Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2009), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 22 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2009.08822caa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Volume 22, Issue 3

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the third issue of the 22nd volume of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management. This issue covers a diversity of contributions in various topics including enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, e-supply chains performance measurement, inter-organizational and virtual collaboration, information and communication technologies (ICT) homeworking, bearing both theoretical and practical implications.

We start off this issue with an empirical contribution by Elizabeth Daniel, Devendra Kodwani and Sanjukta Datta who undertook a study of offshoring. In their paper, the authors sought to determine the impact of announcements regarding ICT-enabled offshoring on the share prices of public companies. In doing so, their study extends the use of event studies in the information systems domain to ICT-enabled offshoring. Elizabeth Daniel, Devendra Kodwani, and Sanjukta Datta establish that investors do not tend to reward offshoring announcements. Furthermore, it is most likely that the value of the firm will be perceived as unchanged or if there is a reaction, it is most likely to reduce the value of the firm. The analysis also showed a positive relation between the size of a firm and the size of the offshoring contract. Also, US investors are found to be more likely to react negatively than UK investors. The study has valuable practical implications to managers in many types of organisations who are currently undertaking or considering offshoring, as it will enable them to understand the possible reactions of shareholders and other stakeholders. In addition, this paper is also one of the very few event studies that consider both UK and US-based companies. The use of transaction cost economics perspective also adds to the theoretical understanding of offshoring, by demonstrating that investors appear to consider increased transaction costs involved in offshoring will outweigh lower purchasing or production costs.

Homeworkers are equipped with the technological capability of interacting with colleagues regardless of where they are and what time it is. This not only allows homeworkers to remain connected outside of the time and physical space that they allocate for work activity, but also the ability for homeworkers to transform their communication patterns with colleagues. Despite the potential highlighted, it is not clear from the literature whether and how homeworkers use their mobile phone to interact with colleagues for social interaction. Hence, Banita Lal and Yogesh K. Dwivedi in this paper aimed to investigate:

[…] if the mobile phone is used by homeworkers as a means of retaining social interaction with colleagues and, if so, to provide illustrations of how the device can be used for this purpose.

The findings of their study challenge the largely pessimistic view of social isolation within homeworking literature, by demonstrating that although a reduction in in-person interaction does result in fewer opportunities for homeworkers to engage in face-to-face social interaction, homeworkers are able to take actions in order to avoid the associated negative outcomes. As well as providing a flexible means of remaining connected, the mobile phone also resulted in changes in patterns of communication for homeworkers. Banita Lal and Yogesh K. Dwivedi offer directions for future research.

Globalization of sales and sourcing markets, shortened product life cycles among other factors increase the pressure over enterprises to increase competitiveness, to operate on a global market, and to engage in alliances of several kinds. In order to meet the requirements and challenges of participating in such alliances, companies must be able to cooperate effectively and efficiently. Antonia Albani and Jan L.G. Dietz provide an overview of some major directions in inter-organizational cooperation. In their paper, they summarize the results of a series of workshops on Modeling Inter-Organizational Systems (MIOS-CIAO!). Antonia Albani and Jan L.G. Dietz offer an overview of what has been established and what is going on regarding the cooperation of enterprises in networks. Such an overview is a useful source of knowledge for those who want to have a quick insight in the relevant aspects of cooperation, and in many well-known modeling approaches and techniques. It is also an inspiring source for those who want to investigate yet unsolved or unsatisfactorily solved problems. In the process, Antonia Albani and Jan L.G. Dietz clarify several core notions in the area of inter-organizational cooperation, such as collaboration, cooperation, enterprise network, choreography, and orchestration. Although developments, both in theory and in practice, will go on, they believe that no landslides are expected. Particularly for practice, the value of this report will therefore last for a considerable time.

