Taking Charge

D. Ciampa and M. Watkins, Right from the Start: Taking Charge in a New Leadership Role, Boston: Harvard Business School Press (1999), 316 pp.

W. T. Gallwey, the Inner Game of Golf (revised edition), New York: Random House (1998), 213 pp.

C.C. Manz and H.P. Sims, Jr., the New SuperLeadership: Leading Others to Lead Themselves, San Francisco: Barrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc. (2001), 256 pp.

J.-F. Manzone and J.-L. Barsoux, the Set-Up-To-Fail Syndrome: How Good Managers Cause Great People to Fail, Boston: Harvard Business School Press (2002), 280 pp.     

It is 11 O'Clock. Do You Know What Your Competitor is Doing?

From Knowledge to Intelligence: Creating Competitive Advantage in the New Economy by Helen N. Rothberg and

G. Scott Erickson, Amsterdam: Elsevier Butterworth Heinemann (2005), 365 pp.

Competitive Intelligence and Global Business edited by David L. Blenkhorn and Craig S. Fleischer, Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers (2005), 292 pp.

Outsource: Competing in the Global Productivity Race by Edward Yourdon, Boston: Prentice Hall PTR (2005), 251 pp.

Digital Infrastructures: Enabling Civil and Environmental Systems through Information Technology edited by Rae Zimmerman and Thomas Horan, London: Routledge (2005), 254 pp.

Decision Support Systems: Frequently Asked Questions by Daniel J. Power, New York: iUniverse Inc. (2005), 232 pp.     

Fighting Malware and Other Unspeakable Threats

John Gantz and Jack M. Rochester. Pirates of the Digital Millennium: How the Intellectual Property Wars Damage

Our Personal Freedoms, Our Jobs, and the World Economy, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall Financial Times (2005), 294 pp.

Thomas R. Peltier, Justin Peltier, and John Blackley. Information Security Fundamentals, Boca Raton, FL: Auerbach Publications (2005), 262 pp.

Paul Reid. Biometrics for Network Security, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR (2004), 252 pp.

Robert M. Slade. Software Forensics, New York: McGraw-Hill (2004), 215 pp.     

Four that Belong on Your Bookshelf

T. DeMarco and T. Lister, Waltzing with Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects, New York: Dorset House Publishing (2003), 196 pp.

M.W. Doll, S. Rai, and J. Granado, Defending the Digital Frontier: A Security Agenda, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons (2003), 238 pp.

.J.D. McKeen and H.A. Smith, Making IT Happen: Critical Issues in IT Management, Chichester, UK: Wiley (2003), 366 pp.

D.J. Power, Decision Support Systems: Concepts and Resources for Managers, Westport, CT: Quorum (2002), 251 pp.     

The New Business Currency

Thomas H. Davenport and John C. Beck, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press (2001), 253 pp.

Brad Hansen, The Dictionary of Computing and Digital Media: Terms and Acronyms, Wilsonville, OR: Franklin, Beedle, and Associates (1999), 543 pp.

Piotr Jankowski and Timothy Nyerges, Geographic Information Systems for Group Decision Making: Towards a Participatory Geographic Information Science, New York: Taylor and Francis (2001), 273 pp.

Jeffrey A. Rohlfs, Bandwagon Effects in High Technology Industries, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2001), 256 pp.     

Bundles from Britain

Ciborra, Claudio U., ed., Groupware and Teamwork: Invisible Aid or Technical Hindrance? (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 240 pp.

Galliers, Robert D. and Walter J. Bates, eds., Information Technology and Organizational Transformation: Innovation for the 21st Century (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1996), 240 pp.

Klepper, Robert and Wendell O. Jones, Outsourcing Information Technology, Systems, and Services (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall PTR, 1998), 392 pp.

Remenyi, Dan, Michael Sherwood-Smith, with Terry White, Achieving Maximum Value from Information Systems: A Process Approach (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1997). 262 pp.

Wigand, Rolf, Arnold Picot, and Ralf Reichwald, Information, Organization, and Management: Expanding Markets and Corporate Boundaries (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 458 pp.

Willcocks, Leslie P. and Mary C. Lacity, eds., Strategic Sourcing of Information Systems: Perspectives and Practices (Chichester, U.K.: John Wiley & Sons, 1997), 262 pp.     

E-Commerce Overviews and Close-Ups

Soon-Yong Choi, Dale O. Stahl, and Andrew B. Whinston, The Economics of Electronic Commerce: the Essential Economics of Doing Business in the Electronic Marketplace. Indianapolis: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997, 626 pp.

Mellanie Hills, Intranet Business Strategies. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997, 396 pp.

David Hudson, Rewired. Indianapolis, IN: Macmillan Technical Publishing, 1997, 327 pp.

Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston, Electronic Commerce, A Manager's Guide. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998, 431 pp.

Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston (eds.), Readings in Electronic Commerce, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1997, 340 pp.

Ravi Kalakota and Andrew B. Whinston, Frontiers of Electronic Commerce, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1996, 850 pp.

Lee W. McNight and Joseph P. Bailey (eds.), Internet Economics. Cambridge, MA: the MIT Press, 525 pp.     

Commerce by Any Other Name

D.F. Aldrich, Mastering the Digital Marketplace: Practical Strategies for Competitiveness in the New Economy, New York, NY: Wiley (2000) 309 pp.

R. Kalakota and M. Robinson, e-Business: Roadmap for Success, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley (1999) 378 pp.

R. Murch and T. Johnson, Intelligent Software Agents, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall PTR, (1999) 210 pp.

R. T. Watson, P. Berthon, L.F. Pitt, and G.M. Zinkhan, Electronic Commerce: the Strategic Perspective, Ft. Worth, TX: the Dryden Press (2000) 162 pp.

J. Christopher Westland and T.K.H. Clark, Global Electronic Commerce: Theory and Cases, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2000) 585 pp.     

The Leading Edge in is Management

Jean Lipman-Blumen and Harold J. Leavitt, Hot Groups: Seeding Them, Feeding Them, and Using Them to Ignite Your Organization, New York: Oxford University Press (1999) 296 pp.

Thomas H. Davenport, Mission Critical: Realizing the Promise of Enterprise Systems, Boston: Harvard Business School Press (2000) 336 pp.

W.H. Inmon, Ken. Rudin, Christopher K. Buss, and Ryan Sousa, Data Warehouse Performance, New York: Wiley (1999) 444 pp.

Jay Liebowitz (ed.) Knowledge Management Handbook, CRC Press (1999) 312 pp.     

New Thinking About the Enterprise

Geographic Information Systems in Business, James B. Pick, Editor; Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing (2005).

Sharing Expertise: Beyond Knowledge Management, Mark Ackerman, Volkmar Pipek, and Volker Wulf, Editors; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press (2003).

Innovations in Knowledge Management, Bonnie Montano, Editor; Hershey, PA: IRM Press (2005).

Business Intelligence for the Enterprise, by Mike Biere; Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, (2003).     

Economic Visions

Jason Dedrick and Kenneth L. Kraemer, Asia's Computer Challenge: Threat or Opportunity for the United States and the World? New York: Oxford University Press (1998) 364 pp. ISBN 0-19-512201-1

Bill Gates with Collins Hemingway, Business the Speed of Thought, New York: Warner Books (1999) 470 pp. ISBN 0-446-52568-5

Henry C. Lucas, Jr., Information Technology and the Productivity Paradox: Assessing the Value of Investing in IT, New York: Oxford University Press (1999) 225 pp. ISBN 0-19-512159-7

Carl Shapiro and Hal R. Varian, Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy, Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press (1999) 384 pp. ISBN 0-87584-863-X     

From Leo to it Value and Security

Martin Curley, Managing Information Technology for Business Value: Practical Strategies for IT and Business Managers, Hillsboro, Oregon: Intel Press (2004), 288pp.

Linda Volonino and Stephen R. Robinson, Principles and Practice of Information Security: Protecting Computers from Hackers and Lawyers, Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall (2004), 232 pp.

Georgina Ferry, A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashops and the World's First Office Computer, London: Fourth Estate (2003), 221pp.     

Little is New Under the Sun But …

Thomas W. Davenport. Thinking for a Living: How to Get Better Performance and Results from Knowledge Workers. Harvard Business School Press, 2005, 227 pp.

Erran Carmel and Paul Tjia. Offshoring Information Technology: Out-sourcing to a Global Workforce. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005, 282 pp.

Wayne W. Eckerson. Performance Dashboards: Measuring, Monitoring, and Managing Your Business. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2006, 301 pp.

Murray E. Jennex (ed.). Case Studies in Knowledge Management. Hershey, PA: Idea Group Publishing, 2005, 372 pp.     

Innovating then and Now

Steven Alter. the Work System Method: Combining People, Processes, and IT for Business Results. Larkspur, CA: Work System Press, 2006, 280 pp.

Stanley Bing. Rome Inc.: the Rise and Fall of the First Multinational Corporation. New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2006, 197 pp.

Victor Fey and Eugene Rivin. Innovation on Demand: New Product Development Using TRIZ. Cambridge University Press, 2005, 242 pp.

Jay Liebowitz. Strategic Intelligence: Business Intelligence, Competitive Intelligence, and Knowledge Management. Boca Raton, FL: Auerbach Publications, 2006, 223 pp.     

