Announcing the new EiC

As I mentioned in my last editorial, my term as editor-in-chief (EiC) of the magazine is coming to an end, and it is my great pleasure to announce that the new EiC of the magazine will be Dr. Peter Corke from CSIRO in Australia. I am extremely happy and comfortable to leave the magazine to Peter who is not only an extremely distinguished scientist but also a motivated leader and pleasant person who will take care with dedication to keep the high level of the magazine and further improve it.     

Invited Viewpoint: How well does the Information Systems discipline fare in the Financial Times’ top 50 Journal list?

This paper investigates the performance of the Information Systems (IS) discipline as reflected in the scholarly impact of the three IS journals that are included in the Financial Times’ top 50 journals (FT50), the four IS journals in the top tiers of the Chartered Association of Business Schools’ Academic Journal Guide (CABS AJG), and the eight journals that comprise the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Senior Scholars' Basket of Journals (AIS Basket). Journal lists, when framed as a form of ‘strategic signaling’, are used to by institutions to communicate values and priorities to scholars. Through strategic signaling, journal lists are performative and have the potential to shape and constrain research activity. Given the strategic and performative role of journal lists, it is important that the journals that constitute those lists have substantial impact. To measure the scholarly impact of journals we propose a new measure, the HMJ index, which comprises an equally-weighted combination of journal H-index, median citations per article, and Journal Impact Factor (JIF). Using the HMJ index, the results show that all eight AIS Basket journals are performing at a level that is commensurate with the other journals that make up the FT50. The results further show substantial differences between the FT50 journals, such as the number of articles published per annum. Implications for IS scholars, IS groups, and the IS discipline are identified, together with recommendations for action.     

Acknowledgements

This monograph is a revison of author's Ph.D. thesis [Bon96]. First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to my thesis supervisors Jaco de Bakker and Joost Kok. I am particularly grateful to them for their advices, enouragements, and suggestions which still have a great influence on my work. I am thankful to Michael Mislove for critically reading my thesis and for his helpful comments.Many thanks are due to my colleagues Stefan Blom, Mirna Bognar, Frank de Boer, Henk Goeman, Jan Willem Klop, Vincent van Oostrom, Daniele Turi, Yde Venema, and Roel de Vrijer, not only for the stimulating discussions we had but also for their friendliness. I am particularly grateful to Franck van Breugel, Joost Kok, Bart Jacobs, Erik de Vink, Marta Kwiatowska, and Jan Rutten, for a very fruitful and enjoyable collaboration.I thank Samson Abramsky, Ralph Back, Bob Flagg, Paul Johnson, Wim Hesselink, Peter Knijnenburg, Paul-André Mellies, Prakash Panangaden, Mike Smyth, Philipp Sünderhauf, and Fer-Jan de Vries for the many inspiring discussions we had in various places around the world.A word of thanks goes also to the people who invited me to discuss parts of the results presented here: Maurice Nivat and Paul Gastin of the Université de Paris, Marta Kwiatowska of the University of Birmingham, and Willem-Paul de Roever and Kai Engelhart of the Christian-Albrechts Universitaet zu Kiel. During my visits to them I benefited from many fruitful discussions and I had a very enjoyable time.Finally, I thank my parents and my wife for their persisting encouragements and support.Marcello BonsangueDepartment of Computer ScienceLeiden UniversityP.O. Box 95122300 RA Leiden, The NetherlandsPhD ThesisVrije UniversiteitAmsterdamCommuncating Editor: Michael W. Mislove     

Exposing graph uniformities via algebraic specification

This survey acknowledges an intellectual debt to Bob McNaughton. In 1968 I turned my research focus to the study of structural uniformities in graphs, motivated by the desire to study theoretical aspects of data structures. The approach that I took in this study was influenced heavily by the algebra-based study of structure in finite automata initiated in the mid-1960s by Bob and others. Their successes in using the syntactic monoid of an automaton to study its structure convinced me to base my study on a monoid-theoretic specification of graphs. The study of what I termeddata graphs occupied me for the next 4–5 years; the insights garnered during that period have served me well since, in a variety of disparate contexts. Indeed, when I began to focus on the study of structural uniformities in the interconnection networks of parallel architectures, in the mid-1980s, it was second nature to me to base this study also on a monoid-theoretic specification of the graphs underlying the interconnection networks. This paper is a brief survey of the highlights of my studies of uniformities in algebraically specified graphs. It is both fitting and pleasureful to dedicate this survey to Bob McNaughton, a wise mentor and a man of vision.This work was partially supported by NSF Grant CCR-88-12567.     

Viewpoint: Information systems research strategy

This article^1,2 has two aligned aims: (i) to espouse the value of a strategic research orientation for the Information Systems Discipline; and (ii) to facilitate such a strategic orientation by recognising the value of programmatic research and promoting the publication of such work. It commences from the viewpoint that Information Systems (IS) research benefits from being strategic at every level, from individual researcher, to research program, to research discipline and beyond. It particularly advocates for more coordinated programs of research emphasising real-world impact, while recognising that vibrant, individual-driven and small-team research within broad areas of promise, is expected to continue forming the core of the IS research ecosystem. Thus, the overarching aim is the amplification of strategic thinking in IS research – the further leveraging of an orientation natural to the JSIS community, with emphasis on research programs as a main strategic lever, and further considering how JSIS can be instrumental in this aim.     

