[AISWorld] JITCAR 18.2 Published

Thu Jul 7 16:20:45 EDT 2016

Dear Friends Around the World:

I am delighted to present the second Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research (JITCAR) issue of 2016. The contents of this issue are: an Editorial Preface article by Young Kyun Kim and Kailash Joshi; a Research Article co-authored by Zafor Ahmed, Uma Kumar, and Vinod Kumar; another Research Article by Joseph Catanio and Michael Bieber; an Expert Opinion report by Mahesh S. Raisinghani; and a Book Review by Vijay K. Vemuri. Summary information of these items is as follows.

In their editorial preface article titled "South Korea's e-government initiatives: Export of established systems and development of m-government systems," Kim and Joshi describe the leadership role of South Korea not only in the development of e-government systems, but also in exporting these systems to primarily developing countries and also moving these systems to mobile platforms. According to United Nations reports, South Korea has ranked number one in e-government systems each year since 2010. Based on the detailed discussions of various initiatives over the years by the South Korean government, this preface identifies implications not only for practitioners but also opportunities for researchers to further investigate.

The first research article is titled "COTS implementation through process and control perspective: A Canadian government case." Implementation of a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) package is inherently challenging and it is further compounded when multiple government organizations are involved. Success in this context is often contingent upon proper stakeholder engagement and control configuration. The authors assert that very few studies have systematically studied the implementation process of non-ERP (enterprise resource planning) COTS from the perspectives of process and control. Using a revelatory case study of a Canadian government organization, the authors have captured a model for a successful COTS implementation and have identified several key processes that are essential for ensuring proper engagement level by all stakeholders.

The second research article is titled "Relationship analysis: Formalizing relationships within the systems analysis process." This article focuses on discovering and representing entities and their inter-relationships in the systems analysis process. The authors present a systematic, domain-independent systems analysis technique to determine a domain's relationship structure. The authors contend that the quality of design artifacts, such as class diagrams, can be improved by first representing the complete relationship structure of the problem domain. A rigorous evaluation was conducted, including a formal experiment comparing novice and experienced analysts with and without the use of relationship analysis. In addition, professional software industry engineers were interviewed and educated on relationship analysis. It was shown that the relationship analysis process provides a fuller and richer systems analysis, resulting in improved quality of class diagrams. It was shown that relationship analysis enables analysts of varying experience levels to achieve class diagrams of similar quality.

The Expert Opinion report documents an interview by Mahesh S. Raisinghani with Dennis Hoebee, Director of Technology Client Services at Texas Woman's University (TWU). He had previously been an Air Force officer for over 18 years training diverse Air Force personnel-military combat forces in hostile settings and professionals in management positions. During the 10 years he has worked at TWU, he has been a systems analyst, integration analyst, and Manager of Information Security and Disaster Recovery. Questions posed to Hoebee are: (a) How important is information technology (IT) in the higher education industry and your university? (b) Please name and briefly describe some of your strategic and security IT applications. (c) What has been the role of IT security in supporting the vision and mission of your university? (d) Please describe the IT architecture in your university covering its three campuses in Denton, Dallas, and Houston. (e) Please name and briefly describe some of your key IT applications. (f) What have been the most important technologies (e.g., mobile, Internet-based, imaging, satellite communications, etc.) that have facilitated your university's expansion? (g) Have your stakeholders faced specific issues dealing with data privacy? What safeguards are in place to protect privacy of information? (h) What advice can you offer to other organizations exploring the use of IT in higher education?
The Book Review by Vemuri provides a detailed critique of the 2015 book titled Web Programming for Business: PHP Object-Oriented Programming with Oracle, authored by David Paper and published by Routledge. Excerpts from the review are provided below:

Web application development no longer means extensive coding. It means putting together modules that have already been developed and available for off-the-shelf purchase or as open source applications. Many e-commerce applications have generalized ready to use modules for shopping carts; billing; and review and recommendation....

This book on web application development for business is targeted to both undergraduate and graduate students of management information systems. The emphasis is not on programming constructs and theories of programming, but instead on application development based on business specifications....

The book is divided into eight chapters of about 30 pages each. Chapter 1 undertakes the monumental task of summarizing Linux, HTML, PHP, and Javascript including installing needed utilities in 37 pages.... Linux is covered in six pages (with plenty of white space within the pages) and includes 25 Linux commands. Chapter 2 deals with object-oriented concepts, again with minimal emphasis on theory, but focused on application development. Extensive code fragments are provided to make the book a learning tool reminiscent of a laboratory manual.

Login security is covered in Chapter 3; again the emphasis is on developing code including developing CAPTCHA scripts to distinguish computers and bots vying for access. Input validation and report generation is the subject of Chapter 4; creating, and modifying XML is covered in Chapter 5. Two important topics, standard PHP library and iterator interface, are covered in Chapter 6. These concepts are illustrated with examples to navigate databases. XML and AJAX are covered in Chapter 7, and Really Simple Syndication and PHP data objects are covered in Chapter 8.

Taylor & Francis, in line with the ongoing trends, has published this journal online since 2014. The website to find all JITCARissues is http://www.tandfonline.com/utca. All authors and reviewers are encouraged to start using the publisher's online manuscript submission and reviewing system at 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 the items in this issue.

Sincerely

Dr. Shailendra Palvia
Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar for 2016-17
Professor of MIS, College of Management
Long Island University Post, Brookville, NY 11801.
http://liu.edu/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty/P/Shailendra-Palvia?rn=Faculty+Profiles&ru=/CWPost/Academics/Faculty/Faculty
Founding and curent Editor-in-Chief, Journal of IT Case and Application Research (JITCAR)
http://www.tandfonline.com/utca
2012 and 2016 LIU Post Nominee for Abraham Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Achievement Award
Faculty Advisor for the Indo-American Club and MIS club
Phone #: 732-983-7034