Xue Guo
Week 13_Venkatesh et al (2016)_Xue Guo
Managing Citizens’ Uncertainty in E-Government Services: The Mediating and Moderating Roles of Transparency and Trust
Venkatesh et al (2016) proposes an integrated technology adoption model in the context of citizens’ adoption and use of e-government services. This paper is driven by the underutilization of e-government services, which prevent the e-government to achieve its full potential. This paper introduces the concept of uncertainty reduction and investigate the effects of citizen’s uncertainty on the use of e-government services.
There are three parts of the research mode of this paper. First, two main factors—information quality (accuracy and completeness) and channel characteristics (convenience and personalization), drive the intention uses of e-government services. Then the model proposes two means of uncertainty reduction—transparency and trust, can partially mediate and moderate the effects of information quality and channel on intention to use. At last, the model examines the effects of intention on the actual use and satisfaction.
Empirically, the paper collects 4430 data from citizen’s attitude towards the use of government websites and online appointment booking services in Hong Kong. The paper conducts hierarchical regression analysis to test the hypotheses. First, the results shown that accuracy, completeness and convenience are positive determinants of citizens’ intentions to use both services. Then the paper tests the mediating role of transparency and trust and finds that completeness and personalization were fully mediated through transparency and trust. The model also includes the interaction terms and find significant moderating effects of transparency and trust.
One of this paper’s contributions is that it draws from multiple streams of research to identify factors that may affect citizens’ use of e-government services. It investigates the mediating and moderating role of transparency and trust, which has not been studied before.
Week 12_Menon and Kohli (2013)_Xue Guo
Blunting Damocles’ Sword: A Longitudinal Model of Healthcare IT Impact on Malpractice Insurance Premium and Quality of Patient Care
Menon and Kohli (2013) examine the impact of IT investments on actual product or service quality. Specifically, this paper studies the relationship between the past healthcare IT (HIT) expenditure and the malpractice insurance premium (MIP). It mainly wants to investigate two problems (1) whether past HIT expenditures affects MIP and the quality of patient care and (2) whether this expenditure moderates the relationship between past MIP and the quality of patient care.
The authors propose that HIT can incur lower MIP and improve the patient care quality because it can efficiently monitor, control, and reduce information asymmetry between the hospital and insurer. Also, HIT’s recordkeeping and monitoring capabilities induce employees and physicians to align their behaviors with service delivery prescribed, which result in higher quality.
Empirically, the paper develops a longitudinal model including a panel data set for 66 general medical and surgical hospitals. It uses readmission and mortality rate as the proxy of the quality of patient care and adopts the depreciation expenses across information processing units as the measure of HIT. The regression model uses the random effects to rule out the impact of hospital-specific and time-specific factors. In addition, the model uses lags of dependent variables as instruments to account for the endogeneity of the independent variables.
The paper found that past HIT expenditures improve the quality of patient care and that it is negatively associated with current MIP. They also found a negative moderating effect of past HIT expenditures on the link between past MIP and current service quality. This paper contributes to the business value of IT by conceptualizing the impact of HIT on ex-ante risk as an expectation and future operations.
How to present your research in conferences?
Professor: What do you think about my presentation? What makes my presentation interesting?
Studnet 1: At first, your presentation told an interesting story. For the first two slides, you use examples and interesting narratives to attract audiences. Secondly, you add a lot of pictures in the presentation, which makes it not boring.
Student 2: I think one advantage of your presentation is that you can interact with audiences, making all of us felt related to the study.
Student 3: In my opinion, telling story is very important. You provide background about the study and provide police officers examples, which show that Officer safety is a big problem in the urban area. This is a good way to attract people’s attention.
Student 4: I think keeping voice up and down also helps attract the audience. If the presenter’s voice lacks variations, it will make the presentation boring.
Professor: Yes. At first, you need to learn how to present your research in a limited time. It will be more difficult to present your research in 15 minutes than 20 minutes. Once, I was asked to present my research in 12 minutes. So it is not possible to show every detail of your research. For a conference presentation, you cannot talk about everything. What do you think is the purpose of the conference presentation?
