IS project team performance: An empirical assessment

IS project team performance is a topic of increasing importance to practicing managers as well as researchers. This paper discusses the development and testing of a theoretical model of IS project team performance. Empirical analysis suggests that team members' perceptions of their ability to represent users' views during a project is a significant predictor of the team's perception of their overall performance. Another significant predictor is team members' belief in their personal involvement in the development process. However, findings on the influence of cohesion on performance differ from those in other studies: apparently cohesion was not a significant factor in this study.     

Enhancing development team flexibility in IS projects

Information system development projects face tremendous challenges because of business changes and technology changes. Research has shown that software team flexibility has a positive effect on project outcomes, but specific requirements for enhancing flexibility are lacking. Drawing from the input-mediator-outcome (IMO) team effectiveness framework, this research investigates the contextual inputs and team processes that lead to development team flexibility and how well team flexibility improves project outcomes. A survey was developed to consider a model derived from the IMO framework. One hundred fourteen members of information systems development project teams in China responded to the survey. Partial least squares analysis was used served to analyze the data. Results indicate that a participatory culture and cooperative norms are an effective foundation for improving required processes that include project coordination of the project and knowledge sharing activities. In turn, the improved process performance extends responses to changes in technology and the business climate. The improved flexibility in meeting change is predictive of outcomes related to project performance and quality of the final product.     

On social computing research collaboration patterns: a social network perspective

The field of social computing emerged more than ten years ago. During the last decade, researchers from a variety of disciplines have been closely collaborating to boost the growth of social computing research. This paper aims at identifying key researchers and institutions, and examining the collaboration patterns in the field. We employ co-authorship network analysis at different levels to study the bibliographic information of 6 543 publications in social computing from 1998 to 2011. This paper gives a snapshot of the current research in social computing and can provide an initial guidance to new researchers in social computing.     

Examining online citizenship behaviours in social network sites: a social capital perspective

As users have flocked to social network sites (SNSs), these sites have gained tremendous scale and concomitant social influence. This growth has come at the cost of social disruption caused by the posting of abusive comments and rumours that turn out to be false. To combat these negative phenomena, this study proposes SNS citizenship behaviour and examines it from the perspective of social capital theory. This study further examines how the key characteristics of SNS in terms of the concept of customer value affect social capital development in an SNS context. The test results explain that the structural, relational, and cognitive dimensions of social capital have significant direct and indirect effects on the SNS citizenship behaviour. These findings also explain that four key characteristics (exploration, communication support, playfulness, and responsiveness) of SNS affect the three dimensions of social capital. This study contributes to the literature in its establishment of the concept of SNS citizenship behaviour and examines it from the social capital theory perspective. Its findings have practical implications through its guidance on how to develop SNS features and manage these sites for the citizenship behaviour of their users, which are achievements for the harmonious and effective functioning of SNS.     

Customer engagement and performance in social media: a managerial perspective

Electronic Markets - The topic of customer engagement via social media is receiving increasing consideration in the literature. Previously, scholars’ use of the notion and dimensionality of...     

IT infrastructure capabilities and IT project success: a development team perspective

In this research we investigate how IT infrastructure capabilities are related to IT project success from a development team perspective. We first conduct an extensive literature review and summarize the insights to suggest an IT infrastructure base model. Drawing upon several other bodies of literature, particularly the psychology literature, we then build upon the base model to propose an integrative research model for IT project success that considers both actual and perceived effects of IT infrastructure capabilities. This research model argues that (1) teamwork quality mediates the effect of technical and human IT infrastructure capabilities on IT project success, and (2) team perceptions of both IT infrastructure and team capabilities shape team perceived likelihood of project success, which subsequently affects team commitment that is crucial to IT project success. We also propose a direct-effect model that directly links all constructs to IT project success so that we can test the efficacy of our proposed research model by comparing all three models. We then collect empirical data (n = 91) through an online survey of CIO/CTOs and team leaders. All three models are evaluated and compared using the partial least squares method. The results show strong support for the proposed research model except for two IT infrastructure components. We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of the findings, and suggest several ways this research can be extended.     

