From the editors

Abstract

Welcome to the second issue for this year. We'd like to first thank our editorial board members Maryam Alavi, Brent Gallupe, Leyland Pitt, Laurie Schatzberg, Al Segars, and Rick Watson who all graciously agreed to help us out when we first began as co-editors of Data Base. Unfortunately, time does move quickly and their 3 year terms have come up. Hopefully, some of them will rotate back in the future after a much needed break. At the same time, we'd like to welcome Wayne Huang from Ohio University and Dave Salisbury from the University of Dayton onto our editorial board.For this issue, we have 5 articles that we believe reflects a nice sampling of the creative research that our IS academy continues to produce. Our first article by Iivari provides a field study testing the DeLone and McLean model in the context of a mandatory information system. While the findings generally support the model, some discrepancies were found. For example, information quality was found to impact user satisfaction, but not system use and the paper notes potential ambiguity issues when the model is applied in a casual-explanatory mode. Given the dearth of empirical studies of this model, Iivari correctly notes that more studies examining a wider variety of systems should be conducted in the future. In contrast, Fox and Spence employed a laboratory experiment to examine the impact of a project manager's decision style (directive, analytical, conceptual, or behavioral) on the use of project management tools. 52 project managers across 8 organizations suggests that one's style can impact the time to complete an initial project plan, its accuracy and completeness when using a project management tool such as Microsoft Project. The authors conclude that appropriate fit of tool to decision making style may well lead to higher levels of performance. Our third article by Sauter and Free also look at the impact of information systems - but the twist is the context of strategic decision making and the role that a decision support system tool can provide for keeping track of and organizing qualitative information. The benefits are reported in the context of hospital administrators and the authors believe it can well be extended to other business situations. Our fourth paper by Burton-Jones and Hubona tests the assumption underlying the Technology Acceptance Model that the belief constructs of perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness fully mediate the impact of individual factors such as staff seniority, age, and education level on usage behavior. The findings suggest that the TAM model, while predictive - may be incomplete when predicting both frequency and volume of usage. Our final paper by Gefen and Ridings applied sociolinguistic theory to understand gender differences in perception of the quality of virtual communities. The authors find that the general gender patterns that occur in traditional oral discourse also carry over to the asynchronous environment of virtual communities which, in turn, impact men and women perceptions of community quality. The key point the authors note is that such perceptions is not a direct consequence of the gender, but of conversation qualities that are shared by the participants in their respective communities.In summary, we continue to be receptive of the diversity of submissions we have received to date and encourage researchers to consider Data Base as a outlet that pushes the boundaries of methods, topics, and theory. We hope you enjoy this issue.

Index Terms

• General and reference

  • Document types

    • Surveys and overviews

• Human-centered computing

  • Collaborative and social computing