Siliang Tong
Paper Summary- Jack Tong
Angst, Corey, et al. “When Do IT Security Investments Matter? Accounting for the Influence of Institutional Factors in the Context of Healthcare Data Breaches.” MIS Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 3, 2017, pp. 893–916.
The authors explore an interesting question about how hospital factors determine the extent to which they are symbolic or substantive adopters of IT specific practices. Institutional theory distinguishes between symbolic and substantive adoption in order to account for the degree to which the activities of a firm are accurately reflected in the signals they communicate to relevant stakeholders. Substantive adoption represents one extreme, where signals are accurate representations of adopted practices and are tightly integrated with the organization’s core operation; where symbolic adoption is intended to enhance a firm’s external validation or legitimacy rather than achieve a specific technical benefit. Using data from three different sources, they create a panel of more than 5,000 U.S. hospitals and 938 breaches over 8 years. They use a growth mixture model approach to model the heterogeneity in likelihood of breach and they apply a two class solution in which hospitals that (1) belong to smaller health systems, (2) are older, (3) smaller in size, (4) for-profit, (5) nonacademic, (6) faith-based, and (7) less entrepreneurial with IT are classified as symbolic adopters. Their findings indicate that symbolic adoption diminishes the effectiveness of IT security investments, resulting in an increased likelihood of breach. Contrary to their theorizing, the use of more IT security is not directly responsible for reducing breaches, but instead, institutional factors create the conditions under which IT security investments can be more effective.
Paper Summary-Jack Tong
Ayabakan, S., Bardhan, I., Zheng, Z.E. and Kirksey, K., 2017. The impact of health information sharing on duplicate testing. MIS Quarterly, 41(4), pp.1083-1103.
Duplicating tests in healthcare create redundant costs for both patients and the insurance providers and information sharing by integrated healthcare system could reduce duplicating tests. Because the formats and frequency of testing information storage are different between radiology tests (low volume but high cost) and laboratory tests (high volume, low cost, manually processed). The authors postulate that implementation of health information sharing technologies will reduce the duplication rate for duplicating tests, and the reduction is more salient for radiology tests compared to laboratory tests, especially when health information sharing technologies are implemented across disparate provider organizations.
The authors utilize a unique panel dataset consisting of around 40,000 patients visits to the outpatient clinics and hospitals for laboratory and imaging tests related to the diagnosis and treatment of congestive heart failure with a quasi-experimental approach. The results of the paper support the authors’ hypothesis that implementation of information sharing system could reduce the duplicating testing for patients.
Paper Summary-Jack Tong
Atasoy, H., Banker, R.D. and Pavlou, P.A., 2016. On the Longitudinal Effects of IT Use on Firm-Level Employment. Information Systems Research, 27(1), pp.6-26.
It is a critical question to understand how IT investment could affect the firm-level employment with argument that whether IT investment would replace human labor with automation or improve workers’ productivity, and the authors examine the longitudinal role of IT use in the firm’s total number of employees. The dataset covers firms with different sizes in various industries from Turkey and captures the firm-level applications of different enterprise software and systems such as ERP, CRM and web applications.
The empirical specifications exploit both within-firm and between-firm variations to show the positive effect of IT use on firm-level employment, which varies across IT applications over time. Interestingly, they find that the effects of the use of enterprise applications materialize after two years, whereas the effects of the use of Web applications are realized in the current year. The authors also explore the moderating role of different factors such as firm size, industry technology density, and average salary rate. They find that long-term effects of the use of enterprise applications on firm-level employment are more pronounced in larger firms, with higher average wages, and in high-technology industries.
Weekly Summary-Jack Tong
Paper: Information Technology and Administrative Efficiency in U.S. State Governments – A Stochastic Frontier Approach
While extant literatures discussing IT value in organizations focus mostly on for-profit institution, this paper provide a new perspective to understand how IT system and investment could improve the efficiency of government and public administration. Analyzing a combination dataset from the IT budget data in state governments, the census data on state government expenditures, and a variety of information on public services states provide, the authors measure technical efficiency with a stochastic frontier analysis with a translog cost function and estimate the effect of IT spending on efficiency. The analyses provide evidence for a significantly positive relationship between IT spending and cost efficiency and indicate that on average, all else being equal, a $1 increase in per capita IT budget is associated with $1.13 efficiency gains.
Since state governments have used IT extensively for internal administration and delivery of public services such as education, social welfare, healthcare, and law enforcement, it is critical from both taxpayer perspective and IT investment planning perspective to understand whether the adoption and investment of IT infrastructure indeed generates sufficient value to the public. The authors adopt a stochastic frontier approach with a cost function, whose data are collected from NASCIO and the census data on state government finances, to estimate the relationship between IT spending and cost efficiency of state governments. The authors find that the relationship is positive and statistically significant, suggesting that the higher IT investments, the greater state government efficiency is.