Road network structure and ride-sharing accessibility: A network science perspective

The prosperity of ride-sharing services has rippled in the communities of GIScience, transportation, and urban planning. Meanwhile, road network structure has been analyzed from a network science perspective that focuses on nodes and relational links and aims to predictive models. However, limited empirical studies have explored the relationship between road network structure and ride-sharing accessibility through such perspective. This paper utilizes the spatial Durbin model to understand the relationship between road network structure and ride-sharing accessibility, proxied by Uber accessibility, through classical network measures of degree, closeness, and betweenness centrality. Taking the city of Atlanta as a case study, we have found in addition to population density and road network density, larger values of degree centrality and smaller values of closeness centrality of the road network are associated with better accessibility of Uber services. However, the effects of betweenness centrality are not significant. Furthermore, we have revealed heterogeneous effects of degree centrality and closeness centrality on the accessibility of Uber services, as the magnitudes of their effects vary by different time windows (i.e., weekday vs. weekend, rush hour in the morning vs. evening). Network science provides us both conceptual and methodological measures to understand the association between road network structure and ride-sharing accessibility. In this study, we constructed road network structure measures with OpenStreetMap, which is reproducible, replicable, and scalable because of its global coverage and public availability. The study resonates with the notion of cities as the set of interactions across networks, as we have observed time-sensitive heterogeneous effects of road network structure on ride-sharing accessibility.     

The development of a tool to predict team performance

The paper describes the development of a tool to predict quantitatively the success of a team when executing a process. The tool was developed for the UK defence industry, though it may be useful in other domains. It is expected to be used by systems engineers in initial stages of systems design, when concepts are still fluid, including the structure of the team(s) which are expected to be operators within the system. It enables answers to be calculated for questions such as “What happens if I reduce team size?” and “Can I reduce the qualifications necessary to execute this process and still achieve the required level of success?”.The tool has undergone verification and validation; it predicts fairly well and shows promise. An unexpected finding is that the tool creates a good a priori argument for significant attention to Human Factors Integration in systems projects. The simulations show that if a systems project takes full account of human factors integration (selection, training, process design, interaction design, culture, etc.) then the likelihood of team success will be in excess of 0.95. As the project derogates from this state, the likelihood of team success will drop as low as 0.05. If the team has good internal communications and good individuals in key roles, the likelihood of success rises towards 0.25. Even with a team comprising the best individuals, p(success) will not be greater than 0.35.It is hoped that these results will be useful for human factors professionals involved in systems design.     

Team experiential cognitive style and team performance: The moderating impact of workplace setting

With an increasing need in organizations to come up with novel and useful ideas to renew and survive, team creativity has grown in importance to managers and researchers. As the cognitive resources of team members are the core input for team creativity, researchers increasingly look at team cognition in general and team cognitive styles in particular. In this research stream, the environmental context in which team members are embedded has received limited attention. We therefore experimentally test variation in the physical workplace environment and how it influences the relationship between team experiential cognitive styles and team creativity. Manipulating the nature of architectural elements in the room, we distinguish between a physical workplace with (i) experiential cues and (ii) rational cues. We also use a control condition where architectural elements are absent in the workplace environment. We rely on resource‐matching theory to build our hypotheses. Using data of 75 student teams of a Dutch university, we find that the relationship between teams' experiential cognitive style and team creativity was positive in the control condition. This positive relationship became insignificant in the two conditions where experiential or rational cues were introduced. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

External social capital and information systems development team flexibility

Context

ISD research based on the socio-technical perspective suggests that two sources of socio-technical change have a bearing on the performance of information systems development (ISD) projects: business requirements and development technology. To enhance project effectiveness, ISD teams need to enhance their flexibility in the face of the constant changes taking place from business and technical environments in which they operate. Flexibility is conceptualized as an outcome of capability development through constantly integrating and reconfiguring available resources within and outside of the organization where the team is embedded.

Objective

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationship between a team’s external social capital and team flexibility. More specifically, based on social capital theory, this study argues that external social capital leads to IS team flexibility, which in turn contributes to the successful project performance.

Method

A survey design was selected to collect data and test the proposed model. A snowballing strategy was employed to collect data. 118 information systems developers participated in the survey and the model was analyzed using partial least squares regression. Results: The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital do contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Results

The findings show that, in general, the ISD teams’ external social capital does contribute to the team’s response to changes. However, they exhibit unique impacts on ISD team flexibility respectively.

