that the airlines have specific advantages from their particular mix of Web site attributes. The paper rounds off with conclusions and implications for research and practice. Keywords:Web Site; Quality; Airline Industry; Longitudinal on EMBEDDING TEST PATTERNS INTO LOW-POWER BIST SEQUENCES Current trends in VLSI designs necessitate low power during both normal system operation and testing activity. Traditional Built-in Self Test (BIST) generators rise unnaturally the power consumption during testing, boosting the need to add low-power solutions to the arsenal of BIST pattern generators. In this paper, the utilization of gray code generators is proposed as a low-power BIST solution; starting from the concept of embedding test patterns into such sequences, we investigate various alterative generators. Experimental results indicate that such generators can result into realistically short lower-power BIST sequences, as compared to other solutions proposed in the open literature. Keywords: Built-in Self Test, Test Set Embedding, Gray Sequences, Low Power Sequences A MODEL FOR DOCUMENT VALIDATION USING CONCURRENT AUTHENTICATION PROCESSES Under the trend toward e-business, the paper-based documents in enterprises are transformed into the electronic ones. In most real-world cases, the electronic documents are simply stored in an enterprise document repository. Owing to the high computation accuracy and efficiency, personal computers have been gradually used to assist domain experts in document authentication tasks (e.g., decision making or process control). Regarding document authentication process management, previous studies focus more on authentication processes without branches and the characteristic of concurrent engineering (CE) is almost ignored in the document authentication issues. In most enterprise knowledge management environment, knowledge validation and authentication is carried out through a collaboration network. Concerning the enterprise operation requirements, this research develops a heuristic model for concurrent authentication process determination based on the existing document authentication history. This research also develops a web-based document authentication information management system and performance of the prototype system is also evaluated via a demonstration case. In summary, by application of the proposed approach, the document authentication process can be automatically determined to support efficient knowledge validation. Keywords: Document Authentication, Knowledge Validation, Knowledge Management, Process Management UNDERGRADUATE SPECIAL TOPICS COURSES: WHAT’S ON THE MENU? As faculty and curriculum developers, we were interested in how other schools utilize undergraduate special topics courses in Information Systems (IS). A review of the literature identified no articles that specifically addressed the issue. To gather data, a survey of the IS programs at colleges and universities in the United States was conducted. It was found that 30% of the respondents offered one or more undergraduate special topics course. The most popular categories of courses were: E-commerce, Security, and Data Warehouses. Fifteen courses were grouped into a category called Other Courses. Somewhat surprising was that not one school reported offering a special topics course on Web 2.0 and its related technologies. Conclusions and future research are discussed. Keywords: Special Topics Courses, Curriculum Development, Pedagogy EXPLORATION OF INFORMATION SYSTEM PROCESS IMPROVEMENTS AND FIRM PERFORMANCE While substantial research has investigated the impact of IT on firm performance, for the most part, this research only considers the tangible aspect of IT, such as IS infrastructure. Intangible aspects of IT, such as IS-related processes, have been investigated in regard to the impact of project performance, but do not consider overall firm performance. This study is an exploration of the gap between these streams of research, and investigates the impact of IS-related process improvements on firm performance. Public CMM level transition announcements were used as events for an event-study methodology to assess the impact of these announcements on firm stock prices. The study found that through a variety of event windows, CMM level transitions consistently had a positive impact on stock price. Keywords: IS Processes, Firm Performance, Event Study, CMM, Stock Market Valuation DESIGN AND EVALUATION OF A LAYERED THEMATIC KNOWLEDGE MAP SYSTEM Knowledge maps (K-maps) have been recognized as an expressive, efficient and effective way to enhance access and navigation of information in a large knowledge repository. However, its capability is limited by the lack of a way to systematically discover the hidden structure of codified knowledge and compactly visualize the map morphology to improve effective navigation. This paper presents a new hybrid approach to tackle these issues and proposes a layered thematic K-map system. The knowledge objects are firstly categorized and labeled according to their hidden conceptual architecture using a hierarchical self-organizing map network and then thematically navigated through a spatially expandable stacked view with corresponding information. The system is tested with a real-world soil remediation patent corpus with various map topologies. A pair-wise evaluation consisting of clustering performance and usability assessment was conducted. Compared with a typical file/directory view, the results of usability evaluation showed that the proposed system enhances the efficiency of comparison tasks while preserving comparable performance of identification and association tasks. Keywords: Knowledge Map, Knowledge Management; Visualization, Hierarchical Self-Organizing Map Network, Text Mining
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