[AISWorld] JAIS Volume 12, Issue 6, June 2011 Contents

[Gregor, Shirley]

The contents of the latest issue of 
The Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS)
Official Publication of the Association for Information Systems
Volume 12, Issue 6, June 2011- JAIS 

Published: Monthly Electronically
ISSN: 1536-9323
Published by the Association for Information Systems, Atlanta, USA
http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/

Editor-in-Chief: Professor Shirley Gregor, The Australian National University, Australia


PAPER ONE
Managing Risks in a Failing IT Project: A Social Constructionist View.
By Wee-Kiat Lim, Siew Kien Sia, and Adrian Yeow

Abstract:
Why do IT projects continue to stumble, despite the proliferation of risk management methodologies and a growing body of knowledge on project risk assessment and mitigation? In this paper, we propose an alternative theoretical perspective that views project risk as a social construction process shaped by the risk accounts of social groups and actors within an implementation context. Risk management is embedded in the social processes where risks are negotiated and contested, with some risk accounts amplified and some attenuated. Through the analysis of a large IT implementation in an Asian logistics firm and its trajectory of successive crises, we examine the process of the social construction of risk. Our findings highlight the inherent fragmentation and the challenge of building collectiveness in risk construction, and the need for risk managers to consider the influence of broader social structures and the reshaping dynamism of sudden focusing events in managing complex IT projects.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol12/iss6/2/

PAPER TWO
Article Title
An Experimental Study of the Effects of Representing Property Precedence on the Comprehension of Conceptual Schemas
By Jeffrey Parsons

Abstract:
Conceptual modeling is the process of using a grammar to construct abstractions of relevant phenomena in a domain. The resulting conceptual schemas are intended to facilitate understanding of and communication about a domain during information systems requirements analysis and during design. Despite keen practitioner interest in conceptual modeling, there is general agreement that the modeling constructs comprising grammars lack theoretical foundations pertaining to what the constructs are intended to represent, which, in turn, inhibits our understanding of whether and why they are effective. This research contributes to our understanding of conceptual modeling grammars by proposing a theoretically-grounded approach for modeling an important aspect of the nature of properties of the phenomena of interest in a domain. Specifically, conceptual schemas typically fail to express explicitly the semantics that, when things possess particular properties, they must also possess certain other properties. This research uses Bunge’s ontological notion of property precedence as the theoretical rationale for explicitly modeling this dependence in conceptual schema diagrams. We examine several forms of precedence, and propose an approach to representing one form in conceptual schemas. We present the results of a laboratory experiment that tests the impact of explicitly representing precedence on how well participants comprehend the semantics conveyed by a conceptual schema. The results indicate that modeling precedence explicitly improves the comprehension of domain semantics expressed in a diagram’s structure, but has varying effects on subjects’ confidence in their comprehension.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/vol12/iss6/1/

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