Conclusion

The various external social capitals have distinctive effects on a team’s flexibility. Specifically, horizontal relationships are positively associated with both business and technology flexibility. Vertical relationships are positively associated with business flexibility and market relationships technology flexibility. ISD managers should establish robust relationships with its high-ups, other lateral units, and third parties outside in the market. They also need to be more adaptive to the increasingly volatile socio-technical environment, and proactively search, exploit, upgrade, and integrate resources that are essential to the development of system development team flexibility.     

Congestion control in social-based sensor networks: A social network perspective

Social-based sensor networks are prone to congestion due to the limited storage space on each node and the unpredictable end-to-end delay. In this paper, we aim to develop an efficient congestion control approach from the social network perspective. For this purpose, we first identify the role of social ties in the process of congestion and specify a list of major congestion factors. Based on these factors, we then model the congestion control as a multiple attribute decision making problem (MADM), in which the weight of congestion factors is measured by an entropy method. We present a MADM-based congestion control approach that determines a set of forwarding messages and its transmission order on each encounter event. Moreover, we design a buffer management scheme that deletes messages whose removal would incur the least impact upon the network performance when the buffer overflows. Extensive real-trace driven simulation is conducted and the experimental results finally validate the efficiency of our proposed congestion control approach.     

Understanding the continuance use of social network sites: a computer self-efficacy perspective

Based on social cognitive theory and the balanced thinking–feelings model, this study proposes a research model to examine the different roles of general computer self-efficacy (CSE) and specific CSE. The research model was tested with a survey of university students in Singapore in the Facebook context. It is found that while general CSE affects continuance intention through both cognition and affection, specific CSE mainly affects continuance intention through cognition. It is also found that general computer experience affects general CSE only and specific computer experience affects specific CSE only.     

Time windows-based team performance measures: a framework to measure team performance in dynamic environments

In this paper, we present a framework for implementing Team Performance Measures based on a temporal accuracy measure called the relative accuracy index (RAI) to evaluate and compare team performance in a command-and-control human-in-the-loop simulation. The framework allows researchers to collect and analyze team outcomes in an unbiased objective manner based on a temporal performance measure known as a Time Window. Our framework provides experimenters and subject matter experts the necessary tools to evaluate performance in terms of task demands. We also provide a sample analysis of individual and team performance using the RAI.     

A trust evaluation scheme for complex links in a social network: a link strength perspective

Potential security threats pose a significant challenge to evaluating the trustworthiness of complex links among users in a social network. Traditional trust computation methods typically consider user comments or interaction, thereby reflecting the trustworthiness between users according to their past experiences. However, the tie strength, which reflects the closeness of user relationships, is also a potential factor for estimating the trustworthiness of links among users. To incorporate this indicator, we propose a trust evaluation scheme for complex links comprising two aspects: the reliability and strength of links among uses. Our main contributions are (1) a trust calculation method, including direct trust for directly linked users and indirect trust for indirectly linked users, which is established based on the comment factor, forwarding factor, and approving factor; (2) a link strength evaluation method to determine the trustworthiness of direct and indirect links between users considering comment stability, mutual trust, interaction frequency, and common neighbours and community similarity, and (3) a link trust evaluation algorithm based on the link trust matrix synthesizing the reliability and strength of links. The experimental results and analysis show that our proposed scheme is feasible and effective in improving the performance of trust evaluation in a social network.     

BNC-VLA: bayesian network structure learning using a team of variable-action set learning automata

Bayesian Network (BN) is a probabilistic graphical model which describes the joint probability distribution over a set of random variables. One of the most important challenges in the field of BNs is to find an optimal network structure based on an available training dataset. Since the problem of searching the optimal BN structure belongs to the class of NP-hard problems, typically greedy algorithms are used to solve it. In this paper a learning automata-based algorithm has been proposed to solve the BNs structure learning problem. There is a learning automaton corresponding with each random variable and at each stage of the proposed algorithm, named BNC-VLA, a set of learning automata is randomly activated and determined the graph edges that must be appeared in that stage. Finally, the constructed network is evaluated using a scoring function. As BNC-VLA algorithm proceeds, the learning process focuses on the BN structure with higher scores. The convergence of this algorithm is theoretically proved; and also some experiments are designed to evaluate the performance of it. Experimental results show that BNC-VLA is capable of finding the optimal structure of BN in an acceptable execution time; and comparing against other search-based methods, it outperforms them.     