Paper Summary- Week8 Jack Tong
Paper: Kim, Keongtae, Anandasivam Gopal, and Gerard Hoberg. “Does product market competition drive CVC investment? Evidence from the US IT industry.” Information Systems Research 27, no. 2 (2016): 259-281.
The motivation of this paper is to explore how product market competition will affect the propensity for firms to use corporate venture capital (CVC) as a venue for innovations. CVC is defined as minority equity investments by established firms in start-ups, typically alongside traditional venture capitalists (VC). The primary drivers for CVC are knowledge and learning for persistent innovation and product market competition rather than financial returns. The authors collect CVC funding information from the VentureExpert data set, augmented with data from CompuStat and the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) patent database. The authors use a novel measure of competition based on 10-K product descriptions-The textual network industry classification (TNIC). TNIC classifications are based on the product market vocabulary in each firm’s 10-K and are updated every year. Firms using similar product market vocabularies are classified as being in the same industry, allowing for a more accurate measure of competition that captures the dynamic nature of the IT industry. The empirical results suggest that firms in competitive markets make higher research and development (R&D) and CVC investments. In addition, the results indicate that increasing product market competition leads to a shift away from internal R&D spending and into CVC. These movements are significantly stronger for technology leaders, i.e., firms with deep patent stocks, in the IT industry. The authors also find that CVC appears to be an effective way of exploiting external knowledge for technology leaders in the IT-producing industry, but not for technology slow starters. CVC investments lead to significantly more patent applications for technology leaders but no appreciable difference for slow starters.
Paper Summary-Week7 Jack Tong
Paper: Gopal, A. and Koka, B.R., 2012. The asymmetric benefits of relational flexibility: evidence from software development outsourcing. Mis Quarterly, pp.553-576.
The authors focus on a critical manifestation of relational governance – the presence of relational flexibility in the exchange relationship – and argue that the enacted observation of relational flexibility is driven by perceptions of exchange hazards. The authors propose that the benefits accruing from it are asymmetric and depend on how the exchange risks are apportioned by the formal contract. They hypothesize that relational flexibility provides greater benefits to an exchange partner that faces the greater proportion of risk in a project, induced through the contract. In addition, they hypothesize that these benefits manifest on the performance dimensions that are of importance to the risk-exposed partner. The authors test these hypotheses on 105 software projects completed by a software outsourcing vendor for multiple clients. The results show that relational flexibility positively affects profitability in only fixed price contracts, where the vendor faces greater risk, while positively affecting quality only in time and materials contracts, where the client is at greater risk. The analysis provide evidence for the asymmetric benefits from relational governance, thereby arguing for a more contingent and limited view of the value of relational governance, based on risk-exposure, rather than the more expansive view prevalent in the literature contending that relational governance provides benefits for all parties to an exchange.
Paper Summary-Week6 Jack Tong
Paper: Li, C., Peters, G.F., Richardson, V.J. and Watson, M.W., 2012. The consequences of information technology control weaknesses on management information systems: The case of Sarbanes-Oxley internal control reports. Mis Quarterly, pp.179-203.
Academia research holds different opinions toward the SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act) act and some scholars claim SOX is bad for business organizations because of the additional regulations and burdensome expense, while others consider SOX is good for business organizations since it helps firms to point out deficiencies in information system. This research builds up on the findings of Feng et al. 2009 and considers the extent that the existence and resolution of information technology control weaknesses impact the ultimate usefulness or quality of the information produced by the financial reporting system(FRS). The author hypothesizes that the stronger (weaker) IT controls over the FRS, the higher (lower) the information quality produced by the system. The authors use the firm’s SOX 404 Management Report on Internal Controls to identify the material weakness of IT controls, and categorize the control weakness across three dimensions: 1. Data processing integrity, 2. System access and security, 3. System structure and usage. The authors find that firms reporting IT material weaknesses in internal control tend to have significantly higher management forecast errors than firms reporting either effective internal controls, or non-IT material weaknesses, accounting for firm size, financial performance, and earning characteristics.
The regression analysis finds that both IT control material weakness and non-IT control material weakness are positively correlated with the forecast errors, but the magnitude of IT control material weakness is more than 3 times larger than that of non-IT control material weakness. The authors also find that the material weaknesses on processing integrity has the strongest impact on the forecast errors.
Paper Summary-Week 5 Jack Tong
Paper: Langer, N., Slaughter, S.A. and Mukhopadhyay, T., 2014. Project managers’ practical intelligence and project performance in software offshore outsourcing: A field study. Information Systems Research, 25(2), pp.364-384.
