[AISWorld] Publication of JITCAR 17.1 by Taylor & Francis and Invitation for Manuscript Submission

Thu May 14 15:28:40 EDT 2015

Invitations for Manuscripts Submission and Announcement of JITCAR 17.1

Dear Colleagues around the world:

About Journal of IT Case and Applications Research (JITCAR)

Mission: In this era of uncontrollable explosion of information technology (IT) and its applications, the gap between theory and practice, frameworks and applications keeps widening. This novel journal will focus on research based on in-depth study of real world cases and applications to explain existing theories and concepts or to help in building new theories and frameworks. This journal should be of great value to professors and students as well as researchers and practitioners of IT. It is a double blind refereed international quarterly journal that is supported by IT scholars from all over the world.  The journal is international in all respects: content, authors, readers, reviewers, and editors.

Scope and Coverage: JITCAR will publish case and application research articles focusing on any size of organization: start-up, small, medium, large, or multinational company. These cases and applications can originate from any country in the world: advanced, newly industrialized, developing, or under-developed. Furthermore, the primary thrust of a case or application may include artificial intelligence, business process reengineering, cross-cultural issues, cybernetics, decision support systems, electronic commerce, firewalls and Internet, groupware, human side of IT, information infrastructures, joint application development, knowledge based systems, local area networks, management information systems, neural networks, office automation, prototyping, query languages, robotics, systems analysis, telemedicine, ubiquitous computing, video-conferencing, webonomics, and so on.

Generally, there will be three research articles. Occasionally, there will be a Teaching Case article.  Research articles will be based on actual case studies and/or applications studies utilizing case study, field study, and/or field experiment research methodology (JITCA, Volume 1, Number 4, editorial preface).  Each teaching case submission to JITCAR will include three components: the case itself, a summary research note, and a detailed teaching note.  These three components will be reviewed as a package; the journal's decision to publish the case will be determined by the quality of the case itself and the accompanying research and teaching notes.

Review Process: Each suitable article is double blind-reviewed by three members of the editorial review board. A final recommendation is made by the Editor-in-Chief or anyone of the two senior associate editors in consultation with an Associate Editor. If a revision is recommended, the revised paper is sent for a final approval to the original Associate Editor.

Call for Manuscripts: The journal encourages manuscript submissions from authors all over the world, from academia, government, and industry. The journal will also include reviews of cutting edge IT books that have bearing on the journal's mission. Practitioner input will be regularly solicited from time-to-time through the industry editor(s) of JITCA.  To utilize cutting edge IT, authors are strongly encouraged to make their submissions electronically to the editor-in-chief or one of the two senior associate editors by attaching file(s) in appropriate format.

Style: Submitted manuscripts must be written in the APA (American Psychological Association) editorial style.  Footnotes are not allowed.  Endnotes should be kept to a minimum; instead the material should be incorporated in the body of the paper.  References should be listed in alphabetical order.  The suggested size of the manuscript is 20 pages (excluding references, tables, and figures).  The manuscript should be typed double-spaced.

>From the Guest Editor's Desk
It gives me a great pleasure to present this first JITCAR issue 17.1 of 2015.  The contents of this issue are:  Editorial Preface article by Dr. Varun Grover; Research article by Dr. Meg Fryling; Teaching Case article by Drs. Yichuan Wang, Yun Wu, Chetan S. Sankar, and Lin Lu; Expert Opinion report by Dr. Daniel Peak; and Book Review by Dr. Vijay Vemuri.  Summary information of these items is as follows.

Dr. Varun Grover in his editorial preface article titled, "Are We Losing Out With Digitization?," focuses on impact of rampant ongoing digitization on human civilization.  He provokes the readers into thinking about some fundamental questions that need to be raised regarding these digitization technologies: (a) Are these technologies liberating or constraining?; (b) Do they improve social interactions or hurt them?; (c) Do they improve cognitive ability or hurt it?; (d) Are they improving economic impact or limiting it?  His contention is that we generally tend to accentuate the positive side of digitization to the almost total neglect of negative side. Then, he goes on to articulate these negative aspects under the categories of social, cognitive, and economic capitals. He concludes by asserting that, "any digitization suffers from the limitations of its creator, and such limitations can get compounded in our interconnected world."
The research article is titled, "Investigating the Effect of Customization on Rework in a Higher Education ERP Post-Implementation Environment: A System Dynamics Approach."  This article applies system dynamics simulation modelling to ERP system post-implementation cycle utilizing data from a case study.  By doing so, this research contributes to: (a) both the system dynamics literature and the pre-packaged software literature; (b) it gives practitioners a simulation model grounded in ERP literature to make more informed customization decisions; and (c) it addresses identified research gaps regarding system customization, project evaluation, effort estimation, impact of adoption, system maintenance, performing updates with enterprise apps, and potential reasons for system abandonment.

