Proposal_Ada
Presentation_Yaeeun Kim
Week 9_How to Improve Your Fluency level in English
How to Improve Your Fluency level in English
Prof. Pang: My English was used to be very poor. I was also shy, but I enhanced my fluency. There should be various way to improve it. What is your suggestion for it?
Student 1:
It has been helpful for me to watch video clips such as presidential speeches, news, sports events, and so on. Also, one faculty recommends to have a tutor for conversational English.
Student 2:
I did my undergrad in Australia. Hanging out with students in English definitely helped. Picking up your advisor’s terminologies is a good way to improve your academic communication skills in English. In addition, watching TV shows is helpful. I personally recommend “Modern family” to pick up contemporary conversational English.
Student 3:
In my case, I learned a lot through preparing for the TOEFL test especially for reading, listening, and writing.
Student 4:
Obviously, you need to make many native-speaking friends and hang out with them.
Student 5:
Indeed, this is a matter of accumulative learning, I believe. Try to use unfamiliar words or expressions consciously. That helps a lot. Repetitions will engrain English in your mind.
Student 6:
To expose myself to more English-speaking environment, I personally created a debate club, which is aimed to discuss about diverse social issues in English. Active participation in such activity definitely helped me to improve my fluency level.
Student 7:
No specific strategy to mention, but setting up a goal actually helped. My goal was to be of native speaker’s level. Setting up a high bar pushed me to practice more though relaxing the aim also helped me in a way.
Prof. Pang:
I do believe that making friends who can have a conversation in English is very helpful. Watching TV shows such as “Modern Family” is also beneficial. Previously, I have watched the old TV show, “Friends,” more than 20 times for each episode. Why? That is because the repeated exposure to practical English expressions from the TV show can be part of my own terminology after repeated listening. I did experience this.
One more thing is here. As a second language learner, if you don’t have knowledge common with that of native speakers, it is really hard to have a real conversation. This is actually not about the fluency level. That is why watching American TV programs should be emphasized once again. In reality, hanging out with native speakers may not be feasible. However, watching your favorite TV programs can be a good alternative.
I still like to listen to podcasts. For example, the BBC podcast is full of great information for conversation. I keep listening to the podcast every day as much as possible. This podcast inspires me that written and spoken languages are actually not different. The highest level of spoken English resembles much like a written language. This podcast can be a good resource to hone your skill.
Student 1:
There is also a great app, called “tunein,” for listening to HBR discussions and other academic findings.
Student 2:
I think, helping each other is also critical. Presenting one’s own research idea can be helpful, too.
Prof. Pang:
When networking in a conference or other settings, academics talk about lots of things other than their research. As Prof. Yoo mentioned, we should practice to converse over diverse topics with your colleagues and friends. Eventually, that helps you a lot in many ways.
Week 9_IT and Administrative Efficiency_Xinyu
Information Technology and Administrative Efficiency in U.S. State Governments: A Stochastic Frontier Approach
Unlike in for-profit business, where the value of IT has been studied by a large body of literature, in public sector, whether IT makes contribution to government performance is unknown. Therefore, this paper examines the relationship between IT spending and government performance. However, due to the different nature of firm and government, the performance measurements widely used in prior literature based on production function become invalid in the context of government. So this paper specifically investigates whether IT investment is associated with cost efficiency of state governments.
To measure the dependent variable, cost efficiency, the paper employs a stochastic frontier analysis with cost function. This method derives a cost frontier, which describes a minimum level of inputs, given certain amounts of outputs. After that, the cost efficiency is regressed respectively on two IT spending measurements with a two-year lag in a fixed-effect regression model, along with multiple control variables. Furthermore, the paper tests three moderators on the efficiency returns to IT spending. Those three moderators represent contextual effects from economic aspect, demographic aspect, and political aspect.
The results indicate IT spending is positively and significantly associated with government cost efficiency. This main conclusion is consistent through robustness checks. The paper mentions that, numerically, one dollar IT spending will lead to 1.13 dollar cost saving, on average. In addition, three moderating effects are all verified, indicating that the efficiency return to IT spending will be impacted by some environmental factors.
