[AISWorld] Contents of JITCAR (Journal of IT Case and Application Research), Volume 15, Number 4

[Shailendra Palvia]

Dear IS Colleagues around the world:

As of January 14, 2014, at the repeated request of the publisher, I have agreed to return as EIC of JITCAR to nurture the journal that I founded in 1999.  It is a great honor to present to you this 60th issue of JITCAR.  After editing the journal for 9 years till 2007, I had passed on the leadership of this journal to Dr. Steven Gordon.  Dr. Gordon elevated the already high quality standards of this journal for three years till 2010.  For the last 2.5 years. Dr. Suprateek Sarker, in his role as Editor in Chief, has worked very hard to sustain these high quality standards. Dr, Sarker relinquished his role of Editor of JITCAR to take over as Editor of the Journal of AIS (JAIS).  I congratulate him and wish him the very best.  I would also like to take this opportunity to thank Professor Andrew Urbaczewski from the University of Denver for editing JITCAR Volume 15, Issue #3.  I invite researchers around the world to submit their manuscripts for publication consideration to JITCAR.

It gives me a great pleasure to present this last issue 15.4 of December, 2013.  The contents of this issue are:  Editorial Preface article by Dr. Shailendra Palvia; Research article by Dr. Nicholas Blessing Mavengere; Research article by Ms. Ruoning Qian and Dr. Prashant Palvia; Expert Opinion report by Dr. Andrew Urbaczewski; and Book Review by Dr. Richard G. Platt.  Summary information of these items is as follows.
Dr. Shailendra C. Jain Palvia in his editorial preface article titled, "E-evolution or E-Revolution: E-mail, E-Commerce, E-Government, E-Education," focuses on digital revolution that the world has been undergoing for over two decades now. The abstract summarized well the goal of the article.

"I was born when first digital computer ENIAC was being unveiled.  Since then, we have moved through several ages of computer evolution: mainframes, minicomputers, personal computers (microcomputers), and Internet.  Within the Internet age starting in late 1980s, there have been several stages of an unprecedented electronic evolution or revolution which can be labelled as e-mail, e-commerce, e-government, and now e-education.  Back in 1998, I thought e-Commerce will never take off.  Much to my surprise, not only did it take off, it has grown faster than traditional commerce.  Most people are now skeptic about e-Education taking off.  This preface article is an attempt to articulate what has happened and what lies ahead."

The first article is titled, "The Role of Information Systems in Promoting Strategic Agility in Supply Chains."  This article emphasizes the role of IT applications in helping supply chains of companies remaining relevant and current with fast changing technological changes and other environmental turbulence.  The abstract below sums it up.

"The prevalent volatile business environment is exerting pressure on companies to change fast for survival- a need to be strategically agile.  This need is more pronounced for supply chains of companies as at least two organizations have to collaborate, communicate, and coordinate their supply chain activities effectively to adequately address environment threats and take advantage of opportunities. Strategic agility is an essential requirement for supply chains to survive in the competitive environment.  Strategic agility is comprised of three dimensions -- strategic sensitivity, strategic response and collective capabilities. Companies can take advantage of the advances in information technology and information systems to enhance strategic agility. This research highlights how information systems (IS) can bolster the three dimensions of strategic agility in supply chains. A normative description approach is utilized for two companies -- IKEA and Kesko to analyze the role of IS in SC strategic agility. The results show that IS, such as advances in social technologies, could be utilized for enhancing strategic agility dimension of collective capabilities. IS, such as data mining systems are vital for promoting strategic sensitivity with supply chain partners downstream i.e., customers. For supply chain upstream, where products are formulated, IS such as business process management systems are required to support strategic response."

The second research article is titled, "Towards an Understanding of Cloud Computing's Impact on Organizational IT Strategy." Summary of this article is the following abstract.

"Cloud computing has become a dominant IT trend during the past two years for its potential to remarkably change the technology and the business landscape. Although a lot have been discussed regarding its benefits and risks, and cloud strategy itself has been widely studied in the business world, its strategic impacts have not yet been fully addressed. In order to understand how cloud computing is going to bring changes to the overall IT strategy of the organization, we conducted interviews with CIOs/IT directors from 4 US companies which have adopted cloud computing services to understand such impacts. Grounded theory approach was used in this study and a model was generated based on qualitative analysis. Our findings reveals that, cloud computing has profound impacts on various aspects of organization's overall IT strategy: including IT architecture, IT management, data strategy, and IT/ business alignment. Given the trend that more and more organizations are going to embrace cloud computing, the model and findings of this research would have great both research implications for future investigators as well as practical implications for organizations."

The Expert Opinion report probes into the experience and expertise of Mr. Jed Summerton, who  is a long-time IS professional .  He has worked as a consultant on the State of Colorado health insurance marketplace and his insights are formed based on his experiences with this and other large public and private sector projects. All questions posed related to the challenges faced by the implementation of Healthcare.gov website.  Questions posed by the interviewer are: (a) What went wrong with healthcare.gov? (b) What challenges were present in that system that aren't in other large systems? (c) Are there differences in government building large systems than the private sector? (d) How could the rollout have been delayed and the government save face? (e) How does the government regain the public trust? (f) Is this system salvageable? (g) How will we know when things have been remediated and the system is functioning as it should?

Book review report provides a detailed critique of 2006 book titled, "Competing on Analytics:  The New Science of Winning," co-authored by Drs. Davenport, Thomas H. and Harris, Jeanne G..  Toward the close of the book, the authors predicted big increase within five year in the use of predictive analytics.  Their prediction was right on mark as evidenced by the importance being given by Fortune 500 and other companies to the use of big data and data analytics.  The book review can be summarized as follows. 

"Predictive analytics is both an art and science that learns to predict the future of individuals, markets, or optimize machines and use of capital to drive competitive advantage.  Tesco is the world's third-largest retailer, largely because of their use of data analytics.  Tesco has increased redemption rates, and revenue by a factor of 3.6 over other competitors with analytics as their core competitive weapon. Netflix was born with analytics as the core competitive weapon.  Netflix is so serious about analytics that they offered a $1 million prize to anyone outside of the company who can improve their movie recommendation algorithms by ten percent. Data analytics is utilized both for front-office and back-office functions.  Dell, Honda, Toshiba, Food Direct and several other companies use predictive analytics to drive down the cost and speed up the supply chain."

As a returning EIC after six years, I need the support of the entire JITCAR editorial board in not only sustaining but elevating the status of JITCAR further from the perspective of the community of scholars worldwide.  We have few positions open for the role of JITCAR reviewer - anybody interested, please contact me.

Sincerely

Dr. Shailendra Palvia
Professor of MIS, College of Management
Long Island University Post, Brookville, NY 11801.
http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/P/Shailendra
Palvia.aspx?rn=Faculty&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty.aspx   
World Conference Chairperson, Twelfth Annual International Smart Sourcing Conference www.outsourceglobal.org , Toronto, Canada, June 26-27, 2014  
2012 LIU Post Nominee for Abraham Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Achievement Award
Founding Editor and current EIC, Journal of IT Case and Applications Research (JITCAR), www.jitacr.org
Phone #: 732-983-7034