Student 3: I think conference presentation could help us get ideas from others. People will connect their research interests with your study, and give valuable opinions. Also, it provides a good opportunity to present your research to potential reviewers. Thus, they can offer you some feedbacks before the review process. It is like a practice.
Student 4: Sometimes, we may be too focused on our ideas and think our study are very interesting. But it is important for us to show it to others and get ideas from the people who are not familiar with the study. They probably will point out problems that cannot be discovered by us.
Student 5: I think one important purpose of conference presentation is to make self-advertisement. You are trying to sell your research to others.
Student 1: I always try to explain my research to my parents. Present research to people who are not familiar with the research can get new insights. Also, we can learn something during the presentation process.
Professor: Yes. You make a good point. You will act as a salesman in a conference. You want to sell your research to the potential editors and reviewers. That’s the function of a conference. Obviously, you don’t have much time to tell everything. You need to convince audiences that you are doing interesting research. It is very important to grasp their intentions. So you don’t want to start your presentation with boring statements, such as “Mobile industry is a big industry (ambiguous)”. You need to think about how to grasp their intentions. An excellent presentation takes a lot of practices.
One thing in my presentation is that I didn’t use text until the page 14. A picture is worth more than a thousand words. So when I prepared a presentation, I spend a lot of time on finding good pictures.
Student 2: Can you share some tips on how to practice? What is the most effective way to practice?
Professor: Present your research to the audience who knows nothing about the research is a good way to practice. I always present my research in front of my wife, and she gives me interesting advice. Also, you can gather some friends or colleagues and practice in front of them.
About texts and figures, I use texts because I did not want to memorize my script. I can look up the slide and explain. But if you use figures, you have to memorize everything. However, in a presentation, you don’t want always to watch the screen, which makes less interaction between you and the audience. Remember, a good presentation is a two-way communication. Another important point is that if you don’t know how to use animation, you’d better avoid it.
Student 3: Yes. Once I tried to insert five slides content into one slide. If the computer in the presentation room is not compatible with yours, the animation will change. It will not achieve the expected results.
Professor: Yes. I don’t recommend you using too much animation. Also, it is a good idea to show context using graphs and numbers.
Student 3: I think another advantage of your presentation is that you can keep the audience calm and avoid their questions. I also noticed that you did not show the literature and theory part in the slides.
Professor: Yes. I don’t like showing literature review in a presentation. If you show the literature review part in your presentation, it maybe not an interesting research from the beginning. You have to demonstrate this is a new and interesting research without literature review. Showing literature review means you are just a follower. Of course, some people have different opinions about this.
Also, I skipped the robustness check fast, because I think it is not the core part of my study. You don’t want to spend a lot of time at the end of the presentation. I just showed the summarized results and contributions. Please think hard about which part of your research is more important and what is not. However, people always like to ask questions about details. In this case, you can prepare extra slides to show literature reviews, definitions, and correlation table. When someone asks specific questions, you can show them these details.
Student 4: Can you provide some tips for the Q&A section?
Professor: My advice is that practice is important. At first, I was also scared about the Q&A part. You probably will get similar questions. So it is a good idea to go over the first round review from a journal. Then you can prepare what kind of questions you will meet. For a conference presentation, it is more important to sell your story than to get comments. My experience tells me that sometimes it was difficult to get valuable feedbacks.
Student 3: One of my advisors likes to send papers to a lot of people and get feedbacks. When you present your work, audiences may not totally understand what you are doing. It is a very limited time window. But if you sent papers to them, they have more time to read it. Then they probably will provide more valuable feedbacks.
Professor: Yes. You could ask friendly reviews. But remember, you cannot nominate these as your reviewers when you submit the paper to journals.
Student 1: My question is that what is the condition to be nominated?
Professor: People who have the conflict of interest should not be nominated. These include teachers, colleagues, coauthors ( a five-year window). Reviewers are supposed to be someone without the conflict of interest.
Week 11_Bloom et al (2014)_Xue Guo
The distinct Effects of Information Technology and Communication Technology
This paper studies the impact of information and communication technology (ICT) on worker and plant manger autonomy and span of control. Different from prior literature, which treats ICT as an aggregate capital stock, this paper examines the differential impacts on the organization of firms for two types of technologies—information technology (IT) and communication Technology (CI).
