Today, corporations are placing increasing emphasis on the management of data. To learn more about effective approaches to "managing the data resource," case studies of 31 data management efforts in 20 diverse firms have been conducted. The major finding is that there is no single, dominant approach to improving the management of data. Rather, firms have adopted multiple approaches that appear to be very diverse in (1) business objective, (2) organizational scope, (3) planning method, and (4) "product," i.e., deliverable produced. The dominant business objective for successful action is improved managerial information; most data management efforts are "targeted" without a formal data planning process; and the dominant product was "information databases." In addition, several key organizational issues must be addressed when undertaking any data management effort.
This article examines the evolving role of the chief information officer. It reviews current thinking on this role and then tests three hypotheses described by Rockart, et al., through a survey conducted with 25 large organizations. The results indicate that IS responsibility is rapidly being distributed, and that the senior IS executive is emphasizing staff responsibilities and is becoming proactive in business strategy issues.
In the past, research examining the work-related correlates of job satisfaction in programmer/analysts has focused on the relationship between characteristics of the job itself and job satisfaction. It is hypothesized that certain aspects of relationships with co-workers, project leaders, and users will also be significant correlates of job satisfaction. Specifically, the relationship between job satisfaction, role conflict, role ambiguity, and quality of leadership provided by supervisors and peers is examined. A questionnaire measuring job characteristics, role conflict and ambiguity, leadership characteristics, and job satisfaction was administered to 118 programmer/analysts at four companies. The results indicate that both role and leadership variables correlated at least as highly with job satisfaction as job characteristics and that the addition of role and leadership variables to job characteristics significantly increases the explained variance in job satisfaction.