The teaching case article is titled, "Leveraging IT for Disaster Recovery: A Case Study of RFID Implementation for Facility Retrieval."  This article demonstrates that the use of RFID, magnetic locators, and GPS together reduces the cost of recovering utility facilities buried under storm debris by 26% compared to current methods.   If this case is adopted for learning in a graduate or undergraduate class at senior level, students will learn the: (a) importance of information technology in disaster recovery operations; (b) use of RFID technology in disaster recovery processes; (c) the utility of the concepts of post crisis renewal and boundary objects; and (d) use of multiple criteria to evaluate information technology use.

The Expert Opinion report probes into the experience and expertise of Michael Holcomb, Manager of Enterprise Database and Intelligence Reporting at Caesars Entertainment Corporation.  Mr. Holcomb spent four years in the insurance industry and nine years in the US Navy Submarine Force as a technician and tactics instructor.  He received his BSBA in Finance from Hawaii Pacific University and his MBA from University of Nevada Las Vegas.  He has been at Caesar's since 2005 working in Finance as an Analyst, Manager of Human Resources Information Systems, and as Manager Enterprise Data warehouse (IT) and Analytics.  He is currently Manager Enterprise Data Solutions.  Caesars Entertainment Corporation (formerly Harrah's Entertainment) is a diversified entertainment company.  Caesars currently owns and/or operates more than 50 casinos in 13 US states and six countries under such names as Harrah's, Horseshoe, and Rio.  Its facilities, which include hotels, dockside and riverboat casinos, and Native American gaming establishments, contain more than 3 million square feet of casino space and some 43,000 hotel rooms. Its locations on the Vegas Strip are Caesars Palace, Paris Las Vegas, and Planet Hollywood. The company went public in 2012.  Questions posed by the interviewers are: (a) How has Business Intelligence (BI) shaped the way in which your company does business? (b) As Caesar's has continued to grow, how has the role of BI at Caesar's changed over the years?  (c) What type of data does Caesar's collect and how much?  How does it store the data? (d) What originally necessitated collecting data on a massive scale and how has that changed over the years? (e) How important is BI to the hospitality industry and specifically to Caesar's? (f) What are some of the challenges currently faced with regards to BI (monitoring, security and access)?  (g) How is the data delivered to the business users and utilized in day to day operations and management? (h) Does the business drive BI or does BI drive the business? (i) What are some more unique aspects of your job? (j) How is your role evolving? (k) How does BI need to change so that the industry can keep up with its business demands? (l) As a data-driven organization, how does Caesar's use Business Intelligence to improve customer service and customer loyalty? (m) Customer feedback is an important measure of your success.  Can you describe how you navigate the four areas regarding the customer feedback process: capturing customer feedback, storing customer feedback, analyzing customer feedback and acting on customer feedback? (n) Over a decade ago, the IT jobs outlook in North America was not strong and enrollments in IT programs declined; now we are seeing resurgence.  Do you believe the IT jobs outlook in this country will continue to improve? (o) What are some of your current major projects? (p) Over a decade ago, the IT jobs outlook in North America was not strong and enrollments in IT programs declined; now we are seeing resurgence.  Is BI and analytics one of those growth areas for Caesar's? (q) What about the future?  What concerns you?

Book review report provides a detailed critique of 2007 book titled, "Counterfactuals and Causal Inference: Methods and Principles for Social Research," co-authored by Stephen L. Morgan and Christopher Winship and published by Cambridge University Press.  The book review can be summarized as follows.

"It is an introductory exposition of causal inference targeted to beginning and veteran social science researchers who need a quick introduction to causal analysis. It integrates two main streams of causal research methodologies -- potential outcomes model and causal graphs -- and associate these methodologies with propensity score and matching concepts. As an entry level coverage that does not require years of training in econometrics, it provides access to very important results in causal inference. The propensity score and matching methods are becoming important research tools and are appearing in information systems research. It is an excellent foundation to pursue causal modeling further in the works of Angrist and Pishke (2009) and Wooldridge (2010).  Despite its many contributions, this book has its limitations. Some important topics such as difference-in-differences, and regression discontinuity estimators receive very little or no coverage. The authors do not cover computational aspects and software usage. Use of data from prior research to illustrate the main results will help bridge the understanding of the readers to the published research in causal modeling. An updated version slated for late 2014 hopefully will mitigate some of these deficiencies."

The new publisher, in line with the ongoing trends, published this journal online only during 2014.  And it will continue to do so in 2015. The website to find all JITCAR issues is: http://www.tandfonline.com/utca. All authors and reviewers are encouraged to start using Routledge's online manuscript submission and reviewing system http://www.editorialmanager.com/jitcar/.  I urge all our current and future authors and reviewers to familiarize themselves with this system.
I hope you will enjoy reading all items in this issue.  With best regards,

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<http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/P/Shailendra%0dPalvia.aspx?rn=Faculty&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty.aspx>
Palvia.aspx?rn=Faculty&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty.aspx<http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/P/Shailendra%0dPalvia.aspx?rn=Faculty&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty.aspx>
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<http://www.jitacr.org/>
Phone #: 732-983-7034

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