The paper proposes that IT is associated with decentralized decision making and CT is associated with centralized decision making. Based on the cognitive view of hierarchy, information technologies increase the availability of information and improve the workers’ ability to solve design and production problems, which lead to higher autonomy. On the contrary, technologies that reduce the cost of with-in firm communication will pass decisions to the center of the firm.
Empirically, the paper utilizes a new international plant-level data set with directly measured indicators of organization and technologies. The results shown that information technologies (ERP and CAD/CAM) are associated with greater plant manager autonomy, worker autonomy and span of control. However, the communication technology such as intranets is associated with lower plant manager autonomy. In extension, the paper also adds two instrumental variables—distance from the place of origin of the market leading ERP system and the differential regulation of the telecommunication industry across countries. And the results still hold after the robustness check.
This paper presents contradict results from prior studies. It provides theoretical and empirical evidence that organization structure of decision making are depending on different type of technology.
Research Proposal_ Xue Guo
Week 9_IT Use by the Police_Xue Guo
Pang and Pavlou (2016) studies the role of IT in preventing violence against police officers. Specifically, it examines the relationship between IT use by the police and number of police officers killed and assaulted.
The study theorizes that IT use by police helps to develop two kinds of capabilities—intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing. First, the intelligence-led policing capabilities can help police to identify and solve crime, reduce the chance of violent encounters, and enable control crimes more proactively. Second, a cooperative relationship with the community can effectively control crime, and ensure police officers’ safety. Thus, both the intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing leads to a reduction in violence against police officers. Then the paper proposes that the use of analytics technology, real-time response technology, and the Internet helps police to develop these IT capabilities.
Empirically, this study used panel data set collected from multi sources (such as LEMAS and UCR). The estimated model uses each functionality of the technology as a variable. The paper estimates the model with random-effects and uses negative binomial regression and spatial autocorrelation models for robustness checks. Also, the paper examines the moderating effects of income inequality and racial disparity. The results show that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the Internet is associated with lower killings of police officers. At the same time, dispatch and in-filed report are associated with fewer assaults of police officers.
This paper provides innovative ideas to combine IT capabilities in organizations with criminology. It empirically demonstrates how different technologies are associated with the safety of the police officers. Also, it expands the current IS literature of IT business value in the public sector.
Week 8_Setia et al. 2012_ Xue Guo
How Peripheral Developers Contribute to Open-Source Software Development
This paper is motivated by the different contributions of Open-Source Software (OSS) Development made by core developers and peripheral developers. Authors of this article explore the role of peripheral developers in OSS product quality and diffusion and how these effects vary across the product life cycle of OSS projects.
Peripheral developers’ motivations and contributions are different from core developers of an OSS project. First, peripheral developers are motivated to contribute the product quality for their own consumption or demonstrate their adherence to the certain community. Second, software adopters rely on the information from their community, and peripheral developers can act as knowledge sources to help the spread information about OSS product. Thus, the paper argues that compared with core developer, peripheral developers have more contributions to the OSS product quality and diffusion. And these effects are more salient in the product mature stage than in the early stages.
Empirically, the paper collects 1966 monthly observations over 147 products. Because of the nested nature of the research design, the paper uses hierarchical linear modeling (HLM). Model1 assesses the variability in diffusion and quality in each level. Model 2 identifies the direct impact of the predictors. And Model 3 tests the cross-level effects at the periodic and product levels. The empirical results showed that peripheral developers’ contribution to product quality assessment is more salient than core developers. And, the peripheral developers’ participation significantly influences product diffusion. Finally, their influences on product quality and diffusion are various across the product life-cycle stages.
Moreover, the paper examined the paradox of peripheral developers’ contribution and found that project size and coordination may moderate the effects of peripheral developers on product quality enhancement. In all, this paper revealed the different roles of developers and differentiated the contributions made by core developers and peripheral developers for OSS projects.
Week 7_Gopal et al.(2003)_Xue Guo
Contracts in Offshore Software Development: An Empirical Analysis
This paper is motivated by the tremendous growth of the offshore software development and the need to increase viability and profitability of vendor-client relationships. It empirically studies the determinants of contract choice in offshore software development projects and examines the factors that affect the project profits accruing to the software vendor.