Political and IT
The authors theorize that the national politics significantly affects IT investments in the federal government we discuss how the U.S. Congress influences federal IT investments. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic. They adopt a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses support all the hypotheses. It is demonstrated that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. A federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate They suggest in order to make more capacity-building IT investments, a federal agency needs more policy directives, greater political support and legitimacy, and sufficient resource endowment from Congress.
However, they did not analysis the effectiveness of IT investment or any other outcome variables of IT investment in the study.
we discuss how the U.S. Congress influences federal IT investments. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic. They a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses support all the hypotheses. It is demonstrated that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. A federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate They suggest in order to make more capacity-building IT investments, a federal agency needs more policy directives, greater political support and legitimacy, and sufficient resource endowment from Congress.
Week 9_IT Governance and Business Value_Vicky Xu
IT governance and business value in the public sector organizations –The role of elected representatives in IT governance and its impact on IT value in U.S. state governments
Pang (2014) examines the moderating effect of IT governance on the relationship between IT spending and performance, measured by cost efficiency, in U.S. state governments. Different from prior studies, Pang (2014) studies the impact of IT governance on performance in the public sector, which is the new setting in IT governance research, meanwhile Pang (2014) focuses on the principal side of IT governance effect of legislative controls on IT management and investments.
Pang (2014) presents the following hypotheses:
H1: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose legislature has an IT-related legislative committee than in ones without such a committee.
H2: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose CIO position is established by legislation than otherwise.
H3: All others being equal, the association between IT spending and cost efficiency is stronger in states whose legislature approves a state CIO nominee than otherwise.
Pang (2014) adopts two-stage estimation approach in this study. First, cost efficiency of each state-year observation estimated by a stochastic frontier model. Second, the estimated cost efficiency regressed on IT spending and governance measures and control variables.
There are several findings in this study: (1). The empirical analysis results show that IT spending in U.S. state governments has positive effects on cost efficiency in state governments. (2). Supervision of state legislatures on IT management and approval of a CIO appointee complement each other. The main contributions include: First, this research contributes to the literature on IT business value and IT governance. Second, a new finding presented to the IS literature that the involvement of principals in IT management helps organizations utilize IT resources more effectively. Third, this study contributes to the literature by recombining research from two distant literatures (IS and political sciences). Finally, this study has several important managerial implications for the public sector organizations.
Week 9_IT and officer safety _Aaron
Policy officers safeguard the public, but who protects our guardian? A working paper coauthored by Dr. Pang and Dr. Pavlou gives an interesting answer, information technology. This research investigated how IT could prevent violence against police officers. Specifically, the authors examined the relationship between IT use by the police and the number of police officers killed or assaulted in the line of duty.
Integrating the literature on IT-enabled organizational capabilities with the criminology, they theorized two mechanisms through which police IT use reduce violence against police officers by developing two key law enforcement capabilities, intelligence-led policing and community-oriented policing. The usage of three kinds of IT, analytics technologies, real-time response technologies and the internet, which facilitate such capability building, was hypothesized to make police officers safer.
To test the hypotheses, the authors utilized a large-scale dataset with 3921 police departments in 2 years combining police IT use, other operational information and annual crime statistics and public safety data. Random-effects models, along with negative binomial regressions and spatial auto-correlation models for validity check, provide a consistent and robust results that IT use for crime analysis, dispatch, and the internet is significantly associated with a decreased in the deaths of police officers. This effect is shown to be more pronounced in communities with a higher economic divide.
The paper initiatively builds a link between IT capabilities in organizations with criminology, contributing to the nascent literature on business value of IT in the public sector and broader societal impact of IT. Most importantly, the finding of this paper could be arguably generalized to the significant role of IT in safety of other occupations under unpredictable dangers.
Week 9_Pang, Tafti, and Krishnan (2014)_Yaeeun Kim
The authors examined whether IT improves administrative efficiency in U.S. state governments. This empirical study contributes to the IS literature by expanding the scope of IT value research to the public sector.
To be specific, U.S. state governments spent approximately 5% of the tax revenues in IT in 2004. On the other hand, for-profit firms used 3.6% of the sale revenue on IT in 2004. This fact enhances the necessity for policy makers to keep their eyes on the IT spending in public organizations. Two important factors motivated the authors to study: 1) the public sector is different from the private business context, and 2) the approach to measure the value effect of IT investments in the private sector may not be appropriate in the government context. In particular, for-profit context uses production function framework, but the public sector context is more suitable to use cost function.