Increasingly, the advance of information technology (IT) is evolving toward a strategic role with the potential not only to support chosen business strategies, but also to shape new business strategies. The importance of alignment of ERP implementation with organizational strategies has been widely recognized. However, in the context of new ventures such alignment has not yet been convincingly demonstrated. From this standpoint, Jau-Rong Chen explores the alignment of ERP implementation with organizational development for new ventures, as well as how ERP implementation can facilitate such development. Using an in-depth case study from a Taiwanese integrated circuit design house, Jau-Rong Chen illustrates that in order to leverage the value of ERP system, the implementation should consider the firm’s growth stages, the unique industrial characteristics, the influences from the business group, and the alignment of the internal control and audit function, corporate governance, and IT governance. Furthermore, data analysis of this study provides a set of vocabularies that researchers and practitioners could employ in similar organizational processes as in new ventures. Accordingly, future ERP implementation processes can be compared and benchmarked.

Demosthenes Akoumianakis contributes to the available literature by reviewing, describing and presenting components of a technological frame of reference and supporting tools which allow virtual partnerships to engage in the practice the partnership is about. In his paper, he focuses on the collaborative practices of virtual teams carrying out knowledge-based work and the tools required/used to assemble “collective” artefacts. This paper investigates existing practices and makes use of scenarios to envision new distributed collective practices in a designated application domain. Demosthenes Akoumianakis uses a mixture of data collection instruments (i.e. survey of current practice and expert interviews) and analytical tools (i.e. scenarios of use, walkthroughs, and virtual prototyping) to provide insight towards the design of practice-oriented toolkits. The proposed approach is validated in the context of an electronic village of local interest with a thematic focus on regional tourism, highlighting the key role of “collective” knowledge management in information-based industries whose products are non-material (intangible) and knowledge is central to gaining competitive advantage. Furthermore, the results include a general model for practice-oriented toolkits conceived of as separate software components from (but interoperable to) the community support system and devised to establish a place for engaging in the practice the community is about. This model is then used to build an operational toolkit for assembling vacation packages by cross-organization virtual communities of practice.

Murali Sambasivan, Zainal Abidin Mohamed and Tamizarasu Nandan argue that in order to manage e-supply chains efficiently and effectively, traditional measures of supply chain performance are not adequate. This argument is also supported by the lack of measures and metrics in the literature. In their paper, Murali Sambasivan, Zainal Abidin Mohamed and Tamizarasu Nandan developed new measures and metrics for monitoring the performance of e-supply chains. To do so, they have used a framework based on the benefits of e-supply chains and conducted focus group discussion by assembling eight experts and practitioners in the field of e-supply chain to come up with the measures and metrics. Subsequently, a questionnaire was designed with these measures and metrics and was sent to about 300 electronic component manufacturing companies in Malaysia to obtain feedback from the industry practitioners. The analysis of the focus groups findings resulted in the identification of six metrics and 22 measures namely:

1. 1.

   web-enabled service metric;

2. 2.

   data reliability metric;

3. 3.

   time and cost metric;

4. 4.

   e-response metric;

5. 5.

   invoice presentation and payment metric; and

6. 6.

   e-document management metric.

The paper concludes with a number of valuable lessons learned from this study.

The last contribution in this issue by Alba N. Nuñez, Ronald E. Giachetti, and Giacomo Boria aimed at contributing to the understanding of coordination in business processes by quantifying how the coordination load is affected by changes in task structure and task characteristics. As they highlighted, most previous studies have been at the organization level, while their research focuses on the business process level. A model that quantifies the amount of coordination work as a function of the task characteristics analyzability and variability and the task structure factor of interdependence is developed. Subsequently, a management simulation game is used with a full factorial design of experiments to test the model. The analyses of the experimental results indicate that as task analyzability decreases and task interdependence increases then the coordination load increases. The increase in coordination load is greater for changes in task interdependence than for changes in task analyzability. Furthermore, the time savings from doing tasks in parallel versus sequential are less than what would be expected due to the increased interdependence between tasks and the resulting requirements for coordination. Alba N. Nuñez, Ronald E. Giachetti, and Giacomo Boria indicate that these results can be used to understand the trade-offs of different process configurations, primarily how coordination load changes when a process is changed from sequential to parallel.

Finally, we hope you enjoy reading this issue, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for the following issue.

Zahir IraniEditor (zahir.irani@brunel.ac.uk)

Ahmad GhoneimEditorial Assistant