The paper examines the adoption of the two prevalent forms of contracting in the software industry—fixed-price contract and time-and-materials contracts. The main risk will be borne by the vendor under a fixed-price contract, and the client under a time-and-material contract. Based on prior theories in contract, this paper presents four possible factors that may affect contract choice: software development risks, client knowledge set, bargaining power and market conditions. Empirically, most of the variables adopt measures from previous literature. In order to assess the reliability of the measurements, the paper uses multiple questionnaire items for one variable. The results show that project-related characteristics such as requirements uncertainty, project team size, and resources shortage significantly explain the contract choice in these cases.
Then the paper studies the efficiency of the contract by examining the effect of the information known during contracting on project profits and add three development factors to improve the fit of the regression analysis. The corresponding results show that vendor does make higher profits from time-and-materials contracts when control for other characteristics of the projects.
The contributions of the paper are that it empirically tests the determinants of contract choice in software industry and addresses the linkage between contract choice and project profits. However, the paper’s limitations are the restricted data set and measurement problem of some variable.
Week6_Li et al (2012)_Xue Guo
The consequences of information technology control weaknesses on management information systems: the case of Sarbanes-Oxley internal control reports
This paper investigated the association between the strength of IT control over management information systems and the subsequent forecasting ability of the information produced by those systems. Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act of 2002 highlights the importance of information system control related to the financial reporting systems. It hypothesizes and tests that management forecasts are less accurate for firms with IT material weaknesses in their financial reporting system (FRS) than the forecast for firms that do not have IT material weaknesses.
At first, the paper compared the management forecast accuracy for firms having IT material weaknesses with firms having either effective internal control or non-IT material weaknesses. Then the paper investigated whether certain categories of IT material weaknesses have a greater impact on the informational quality of the FRS than others.
The paper acquired the data from SOX 404 reports that available on Audit analytics from 2004 to 2008. The model uses management forecast error as the proxy for decision outcomes resulting from the quality of information produced by the FRS. The results show that firms with IT-related internal control material weaknesses have lower management accuracy than the firms have efficient internal control and have non-IT material weaknesses. And, when categorizes IT control quality into three dimensions: data processing integrity, system access and security, and system structure and usage, the paper found that data processing integrity has a greater impact on information quality than others.
One contribution of this paper is to highlight the implications of IT control on information quality issues for system users and decision makers. Also, the paper provides evidence that internal control reports, mandated by SOX, can provide information to system users about the underlying system and data quality.
Week5_Subramanyam et al (2012)_Xue Guo
In Search of Efficient Flexibility: Effects of Software Component Granularity on Development Effort, Defects, and Customization Effort
This paper mainly examines the relationship between software component design dimensions and software development outcomes in the context of model-driven, component-based software development (MDCD). It explores how different software design dimensions affect the trade-off between efficiency and flexibility.
The authors proposed that component granularity design (fine-grained & coarse-grained) decision plays an important role in the relationship between realized development efficiency and flexibility, i.e. the coarse-grained component would be associated with greater flexibility but less efficiency. The paper also proposes that mediating effect of in-process defects between component granularity and the development and customization efforts.
This paper empirically tests the effects of component granularity on development efficiency and flexibility from a sample of 92 data. The empirical models contain three dependent variables: in-process defects, development effort and customization effort. And the main independent variables include three measures of the component granularity: data elements, data layer interfaces and internal interfaces. The paper uses three-stage least squares regressions (3SLS) to address the simultaneity among certain measures and seemingly unrelated regression (SUR) to examine consistency of results. And it tests the hypothesis by conducting join tests for three measures of the component granularity. The empirical results support all of the author previous hypothesis.
The contribution of this paper is that it provides three measures of component granularity which match with the generic structural complexity dimensions and empirically establish the importance of component granularity design decision on the trade-offs between efficiently and flexibility.