For the analysis, the authors estimated the impact of IT investments on administrative efficiency with a two-stage estimation approach based on a multi-product translog cost function. In the first stage, they estimated cost inefficiency with a stochastic frontier model, and in the second stage, the estimated cost inefficiency was regressed on IT intensity and other exogenous factors by reflecting on the fact that the government outputs are exogenously given. As government agencies are expected to deliver necessary public service within a budget collected from tax, efficiency benefits of IT is more applicable in the public sector context than adopting the effect of IT on costs of goods sold. The applicable area of cost efficiency is not limited to human resources but opens to services, which is affected by automating organizational process by focusing on the automate and informate roles of IT.
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.
Week9_Politics and IT Investments_Ada
Politics and Information Technology Investments in the U.S. Federal Government in 2003-2016
Motivation:
The U.S. federal government spends a considerable amount of tax revenues in IT every year. Hence, taxpayers, who pay for these IT expenditures, would ask whether these investments are being well made. However, information systems (IS) researchers to date have paid little attention to what influences IT investments and management in the government sector (reference anonymized for blind review), an issue that would be significant to policy makers and the public in general as well as private-sector IT industries.
Research Questions:
This study investigates how the national politics affects IT investment profiles in U.S. federal agencies. They hypothesize that a federal agency’s capacity-building IT investments are associated with (i) legislative approval for the chief executive, (ii) government dividedness, and (iii) the agency’s ideological characteristic.
Main Findings:
With a panel dataset from 135 federal agencies and bureaus in 2003-2016, the empirical analyses demonstrate that the national politics has a significant impact on their IT investment profiles. They find that a federal agency is more likely to make capacity-building IT investments when its chief executive is blessed with legislative approval, when the federal government is more united, and when it is ideologically more moderate. In sum, their study supports the central proposition that in order to invest more in major capacity-building IT development, the federal agencies need to secure compelling policy mandates and political legitimacy from Congress for implementation of strategic policy initiatives..
Contributions:
They contribute to the IS literature by demonstrating that budget allocation decisions between IT development and maintenance in governments are affected by political environments. They offer several policy prescriptions in federal IT management for policymakers and practitioners in the public sector.
Week 9_Pang et al. (2015)_Jung Kwan Kim
Pang, Tafti, and Krishnan (2015) conjoin multiple perspectives of the Information system, Public economics, and Political science literatures to examine the relationship between IT and governmental size. More specifically, the authors attempt to reveal the impact of IT budgets of a state CIO on state government size.
Theoretically, we can expect both positive and negative relationships. On the one hand, as the Hypothesis 1A argues, “the size of CIO IT budgets in a state is associated with lower state government spending.” This argument can be supported in that the introduction and advancement of IT systems may 1) increase the productivity of administrative processes, 2) ameliorate information asymmetry between legislatures and governmental agencies with lower monitoring costs, and 3) decrease the costs of transaction and coordination by more privatization of public services. Collectively, these benefits facilitate the reduction of government size.
On the other hand, the competing Hypothesis 1B contends that “the size of CIO IT budgets in a state is associated with larger state government spending.” Its main rationales are, 1) the IT infrastructure and enterprise systems may create strategic initiatives to serve public areas which used to be underserved; 2) the enhanced capabilities to monitor and coordinate administrative processes can lead to push further the boundary of administration, even incorporating some roles of federal, local, and private players.
Based on system GMM model with a five-year unbalanced panel data of 190 observations from 44 states, the empirical test supports the Hypothesis 1A, implying that more IT investment by state CIOs are associated with lower state governmental expenditures. This main finding suggests that the increase in the IT budgets by state CIOs may mitigate “bureaucrats’ interests to maximize their expenditures.”
Week 9 – Management Science paper
Week 8 How to write a lot
Week 8 Book recommendation How to write a lot
- Set milestone. For example, I will write one page on Monday. I need to finish 10 pages by this week
- Writing is a accumulating process. You don’t get a good paper in one iteration. I write a lot in the beginning without thinking the quality of English. I will improve it after I read it several time or re-write.