The ‘hijacking’ of the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems: Implications for the information systems community

Journal hijacking, which refers to the attempted brand takeover of a journal by a third party, is a nascent threat confronting the information systems (IS) community, as evidenced by cybercriminals having established an online presence, masquerading as the Scandinavian Journal of Information Systems (SJIS). The SJIS hijacking damages the journal's reputation, leads to payment and publication scams, involves identity theft among unsuspecting IS researchers, and results in tarnished author reputations. Beyond SJIS, journal hijacking presents a threat, not only to the IS community, but also to science and academic integrity in general if researchers and readers cannot distinguish between fake publications by hijacked journals and real publications by legitimate journals. In this opinion article, we relate the story of the SJIS hijacking from the victims' perspectives. We describe its many aspects, draw attention to the key factors that contribute to the problem, and offer our perspectives on different response strategies in the absence of simple solutions. We hope to create awareness about the problem and stimulate a discussion in the IS community, not least in the face of digital innovations, such as ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence technologies that may inadvertently support paper mills and the production of fake research results.     

Profiling a decade of Information Systems Frontiers’ research

This article analyses the first 10 years of research published in the Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) from 1999 to 2008. The analysis of the published material includes examining variables such as most productive authors, citation analysis, universities associated with the most publications, geographic diversity, authors’ backgrounds and research methods. The keyword analysis suggests that ISF research has evolved from establishing concepts and domain of information systems (IS), technology and management to contemporary issues such as outsourcing, web services and security. The analysis presented in this paper has identified intellectually significant studies that have contributed to the development and accumulation of intellectual wealth of ISF. The analysis has also identified authors published in other journals whose work largely shaped and guided the researchers published in ISF. This research has implications for researchers, journal editors, and research institutions.

Ambiguous Physiognomy

ABSTRACT

I know that all contemporary artists need a written introduction to their work, something that provides it with a bit of context. At best a narrative that portrays my work as the logical culmination of a personal journey, full of struggle and heroism. I sit here in front of my screen, trying to make a diverse artistic practice involving installations, video, performance, sculpture and online work out to be a single cohesive body of work. But below almost each of the words that I slowly type on the keyboard, a squiggly red line appears. It is as if the spell checker is determined to undermine the carefully constructed artistic persona that I am putting together from shows in and outside of institutions and other arts spaces. It is as if the computer is suggesting a potential drift through my own biography that opens the possibility that I could be writing a far more interesting text about my work than I am right now: a less regulated and smooth narrative of who I am as an artist, led by the associative structure of my spell checker’s software, rather than my own preconceived notions of who I am and what I do.     

Tribute to Professor Edgar H. Sibley and his contributions to the IS discipline

Professor Edgar Henry Sibley (the Founding Editor of Information & Management, in short, I&M) passed away peacefully in Virginia, USA on January 12, 2020. As an eminent scholar in Information Systems (IS) and the Founding Editor of I&M, Professor Sibley has left a remarkable legacy to both the journal and the IS discipline. If the journal (I&M) could talk, it would tell the story of the passion, effort, untold amount of time, and incredible rigor Professor Sibley put into this journal. As the second and the current Editor-in-Chief of the journal, I took the liberty to invite three IS scholars, one from each region of the Association for Information Systems (AIS) community to speak about Professor Sibley’s contributions to the IS discipline. They are Professor Prashant Palvia from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, USA Professor Jose Benitez from Rennes School of Business, France and the University of Granada, Spain and Professor T.P. Liang from National Sun-Yat-Sen University, Taiwan. All three scholars had different and positive interactions and experiences with Professor Sibley and I&M that they are eager to share with us. We hope the whole IS community will join us to acknowledge and pay our heart-felt tribute to Professor Sibley´s many contributions to our discipline.     

New year, New Challenges [Editor's Remarks]

It is a great honor and privilege for me to serve as the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Computational Intelligence Magazine (CIM). I would like to take this opportunity to thank the Administrative Committee (ADCOM) and the Executive Committee (EXCOM) of IEEE Computational Intelligence Society (CIS), particularly David B. Fogel and Xin Yao, for supporting my appointment. My deep appreciation also goes to the founding Editor-in-Chief of CIM, Gary G. Yen, for his unconditional support during the period of transition. I look forward to his continued contributions to the magazine in his new capacity as the IEEE CIS President.     

Retracted: Unified Framework for Efficient and Enriched Water Animation with Surface and Wave Foams

The above article from Computer Graphics Forum, published online on 28 June 2018 in Wiley Online Library ( wileyonlinelibrary.com ), has been retracted by agreement between the authors, the journal Editors Min Chen and Bedrich Benes and John Wiley & Sons Ltd. The retraction has been agreed due to both authors wishing to adhere to the high professional standard for academic publications.     

