[AISWorld] JITCAR 18.4 Published (Journal of IT Case and Application Research)

[Shailendra Palvia]

Dear Friends Around the World:


I am delighted to present 2016's fourth issue of JITCAR.


The contents of this issue are:  Editorial Preface article by Dr. Steve Gordon; Research article one  co-authored by Dr. Ambuj Anand, Dr. Priya Seetharaman and Dr. Sanji Vaidya; Research article two co-authored by Dr. Daniel Folkinshteyn and Dr. Mark Lennon; Expert Opinion report by Dr. Daniel A. Peak; and Book Review by Dr. Vijay Vemuri.  Summary information of these items is as follows.



In his editorial preface article titled, “Prospects for Case-Based Research on Social Media.”  Dr. Gordon focuses on the tremendous opportunities that the social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) offers case and application researchers in several areas.  Google Scholar cites 865,000 scholarly articles that mention “social media” directly.  Dr. Gordon provides research opportunities in three areas: (a) Power in the People; (b) What’s UP Doc?; and (c) Inside the Organization.  First area refers to the tremendous power that people of the world at any level – city, state, country, region, world – can unleash for a positive (or negative) change. He cites the example of 2011 Arab Spring that resulted in the overthrow of dictatorships in Tunisia and Egypt in which avalanche of communication on social media was a major contributor.  He aptly mentions that “Social media are a means of democratization, even in the face of repression.”  He cites other examples -- Obama 2008 U.S. Elections; Modi 2014 India Elections; Islamic Caliphate/ISIS; and ALS Ice Bucket Challenge.  Most recently, the 2016 U.S. Election points vividly to the role of social media in terms of tweets, Facebook postings, blogs, and fake news.  In the second area very nicely elucidated by Dr. Gordon, healthcare sites, such as WebMD and MedHelp, provide informational and interactive support for online communities to share and consult with one another on health issues.  Such social media communications support well-being of people and reduce the stigma associated with many diseases.  In the third area, Dr. Gordon emphasizes the role of social media within organization to spur regular and relevant communications among employees and managers through tools, known as Enterprise Social Media (ESM).  These private social media networks also known as Intrantets and Extranets allow the organization to limit their use to members of the organization and selected outsiders.  They private networks collect and analyze data and metadata about the communications that take place on the network to provide broad as well as deep knowledge to improve organizational performance.



First research article is co-authored by Drs. Anand, Seetharaman and Vaidya and is titled, “Role of Project Owner in E-Government Project Sustainability.”  This article postulates that the role of project owner is critical in sustaining a project. The authors present the case of Jhansi Jan Suvidha Kendra, a Grievance Redressal platform implemented in Jhansi (Uttar Pradesh, India), to highlight the multi-faceted role of a project owner primarily in the phases of conceptualization, implementation and institutionalization.  For project sustainability, three key mechanisms recommended are: Involving citizens in project conceptualization and implementation, empowering citizens to monitor project performance and incentivizing key stakeholders.



The second research article is titled, “Braving Bitcoin: A Technology Acceptance Model Analysis.”  Bitcoin, an entirely digital distributed currency, has been disruptive and controversial in its implementation.  Its disintermediating nature has fueled the tremendous growth of the financial technology industry.  According to the authors, “Bitcoin's distributed, verifiable, and immutable public transaction ledger, known as the blockchain, holds out the promise of fast, cheap, peer-to-peer financial transactions, as well as significant efficiencies in the transfer of other assets via overlay networks.” The authors have used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) framework to analyze aspects of the technology acceptance process in the case of Bitcoin as a currency and the blockchain as a financial technology. They present their findings from the perspective of both Developers and End Users. in order to identify similarities and differences in how various stakeholders accept this new technology. They also illustrate these findings with a series of condensed case studies drawn from secondary sources; and an in depth single case study of a blockchain based auction system drawn from primary sources.



The Expert Opinion report documents interview by Dr. Daniel Peak with Mr. Terry Lenhardt, Vice President and Chief Information Officer of Steelcase, Inc. Mr. Lenhardt oversees all of Steelcase’s IT functions and also continues to lead Sales Finance for the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pacific. Prior to joining Steelcase in 1994,  Mr. Lenhardt worked at Unisys Corporation.  He began his career as an auditor for the public accounting firm of Touche Ross & Co., where he earned certification as a public accountant.  Questions posed to Mr. Lenhardt are: (a) As CIO, could you please describe your role at Steelcase?; (b) How is the role of CIO at Steelcase different from what it was ten years ago?; (c) Is there a research and development component in your job?; (d) Fifteen years ago, I helped design a large academic technology facility, which we furnished with Steelcase products.  The workspaces were very accommodating, but geared for the state of technology at the time.  Today we might do it differently.  Today, the relatively new mobile office paradigm is refocusing workplace designs from fixed offices and compact bullpens to more distributed, spacious, off-site offices.  How has Steelcase IT supported this product change?; (e) How is information technology changing the way people behave in the workplace?; (f) I’m interested in those spaces where employees can get away.  Can you provide a few examples?; (g) Would you please define the Steelcase concept of smart spaces?; (h) Please explain a little about the generated data concept.  Does this mean that you can assess your solutions by monitoring activities, processes, and user experiences that occur within various spatial configurations?; (i) R: What is the role of IT and smart spaces in the work environment?; (j) Very interesting.  Then, when should the knowledge worker, the technology, and the workplace be aligned and how?; (k) I like the requirement of seamless technology.  My sister is a manager who works from home, but her teams are all over the world.  Her day is long and full of remote