Week 10 – Research Proposal Presentations
On March 23, each student will present his/her ideas for a final term paper (research proposal).
- Each student will have 10 minutes for presentation, followed by a 5-minute Q&A.
- For MIS students, proposal topics must be from (or closely related to) the research topics in this seminar. Non-MIS students are allowed to deviate from this boundary but still expected to propose new IS ideas or interdisciplinary research ideas with IS and own majors.
- Presentation will consist of (i) motivation, (ii) background theory, (iii) hypotheses, and (iv) possible data sources.
- Presentation will be stopped promptly at 10 minutes. Hence, be advised to keep your slides within 7-8 pages.
- Post your presentation slides on this site by Monday, March 21, 11:59 PM, so that the instructors and other students have enough time to look at and think about feedback.
Week 09 – Government – paper assignment
IT and Administrative Efficiency (MISQ 2014) | Xinyu |
IT and Administrative Efficiency (MISQ 2014) | Yae Eun |
IT Governance and Business Value (DSS 2014) | Vicky |
Bigger or Smaller Governments (MS 2016) | JK |
Politics and IT Investments | Ada |
Politics and IT Investments | Yiran |
IT Use by the Police | Aaron |
IT Use by the Police | Xue |
How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing
The ASA’s statement on p-values: context, process, and purpose
Working Papers for Week 9
Pang – Federal IT – 03.08.16.pdf
Pang and Pavlou – Officer Safety – 02.16.16.pdf
Here are two working papers of mine that we’ll discuss next week. I look forward to your feedback and discoveries of errors.
Week 8_Huang et al. (2013)_Xinyu
Appropriability Mechanisms and the Platform Partnership Decision: Evidence from Enterprise Software
The efficacy of intellectual property rights (IPR) as a mechanism to appropriate the returns from innovation has been studied with mixed empirical findings. Following prior literature, this research examines whether ownership of IPR and downstream capabilities such as marketing capability is an effective mechanism to encourage the owner of innovation (or so-called ISV) to join proprietary platform and prevent platform owner to expropriate the innovation. The study is conducted in the environment of software industry, and SAP is the software platform investigated.
The paper proposes that both of the two anti-expropriation mechanisms will increase the probability of ISV partnering with the software platform. It also propose that strong downstream capabilities, therefore, will weaken the value of intellectual property protection mechanism. Finally, it posits the value of IP protection will be enhanced if the markets served by the ISV grow rapidly. In this research, partnership with software platform is indicated using a binary data based on ISVs’ decision to become certified by a platform or not. Downstream capabilities is measured by trademarks and consulting services, and market growth is measured by sales growth. The primary model is built upon a survival model. However, for the purpose of robustness check, it also use generalized estimating equation model and linear probability model with fixed effects, as well as alternative measurement for key variables. Three hypotheses are all verified.
Week 8_Kleis et al. (2012)_Vicky Xu
Information Technology and Intangible Output: The Impact of IT Investment on Innovation Productivity
Since the prior research focused on the contribution of IT to firm-level productivity and less research concern about the relationship between IT, knowledge creation, and innovation output, Kleis et al. (2012) try to identify the contribution of IT to innovate production across multiple contexts using a quality-based measure of innovation output.
Kleis et al. (2012) address the conceptual model of knowledge production that based on the knowledge production function (KPF) shown as the following (Figure 1. P47):
Kleis et al. (2012) collected a panel dataset comprised of annual information on innovation spending research and development (R&D), IT spending, and citation-weighted patents for large U.S. firms between 1987 and 1997. For empirical analysis, Kleis et al. (2012) build two sets of analyses to analyze more than 1800 observations: First, involving a thorough examination of the core research questions. Second, involving further analysis of the impact of IT on innovation output.
The main contribution of this study: (1). The estimation results indicate that IT and R&D both play positive and significant roles in innovation production. (2). The results highlight that R&D has a positive impact on citation-weighted patent output, meanwhile, the firm size is inversely related to patent output. (3). The final results demonstrate an important aspect of IT and the innovation creation process (i.e. networks, e-mail, telecommunication, etc. also contribute to the innovation process). (4). The estimates of the return to investment for IT-driven innovation appear to be economically meaningful and have market value impact.
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