An ergonomic evaluation of VDTs“”

Eight VDTs of different trademarks were analysed in relation to the following properties:

( a) Contrasts of luminance between the screens on the one hand and source documents, as well as other surfaces of the VDT, on the other.

(b) Oscillation degree, sharpness and stability of characters.

( c) Face and legibility of characters.

( d) Dimensions, mobility and reflection degrees of the keyboards.

Special equipment was developed and standardized conditions were applied to the measurements.

The eight VDTs showed essential differences for all the parameters, which might be partially responsible for eye strain and postural complaints. It can be concluded that customers should pay more attention to ergonomic qualities when choosing a VDT. But such an endeavour remains useless if the customer does not, at the same time, look for a proper design of the whole workstation including the working environment.     

Third-party Copyright Liability after Grokster

This Article, the original version of which was published in the Minnesota Law Review (vol. 91, pp. 184 - 240), studies the construction of third party copyright liability after the recent Supreme Court case Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. This inquiry is important because third party copyright liability has become a controversial area of law that affects the viability of entire industries. Unfortunately, the law governing third party copyright liability is unclear. Grokster involved a claim of third party liability against defendants whose technology supported the sharing of music over the Internet, and it represents the Supreme Court's attempt to bring coherence to the relevant law.

Grokster is a difficult case to understand. It added a new cause of action for inducement to the law of third party copyright liability, but the meaning of inducement is unclear, especially when one considers the incoherent structure of pre-Grokster law. Future courts will find it challenging to interpret Grokster in a way that creates an effective, coherent structure for the law third party copyright liability.

This Article was among the first to comprehensively analyze Grokster and its effect on the theory and construction of third party copyright liability in the United States. This effort includes a survey of pre-Grokster law, the application of tort theory to expose the structure of conflicts in the law, an explanation of the rationale and implications of Grokster, and the construction of a coherent framework for third party copyright liability. The Article concludes that Grokster made important theoretical and practical choices about the law that are appropriately sensitive to the costs and benefits of third party copyright liability.     

Past, Present, and Future

Thomas L. Friedman. the World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. N ew York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005, 488 pp.

Nicholas G. Carr. Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2004, 193 pp.

John Hagel III and John Seely Brown. the Only Sustainable Edge: Why Business Strategy Depends on Productive Friction and Dynamic Specialization. Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2005, 218 pp.

John Markoff. What the Dormouse Said. New York: Viking, 2005, 301 pp.     

Taskmaster: an interactive, graphical environment for task specification, execution and monitoring

Taskmaster is an interactive environment that employs a unique blend of graphic technologies and iconic images to support user task specification. In this environment, problem solving is based on the selection, specification, and composition of tools that correspond to natural sets of ordered operations. The Taskmaster environment is novel in that it

(provides an interactive, visual-based approach to user task specification;

(encourages and supports task specification and refinement processes from both the top-down and bottom-up perspectives; and

(enables one to specify parallel tasks in a natural and convenient manner

To “program” a given task within the Taskmaster environment, one decomposes it into an ordered set of conceptually simple, high-level operations, and then combines (composes) a corresponding network of software tools that implements these operations. Execution of the specified network provides a task solution. Major system components supporting user task specification include a network editor, a tools database and a network execution monitor.     

Book Reviews

Books Reviewed in this Articles: Managing Chaos: Dynamic Business Strategies in an Unpredictable World, Ralph D. Stacey, Kogan Page, London (1992), 216 pp. Groupthink in Government: A Study of Small Groups and Policy Failure, Paul 't Hart, Swets and Zeitlinger B.V., Amsterdam/Lisse (1990), 318 pp. Transforming the Crisis-Prone Organization: Preventing Individual, Organizational and Environmental Tragedies, Thierry C. Pauchant and Ian I. Mitroff, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco (1992), 255 pp.     

Modelling consumer intention to use gambling technologies: an innovative approach

This paper reports the results of a study that sought to analyse the attributes of gambling technologies that affect consumer intention to use card-based gambling in Australia. A 23-item questionnaire was developed from an analysis of interviews with 20 key industry stakeholders, adapted to a modified version of existing technology acceptance model (TAM) questions (Davis 1989, Wang et al. 2003), then administered to 134 patrons of two gambling venues.

Data reduction yielded three constructs consistent with the TAM: 'ease-of-use', 'perceived usefulness' and 'intention to use' the technology. Significant correlation was found in each component, and each set of component items exhibited high internal reliability. Further analysis using structural equation modelling revealed that 'usefulness' is a significant predictor of 'intention to use' card-based gambling systems, and that 'ease-of-use' also has a positive effect on intention. Replication of these results, complemented by actual usage data, will enhance understanding of the benefits.