This article reports on the changing nature of Information Systems (IS) with regards to the internet. The authors suggest that the internet revolution upended tractional models of the customer/producer relationship. The internet has forced organizations to be more customer-centric, in particular, the way organizations disseminate information. The authors regard customer-centric IS as increasingly important and one that factors in customers, process, technology and product/service to maximize customer satisfaction.
This article comments on a study looking at the value of information technology employees outside of the IT department and how they contribute to the health of companies in many ways. The authors of the study believe that IT professionals are often overlooked as sources of innovation in companies and look at organizational mechanisms which have an impact on the propensity to innovate in IT. They studied several aspects of IT including planning, advisory boards, customer support units and more. Using evidence from both a Delphi study of a group of senior managers and a field study of three medium-sized organizations, the authors demonstrated that all but the first of their 14 named mechanisms have statistically discernible impacts on innovation.
Requirements modeling constitutes one of the most important phases of the systems development life cycle. Despite the proliferation of methodologies and models for requirements analysis, empirical work examining their relative efficacy is limited. This paper presents an empirical examination of object-oriented and process-oriented methodologies as applied to object-oriented and process-oriented tasks. The conceptual basis of the research model is derived from the theory of cognitive fit, which posits that superior problem-solving performance will result when the problem-solving task and the problem-solving tool emphasize the same type of information. Two groups of subjects participated in an experiment that required them to construct solutions to two requirements-modeling tasks, one process-oriented and the other object-oriented. One group employed the object-oriented tool while the other used the process-oriented tool. As predicted by the theory of cognitive fit, superior performance was observed when the process-oriented tool was applied to the process-oriented task. For the object-oriented task, however, the performance effects of cognitive fit require further investigation since there was no difference in subject performance across the two tools.