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September 2006

September 08, 2006

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Tom Babineau

Booth Part 1

My apologies to everyone for the late entries.

 

Posted by Tom Babineau | 2 comment(s)

September 14, 2006

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Tom Babineau

Speier & Morris

In reading this article I tried to keep context in mind. This article was published in the third quarter of 2003, which means the development of this idea probably started in 2001-2002. I say this because I read this article the first time and said, "So what?" There is plenty of research and our own real-life experience to tell us that generally graphical interfaces will create enhanced user experiences, satisfaction, and performance; that is why I believe DOS as a primary PC interface died so early on in the computer age. Although there seemed to be some decrease in accuracy on the visual interface in this study, I would question how the visual interface was set up rather than discount the overall results. Still, in 2001-2002 we were well on our way to front-ending just about everything with an easy-to-use graphical interface. Perhaps Speier & Morris just needed to validate it in another manner.  From my understanding of how the practice of social research is accomplished, this is a text book research project when you analyze the structure, data collection method, etc. I did appreciate the framework they built for evaluating end user performance in the test. Thinking of relationships like spatial recognition proficiency when evaluating the differences between text and graphical interfaces was spot on. There was certainly some significant thought put into the variables they accounted for and evaluation criteria for their samples. I still struggle with the value this research can bring to education or industry. I bet you all can help me with that though.

Keywords: Speier and Morris

Posted by Tom Babineau | 3 comment(s)

September 15, 2006

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Tom Babineau

ITIL

Professor Ryan and I attended the last CIO forum here on campus and heard what I found to be an interesting discussion on ITIL. For those of you not familiar with ITIL, ITIL (pronounced wither "I-till” or a close variation of “idle”) stands for the IT Infrastructure Library. This “library”, which was developed in the UK, consists of 10 books that attempt to do a few significant things from what I have gleaned so far: 1.) Develop a repository for IT best practices, at a high-level2.) Develop a common IT language and definitional support for this language3.) Develop a set of guidelines and standards to apply to the (as already established in our two class sessions) sometimes ambiguous world of IT4.) Establish itself as a world recognized standard with a standards body and review process to adapt to the ever-changing world of IT 

I am going to start a more thorough investigation of ITIL, but I wanted to know if any of you have run into ITIL in your educational or professional endeavors. What was the context? Do you see this type of standardization as a help or a hindrance to our research? Do you feel this type of resource reduces the value that our education gives us (even slightly) and/or the value of the research from the IT educational community at large? I look forward to your input.

Keywords: ITIL

Posted by Tom Babineau | 0 comment(s)

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Tom Babineau

ITIL

Professor Ryan and I attended the last CIO forum here on campus and heard what I found to be an interesting discussion on ITIL. For those of you not familiar with ITIL, ITIL (pronounced wither "I-till” or a close variation of “idle”) stands for the IT Infrastructure Library. This “library”, which was developed in the UK, consists of 10 books that attempt to do a few significant things from what I have gleaned so far: 1.) Develop a repository for IT best practices, at a high-level2.) Develop a common IT language and definitional support for this language3.) Develop a set of guidelines and standards to apply to the (as already established in our two class sessions) sometimes ambiguous world of IT4.) Establish itself as a world recognized standard with a standards body and review process to adapt to the ever-changing world of IT 

I am going to start a more thorough investigation of ITIL, but I wanted to know if any of you have run into ITIL in your educational or professional endeavors. What was the context? Do you see this type of standardization as a help or a hindrance to our research? Do you feel this type of resource reduces the value that our education gives us (even slightly) and/or the value of the research from the IT educational community at large? I look forward to your input.

Keywords: ITIL

Posted by Tom Babineau | 1 comment(s)

September 23, 2006

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Tom Babineau

Dube' & Pare': RIGOR IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS...

The authors of this article did a very thorough job. I particularly appreciated their structure and use of tables to present their data. The results of their research were telling. I read the abstract and introduction and was immediately taken back to our classroom discussions and particularly the Benbesat and Smud article. I would like to see this study done again for the next decade. The authors claim below codified for me one of the primary reasons that our field is struggling for validity: "A major finding of our exhaustive, empirical examination of published positivist case studies ... is that a large portion of them have actually ignored the state of the art of case research methods that have been readily available to them."  As we learned in Booth et al., some of the things we need to do to provide useful scientific knowledge is to develop our original thought via generally accepted, scientific methods and with complete transparency. The evidence Dube' & Pare' provide (particularly the data on transparency of data collection methods and use of multiple data sources) were surprising to me. One could contend that this study of articles from 1990-1999 was part of the maturation process of our field, perhaps a stage. I would be interested to see a similar study taken from 2000-today.  There are a few areas of this article where the authors seem to fall into the traps of their own criticisms. For instance, there seemed to be no clear criteria for what constitutes a "clear research question." The only thing that came close to trying to explain their criteria was a short discussion on "how" and "why" questions that seemed to be highly presumptuous, suggesting that "what" questions held more weight than "how" questions for certain types of studies.

Keywords: Dube' & Pare', rigor

Posted by Tom Babineau | 1 comment(s)

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Tom Babineau

Experts in our Field

Reading this week's articles was interesting in many ways for me. In particular, there were the citations and articles used in this study. Are Lee, Benbasat, and Yin the predominant scholars in our field? Are they the only thought leaders we have in our field? One sure could have concluded that based on our recent articles. I know there are a lot of productive scholars in our field, and perhaps these folks are just very talented, but I want to see more breadth with varied points of view.   While I am reading research articles I find myself looking for original thought from the authors. In many instances I have read through the majority of the paper with only small bits of original thought from the author(s). Are we supposed to have 70% of our paper come from other people's work? I understand the thought process of a Lit Review, but it seems that citation overload sometimes occurs in research papers. This may be my naivety showing again, but I think we can provide quality material with the appropriate amount of rigor without needing a reference for every sentence in the paper.

 

Posted by Tom Babineau | 3 comment(s)