Editorial

Citation

Ali, M. and Irani, Z. (2011), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 24 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2011.08824eaa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Volume 24, Issue 5

It gives us great pleasure to welcome you to Volume 24, Issue 5 of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management. This issue is based on a selection of the best papers presented at the 2010 European, Mediterranean and Middle Eastern Conference of Information Systems, 10-12 April, Abu-Dhabi, UAE (www.emcis.org). The papers deal with contemporary and potential issues and themes related to ICTs and organizations from a multiplicity of angles, providing a mixture of conjectural and prudent contributions.

This issue commences with Ali and Lee, who have investigated any cultural impacts on end-users’ web page design in web logs. They have analysed the design preferences of 201 web logs in Malaysia have been collected using content analysis method and tested the existence of Malaysian cultural traits on the web pages. The results confirm that there is no cultural impact on web log designs that is contrary to existing studies that reported cultural traits in static web page design. This paper concludes by suggesting the increased social interaction among web loggers as one of reasons of weakened cultural impacts in web log design behaviour. Ali and Lee have concluded that culture has been considered as one of major factors that affect the design behaviour of static web pages that mostly support one-way interaction between information providers and information consumers. On the other hand, the recent adoption of Web 2.0 technology enabled bi-directional interaction between information providers and consumers and it is not known if there is still a strong cultural impact on web page design based on this new technology.

This paper is followed by the research that focuses on the relevance of the theory of deferred action for knowledge management systems (KMS) design in practice. The authors of this research – Patel and Ghoneim, explored their research by adopting a case study approach to examine knowledge work and knowledge management in virtual teamwork in a large UK telecommunications company to understand the occurrence of emergent knowledge and how it is managed by virtual team leaders. The section in the company studied is described as a “knowledge intensive organisation” dealing with the company’s e-commerce activities. The analysis confirms the complex adaptive system hypothesis – a complex system adapts to its environment through self-organisation. The authors argue that the data reveal the behaviour of the virtual team to be self-organising and adaptive to its environment. It confirms the knowledge tacitness hypothesis and social embeddedness of knowledge hypothesis as important determinants of knowledge sharing. Specifically, the data reveals the main issues concerning knowledge sharing practices of virtual team workers and the crucial team leader’s role in the effectiveness of the teams’” capability to develop social links to externalise and share tacit knowledge to accomplish tasks. In this paper, the authors contribute “emergent knowledge” as a third category of organisational knowledge in addition to the existing tacit and explicit knowledge that needs to be considered when designing knowledge management systems. It also derives socio-technical systems design principles based on the theory of deferred action, and a tentative development process with metrics is then proposed for knowledge management systems design that caters for emergent, tacit, and explicit knowledge. The study contributes to the limited research and lack of consideration of emergent knowledge as an integral part of organisational knowledge, especially in an era of emergent organisations.

Following the previous research, this study is presented by Freeman and Freeman. This research proposes that modelling users’ interactions online is envisaged to allow developers to increase the usability of online systems and will aid system developers in building better systems to meet users’ needs, hereby creating better system design processes. The normative task model that was developed in this paper was created through an expert review of 14 online grocery stores, using a reverse engineering technique to model the features of the stores’ ordering process. The research identified three main areas of user experience when undertaking the process of adding a product to an online trolley: attempting to retrieve the product, receiving the results of the retrieval attempt, and adding the product to the trolley. These three classifications were used as the basis for an analysis of errors. The findings present a model that can be used to further understand the processes of customers as they engage in an online grocery shopping visit. The normative task model presented is expected to help in the future design of online grocery stores by identifying the possible errors that users can encounter, and methods to reduce the occurrence of these errors. Errors are one area that traditional task-modelling processes ignore, due to their focus on successful processes. This paper presents the innovative process of the development of a normative task model for modelling user interactions when using online grocery stores.

Thereafter, Al-Salti and Hackney have investigated the key factors that facilitate or inhibit knowledge transfer success from vendors to clients in information systems (IS) outsourcing. The collection of data rested on semi-structured interviews with IS/IT managers at various levels of the subject organizations and careful documents analysis. The findings suggest that knowledge transfer success in IS outsourcing is affected by four sets of factors: knowledge-related, client-related, vendor-related and relationship-related. This study may provide some useful insights for IS managers on how to manage knowledge transfer in IS outsourcing projects and better understand the key factors that impact its success. This study investigated the client’s perceptive only which is one side of the knowledge transfer process. A balanced understanding of the research questions (i.e. from both sides: client and vendor) permits a fuller examination and comparison between the perceptions of the two sides of the relationship. The value and the originality of this study come from the fact that knowledge transfer in IS outsourcing has not been comprehensively explored. Previous research fails to provide a complete understanding of the factors that impact knowledge transfer success as most are focused on the type of knowledge transferred, the client, the vendor or the relationship between the client and the vendor.

We hope you will find this issue interesting and thought provoking, and hope to receive your valuable contributions for forthcoming issues.

Maged AliGuest Editor

Zahir IraniEditor