meetings—a very different environment from what she and I began with.  You’ve shown us that you aim to accommodate these people.  Overall, what does Steelcase offer 21st-century distributed managers who are absolutely dependent on IT to do their jobs?; (l)  With regard to these offered solutions, how does Steelcase address the challenges of seamless, distributed meetings?; (m) Speaking of the importance of being energized and engaged, do Millennials have different IT requirements than the previous generation business professionals?; (n) When do new IT and workspace requirements become a burden to business?; (o) I like your optimism.  Does fulfilling the new requirements make the millennials more productive?; (p) That makes sense, especially because you personalize the work experience across generations.  How will these new requirements transform business?; (q) Analytics is a new and growing area that is redefining data-driven decision making in business.  So, is the current role of information technology transitional?; (r)  How do you envision that role in the connected future?; (s) Speaking of bimodality, social media is another technology that has impacted the once heavily-governed IT landscape. What is the role of social media at Steelcase and in your products?; (t) Does social media have a special role in digital business?; (u) Can you discuss some of your major initiatives?; (v) Some people may still think of Steelcase as an office furnishings company, but you’ve shown that data and IT drive your solutions.  From a planning perspective, how important is IT to the overall corporate strategy at Steelcase?; (w) Steelcase provides furnishings for academic environments and corporate environments.  I’ve worked in both environments where they used Steelcase products.  Is there a difference between the types of furnishings needed by each?; (x) Henry Chesbrough at Berkeley said when add services to products and technologies, you inevitably change the business model.  Is Steelcase helping to change that model?



Book review report by Dr. Vijay Vemuri provides a detailed critique of the 2016 book titled, “Big Data Essentials” authored by Mr. Anil Maheshwari and published by Amazon Kindle.  This is the very first digital-only book reviewed for JITCAR.  Eleven chapters in this book cover nearly all the technologies needed for understanding, analyzing and benefiting from big data.  The chapters  are titled: Wholeness of Big Data, Big Data Applications, Big Data Architecture, Distributed Computing using Hadoop, Big Data Processing, Databases to Support Big Data, New Technologies  for Streaming Data, Technologies to receive Big Data, Primer on Cloud Computing, Web Log Analyzer, and Data Mining Primer. Salient features of the book as extracted from the Book Review are as follows.





“big data applications for monitoring and tracking and gaining insights from different functional areas are briefly explained; the recommender systems of Amazon and Netflix are also briefly described; important concepts and tools of big data including Hadoop, MapReduce, MongoDB, and Kafka messaging system are elucidated; distributed computing using Hadoop (including an appendix for technical details of Hadoop) is articulated; File systems to store Hadoop data and instructions to perform basic file operations are provided; big data processing utilizing MapReduce parallel programming framework is well explained; the inadequacies of relational database management systems and the need for NoSQL (Not only Structured Query Language) databases to overcome these difficulties is clearly described; the architectures of MongoDB and Cassandra are briefly described and contrasted; also provided is description of technologies to receive data from different sources at different rates of speed in a flexible and scalable manner.  Above all, two tutorials in the appendices provide details of installation and basic use of Hadoop and Spark systems.”


Routledge, in line with the ongoing trends, has published this journal online since 2014.  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 the items in this issue.  With best regards,



Sincerely





Dr. Shailendra Palvia

Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow for 2016-17

based out of IIM, Ahmedabad, India

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

Recipient of Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award 2016-17

2012 & 2016 LIU Post Nominee for Abraham Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Achievement Award

Founding Editor and current EIC, Journal of IT Case and Applications Research (JITCAR)

Phone #: 732-983-7034?



Sincerely





Dr. Shailendra Palvia

Fulbright-Nehru Senior Research Fellow 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

Recipient of Fulbright-Nehru Senior Scholar Award 2016-17

2012 & 2016 LIU Post Nominee for Abraham Krasnoff Lifetime Scholarship Achievement Award

Founding Editor and current EIC, Journal of IT Case and Applications Research (JITCAR)

Phone #: 732-983-7034