Practice intelligence is the ability to resolve project related work problems that are unexpected and can not be resolved by established processes and frameworks. This study examines the role of project manager’s practical intelligence in the performance of software offshore outsourcing projects. The authors posit that project managers could apply practical intelligence to effectively address and resolve unexpected incidents, and therefore the level of practical intelligence positively affects project performance. The authors further theorize that project complexity and familiarity contribute to its information constraints and the likelihood of critical incidents in a project, thereby moderating the relationship between practical intelligence and project performance.
The authors explore the research question by analyzing a detailed longitudinal data that record project and personnel level activities on 530 projects completed by 209 project managers. The authors employ the critical incidents methodology to assess the practical intelligence of the project managers who led these projects. The authors consider several factors that influence task complexity and requires different level of practical intelligence such as Technological Complexity (Software size and schedule compression), Organization Complexity (team size and team dispersion), and Task familiarity. The findings indicate that project managers’ practical intelligence has a significant and positive impact on project performance (cost performance and client satisfaction). Further, projects with higher complexity or lower familiarity benefit even more from project managers’ practical intelligence.
Week4 Paper Summary-Jack Tong
Paper: Ceccagnoli, Marco, Chris Forman, Peng Huang, and D. J. Wu. “Cocreation of Value in a Platform Ecosystem! The Case of Enterprise Software.” MIS quarterly (2012): 263-290.
This paper examines whether participating in an ecosystem platform improves the business performance of small independent software vendors(ISVs). By analyzing the partnering activities and performance indicators of a sample of 1,210 small ISVs with SAP over 12-year period (the data source: CorpTech database), the authors find that collaborating with an ecosystem platform is generally associated with an increase in sales and a greater likelihood of IPO. The effect is stronger for ISVs that have stronger downstream capabilities and greater intellectual property rights.
To evaluate the performance of ISVs, the authors measure two metrics: sales and the likelihood of IPO. They present robust empirical evidence showing that the decision to partner is, on average, associated with both an increase in sales and a greater likelihood of an IPO. To enhance identification of causal effects they adopt a variety of approaches, including the use of fixed effects panel data models with instrumental variables. The instruments are based on an ISV’s personal connections to SAP in the years prior to partnering, obtained from Linkedln, and the propensity of similar ISVs to partner with SAP
Survival Skill- The role of advisors
Prof: Two principles of advisors: your advisor is not your boss; your advisor will not do research for you
What that means?
Xi: In Asia culture, the perception for advisor is different from that of Western culture, we will do whatever the advisor asks to. But in the Western culture, we may critically think what is right and wrong from the advisor.
JT:
Zhe: It depends on how we define “boss”. Some students are dependent on their advisors, but advisors expect students to be more independent and live on their own. As Zhe pointed out, he is more independent and would like to spend nights to develop his own program. But we as students all need the general guidance from our advisors
Sid: When students join the program, we all have the mentality what a PhD looks like, but as we grow up in the program, we develop our own research ideas, working patterns, and perception for research.
Prof: In Asia, we treat teacher’s guidance and order as God truth and hold no doubt on them. But it is nor right, we should have the courage to disagree with our advisors. In Asia, the knowledge is one-way straight, the knowledge imparted from advisors to students, but in Western culture, the knowledge is two-way communication.
HK: In her class, she tries to build up collaboration atmosphere and encourage discussion about disagreement. It also depends on the stage we are in the program, as first year PhD students, we may follow completely on what our advisors ask us to do; but when we start to develop our own research, we will be more independent from our advisors and stand on our own points.
Prof: In terms of the second principle, we majorly focus on the research project that we are the lead authors.
Leting: Do not expect our advisors will do everything for us. As doctoral students, we need to initiate and lead our own project. The earlier we start our own work, the more we could grow up. But as young scholars, we do need inspiration and guidance from our advisors. We need to better plan our communication strategy with our advisors and get their support to deal with challenges.
Prof: Our advisors are very busy. They are working on multiple projects at the same time, and they can not help us for detailed work. We could not expect our advisors spend much time to take care of us for every minute. Thus, Do not blame your advisors when your research goes south. We have to take leadership and responsibility for our own research. Advisors will help us and disagree with us, but at the end of the day, it is us who make the decision and lead the project. In the PhD program, we are trained to be independent researchers. Handoff advisors may let the students suffer from the program, but the ones who survive in the program usually are very successful in future career.
Prof: My advisor does not review my Stata code and even my data. If she/he wants to see the data and code, probably she/he is too hands-on. What if advisors are too hands off? It is a good idea to have two advisors: one is senior and experienced advisor who will give us big idea and general guidance; the other is junior advisor that is willingness to offer more hands-on guidance. The senior advisor may give us very great help to deal with the positioning of the paper, the contribution of the paper, and how to respond to the reviewer’s comment.