Web crawling and filtering for on-line auctions from a social network perspective

The on-line auction is one of the most successful types of electronic marketplace and has been the subject of many academic studies. In recent years, empirical research on on-line auctions has been flourishing because of the availability of large amounts of high-quality bid data from on-line auction sites. However, the increasingly large volumes of bid data have made data collection ever more complex and time consuming, and there are no effective resources that can adequately support this work. So this study focuses on the parallel crawling and filtering of on-line auctions from the social network perspective to help researchers collect and analyze auction data more effectively. The issues raised in this study include parallel crawling architecture, crawling strategies, content filtering strategies, prototype system implementation, and a pilot test of social network analysis. Finally we conduct an empirical experiment on eBay US and Ruten Taiwan to evaluate the performance of our crawling architecture and to understand auction customers?? bidding behavior characteristics. The results of this study show that our parallel crawling and filtering methods are able to work in the real world, and are significantly more effective than manual web crawling. The collected data are useful for drawing social network maps and analyzing bidding problems.     

Social interactions of information systems development teams: a performance perspective

We report results from a longitudinal study of information systems development (ISD) teams. We use data drawn from 60 ISD teams at 22 sites of 15 Fortune 500 organizations to explore variations in performance relative to these teams' social interactions. To do this, we characterize ISD as a form of new product development and focus on team-level social interactions with external stakeholders. Drawing on cluster analysis, we identify five patterns of team-level social interactions and the relationships of these patterns to a suite of objective and subjective measures of ISD performance. Analysis leads us to report three findings. First, data indicate that no one of the five identified patterns maximizes all performance measures. Second, data make clear that the most common approach to ISD is the least effective relative to our suite of performance measures. Third, data from this study show that early indications of ISD project success do not predict actual outcomes. These findings suggest two issues for research and practice. First, these findings indicate that varying patterns of social interactions lead to differences in ISD team performance. Second, the findings illustrate that singular measures of ISD performance are an oversimplification and that multiple measures of ISD performance are unlikely to agree.     

Impacts of collaborative IS on software development project success in Indian software firms: a service perspective

The collaborative work of team members has become a common occurrence in software development projects. Collaborative information systems (CIS), designed to facilitate and support teamwork, appear critical for software project success. However, the quality and convenience of the services and functions delivered by CIS have not received robust attention in academia. Hence, the current study investigates the role of the CIS service characteristics of service quality and service convenience in teamwork and software development project success using DeLone and McLean’s (D&M) Information System (IS) Success Model as the theoretical framework. This study incorporates the success indicators of teamwork quality, teamwork performance, and project success as measured by software quality and project performance. Data from 153 Indian software companies confirm that collaborative IS services, as well as teamwork quality/performance, are central to software development project success. We believe that the findings of this study will be helpful to project managers of software development firms.     

On application-unbiased benchmarking of web videos from a social network perspective

Along with the emerging focus of community-contributed videos on the web, there is a strong demand of a well-designed web video benchmark for the research of social network based video content analysis. The existing video datasets are challenged in two aspects: (1) as the data resource, most of them are narrowed for a specific task, either focusing on one content analysis task with limited scales, or focusing on the pure social network analysis without downloading video content. (2) as the evaluation platform, few of them pay attention to the potential bias introduced by the sampling criteria, therefore cannot fairly measure the task performance. In this paper, we release a large-scale web video benchmark named MCG-WEBV 2.0, which crawls 248,887 YouTube videos and their corresponding social network structure with 123,063 video contributors. MCG-WEBV 2.0 can be used to explore the fusion between content and network for several web video analysis tasks. Based on MCG-WEBV 2.0, we further explore the sampling bias lies in web video benchmark construction. While sampling a completely unbiased video benchmark from million-scale collection is unpractical, we propose a task-dependent measurement of such bias, which minimizes the correlation between the potential video sampling bias and the corresponding content analysis task, if such bias is unavoidable. Following this principle, we have shown several exemplar application scenarios in MCG-WEBV 2.0.