Week4_Chellappa et al (2010)_Xue Guo
Competing in Crowded Markets: Multimarket contact and the Nature of Competition in the Enterprise Systems software industry
This paper examines the performance consequences of competition among enterprise systems software (ESS) providers. The authors provide reasons for the appearance of ESS firms in the crowded markets and shed light on ESS firms’ strategies in competitive markets.
The paper mainly discussed the effects of multimarket contact and participation in crowded market on ESS firms’ performance. Based on the previous literature about the mutual forbearance and crowded market structure, the authors proposes that multimarket contact can foster mutual forbearance, which is positively related to firm performance, and the participation in crowded market also positively associated with firm performance by demand externalities.
The authors empirically test the hypothesis by a merging dataset across three time periods. It builds a random effect model, which contains the dependent variable—firms’ performance and the main independent variables—multimarket contact, participation and the interaction term of these two. Also, the authors incorporate a temporal lag between Dependent Variable and the other variables to avoid causal ambiguity. The results showed that the coefficient of multimarket contact and the interaction term is positive and significant. The coefficient of participation is weakly significant. These results suggest that firms do not benefit by offering a large number of software components. However, firms stand to benefit if they strategically choose specific market. In addition, firms gain performance benefits by competing in the crowded market but it may be diluted by increased market overlap and competitive rivalry.
This paper contributes to the literature by further examining performance consequences in crowded market of ESS firms and studying the joint effects of multimarket contact and market overlap on ESS firm performance. At the same time, it provides meaningful implications for firm strategy and management.
Week3_Ray et al(2009)_Xue Guo
Competitive Environment and the Relationship Between IT and Vertical Integration
In this paper, authors mainly discussed two questions: 1. How does the competitive environment moderate the relationship between IT and VI (vertical integration)? 2. How does the level of VI in different competitive environments influence firms’ performance (coordination and production cost)? Basically, this paper examines the relationship of four constructs: IT, VI, competitive environment and firm performance.
Previous literature showed that IT is associated with a decrease in VI. However, this paper examines that different competitive environments have various impacts on the relationship between IT and VI. Moreover, the authors found that the level of VI may affect the firms’ performance based on diverse competitive environment.
The paper empirically examines the model using firm-level IT spending data from 1995 to 1997. Two measures of the competitive environment are demand uncertainty and industry concentration that complement each other and the measures of firm performance are coordination cost and production cost. The paper uses 2-equation model, which run both directions (from IT to VI and VI to IT) to examine the first question, which can address the endogeneity problem between IT and VI.
The results suggest that in uncertain demand and in unstable competitive environment, IT is associated with decreased VI. And in more predictable and concentrated environment, IT is associated with increased VI. Also, the paper found that firms made rational strategies about VI and IT in different competitive environments to decrease the coordination and production cost. Compared with the previous literature, this paper provides a more refined understanding of the relationship between IT and VI.
Week2 Summary_Tambe et al. (2012)_ Xue Guo
The Extroverted Firm: How External Information Practices affect innovation and productivity
This paper proposes that IT are most productive when they allow firms to quickly respond to external information, such as customer interaction, benchmarking and using inter-organizational project teams. And it empirically proves that external focus, decentralization, and IT intensity are associated with productivity in modern firms.
The paper uses survey-based data from 253 firms to examine the hypothesis. At first, authors calculate correlations between organizational practices and IT measurements and gives the preliminary results that external focus, internal workplace organization and IT usage are complements in the production process. Then the paper tests the relationship between Innovation and various stage of the product development and found that firms’ ability to capture information from its environment is positively associated with product leadership and effective management of the product line. Then, the paper uses the full-sample data to test the complementarities in production. The OLS model contains the three-way interaction term of external focus, IT, and decentralization. The results show that the effect of IT on firm productivity is significant when the external focus and decentralization are matched in the either direction.
Another important point in this paper is the robustness check. The paper uses organization inhibitors as instrumental variables in the innovation and product development regressions because these variables may affect the costs firms face in adopting new organizational firms, as well as they are not directly correlated with firm performance. The results still hold when the models include instrumental variables and use other measures of the organizational practices.
This paper has rich implications. The firms that can better utilize their environment may outperform their competitors and external focus is distinct from organizational decentralization. It also helps to explain the fact that firms operated in information rich environments tend to have higher returns of IT investments.