Zhe: To some degree, our research with the advisor is a kind of training. Thus, learning from the process could be more important than publishing the paper itself.
HK: If we have two advisors, we may face to deal with contradicting opinions. What shall we do?
Prof: We need to make the decision on choosing the opinion because it is our project and we need to think who right and which opinion is more reasonable. Like choosing coauthors, it is best to have 3 coauthors in one paper.
Reading Summary Week3-Jack Tong
Paper: Sundar Bharadwaj, Anandhi Bharadwaj, Elliot Bendoly, (2007) The Performance Effects of Complementarities Between Information Systems, Marketing, Manufacturing, and Supply Chain Processes. Information Systems Research 18(4):437-453.
The authors develop a conceptual model to understand how cross-functional coordination within a firm and cross-organizational coordination will affect firm-level manufacturing performance. The focus of this paper is on manufacturing organizations that need to coordinate internal resource and information across different functional department, and across the supply chain. In the conceptual model, the authors list three coordination activities-manufacturing and marketing coordination, manufacturing and IS coordination, manufacturing and supply chain coordination, and it also mentions integrated IS capability.
The data are collected through survey. The authors then create scale for each coordination activity and develop a composite measurement for manufacturing performance that made up of multiple manufacturing performance metrics. the objective performance index was composed of operating margins, on-time (backlog) ratios, and inventory turns.
The empirical estimation section is quite intuitive and straightforward, the authors build up a OLS regression with manufacturing performance as DV, and the coordination activities, IS integration capability and interaction terms between coordination activities and IS integration capability as IVs. The IS integration capability is also a function of manufacturing -marketing coordination activities.
Results show that a firm’s integrated IS capability, as well as the complementary effects of IS capability with manufacturing, marketing, and supply chain processes, are significant predictors of manufacturing performance.
Week 2-Reading Summary-Jack Tong
Paper: Rawley, Evan, and Timothy S. Simcoe. “Information technology, productivity, and asset ownership: Evidence from taxicab fleets.” Organization Science 24, no. 3 (2013): 831-845.
The authors examine how technology adoption impacts firm’s vertical integration and worker’s skills. The paper applies a formal productivity-based theory of asset ownership and tests it by measuring the impact of information technology adoption on asset ownership in the taxicab industry. The authors posit that improvements in technology lead to increased integration and a greater reliance on unskilled labor.
There are three types of organizations in the proposed model: 1. independent owner-operators; 2. fleet-affiliated drivers who own a car but contract for dispatching; 3. shift drivers who rent both a car and dispatching service from a fleet. The empirical results show that adopting a computerized dispatching system causes taxicab firms to increase the percentage of vehicles they own from affiliated drivers.
This paper contributes to two streams of literatures: firm-boundary and skill-biased technical change. The paper provides a theory-based model and empirical results that technology adoption causes firms to increasingly vertically integrate, even without changes in asset specificity. Moreover, the paper also provide additional support on the limitation to the standard skill-biased technical change hypothesis that information technology typically increases the demand for skilled labor.
Week 1 Reading Summary-Jack Tong
Paper: Cheng, Zhuo, and Barrie R. Nault. “Industry level supplier-driven IT spillovers.” Management Science 53, no. 8 (2007): 1199-1216.
This paper is about understanding the impact of upstream IT investment on downstream productivity, to be more specific, the authors examine the spillover effect of supplier-side IT stock capital investment on downstream industry productivity.
The authors list several reasons on the rationales behind the research motivation for this topic. First, supplier’s investment on IT infrastructure could translate into better or new products, service, or more efficient operation for downstream industries. Second, supplier’s improvement on interorganizational systems will provide more accurate demand forecast that benefits downstream companies. Despite the obvious benefits of supplier’s IT investment on inter-firm cooperation and management, little research has been done to scientifically examine the effect due to empirical data scarcity. The authors develop a model for spillover effect of supplier-side IT investment explicitly accounting for the measurement error of the price deflator of the intermediate input, reflecting the mismeasurement of the quality enhancement provided by upstream IT investment. They find that the supplier-driven IT spillovers are both positive and significant. Moreover, they also indicate that because of the failure to account for the quality improvement, the measured price deflator overestimates the true deflator by approximately 30% at the mean level of IT capital stock.
In terms of relevant literatures and contributions of this paper, the authors list two aspects. The first is that the modeling approach proposed by the authors extend the production-function framework to a new field in understanding spillover effect of IT investment. Second, this paper also builds up findings and research in Supplier-driven IT spillovers.
The authors derive the proposed model from the basic Cobb-Douglas production function. They derive a model of supplier-driven IT spillovers by explicitly accounting for the errors in the measurement of intermediate input prices. The model facilitates authors to infer the magnitude of measurement error of the intermediate input price deflators from the estimates of the parameters.