Working relations of technology production and use

This paper explores the relevance of recent feminist reconstructions of objectivity for the development of alternative visions of technology production and use. I take as my starting place the working relations that make up the design and use of technical systems. Working relations are understood as networks or webs of connections that sustain the visible and invisible work required to construct coherent technologies and put them into use. I outline the boundaries that characterize current relations of development and use, and the boundary crossings required to transform them. Three contrasting premises for design-the view from nowhere, detached engagement, and located accountability — are taken to represent incommensurate alternatives for a politics of professional design. From the position of located accountability, I close by sketching aspects of what a feminist politics and associated practices of system development could be.I am deeply grateful to Phil Agre, Jeanette Blomberg, Andrew Clement, Mike Hales, Susan Newman, Leigh Star, Randy Trigg, and Ina Wagner for their careful readings and critical suggestions on earlier versions of this paper.     

Informationssystem-Strategie

The paper depicts the current state of IS strategy research with the aim of identifying research needs as well as appropriate ways to study IS strategy in the future. To this end, the paper introduces the results of an extensive analysis of academic literature on IS strategy. In addition, it sheds light on current practice as uncovered in case-study research and through in-depth interviews with IS strategy professionals. A comparison reveals that the issues prevalent in practice and the ones traditionally focused on in the academic debate on IS strategy often vary considerably. A conspicuous attempt to fill this gap is the so-called “Strategizing” framework put forward by Robert Galliers. This framework, which is receiving increasing attention in the current academic debate, calls for a practice turn in IS strategy research in that it treats strategy as something people or, more precisely, IS strategists do. In addition, by identifying the challenges and problems IS strategists are faced with, the framework intends to better reflect the new planning conditions which are often seen as characteristics of the information age. The framework distinguishes three general problem domains of IS strategizing: exploration, exploitation, as well as implementation and change management.     

InfoFilter: Supporting quality of service for fresh information delivery

With the explosive growth of the Internet and World Wide Web comes a dramatic increase in the number of users that compete for the shared resources of distributed system environments. Most implementations of application servers and distributed search software do not distinguish among requests to different web pages. This has the implication that the behavior of application servers is quite unpredictable. Applications that require timely delivery of fresh information consequently suffer the most in such competitive environments. This paper presents a model of quality of service (QoS) and the design of a QoS-enabled information delivery system that implements such a QoS model. The goal of this development is two-fold. On one hand, we want to enable users or applications to specify the desired quality of service requirements for their requests so that application-aware QoS adaptation is supported throughout the Web query and search processing. On the other hand, we want to enable an application server to customize how it should respond to external requests by setting priorities among query requests and allocating server resources using adaptive QoS control mechanisms. We introduce the Infopipe approach as the systems support architecture and underlying technology for building a QoS-enabled distributed system for fresh information delivery. Ling Liu, Ph.D.: She is an associate professor at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. She received her Ph.D. from Tilburg University, The Netherlands in 1993. Her research interests are in the area of large-scale data intensive systems and its applications in distributed, mobile, multimedia, and Internet computing environments. Her work has focused on systems support for creating, searching, manipulating, and monitoring streams of information in wide area networked information systems. She has published more than 70 papers in internal journals or international conferences, and has served on more than 20 program committees in the area of data engineering, databases, and knowledge and information management. Calton Pu, Ph. D.: He is a Professor and John P. Imlay, Jr. Chair in Software at the College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology. Calton received his Ph.D. from University of Washington in 1986. He leads the Infosphere expedition project, which is building the system software to support the next generation information flow applications. Infosphere research includes adaptive operating system kernels, communications middleware, and distributed information flow applications. His past research included operating system projects such as Synthetix and Microfeedback, extended transaction projects such as Epsilon Serializability, and Internet data management. He has published more than 125 journal and conference papers, and served on more than 40 program committees. Karsten Schwan, Ph.D.: He is a professor in the College of Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees from Carnegie-Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He directs the IHPC project for high performance cluster computing at Georgia Tech. His current research addresses the interactive nature of modern high performance applications (i.e., online monitoring and computational steering), the development of efficient and object-based middleware, the operating system support for distributed and parallel programs, and the online configuration of applications for distributed real-time applications and for communication protocols. Jonathan Walpole, Ph.D.: He is a Professor in the Computer Science and Engineering Department at oregon Graduate Institute of Science and Technology. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Lancaster University, U.K. in 1987. His research interests are in the area of adaptive systems software and its application in distributed, mobile, multimedia computing environments. His work has focused on quality of service specification, adaptive resource management and dynamic specialization for enhanced performance, survivability and evolvability of large software systems, and he has published extensively in these areas.     

Nightmare On The Dot-NET,Part II (Bill's Back)

Forget Freddy Kruger, Jason, or even Hannibal Lecter. The scariest thing I have come across recently is the Bill, Scott and Bob (Muglia) triumvirate. Even as we worry about the increased impact of legal surveillance measures in the post-911 era, a most disturbing threat to our privacy has been released and, for once, not a single elected politician has been involved. I am, of course, speaking of Microsoft Windows XP and its Big Brother, .NET.     

Reflections on information systems practice, education and research: 10 years of the Information Systems Journal

This paper celebrates the 10‐year anniversary of the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) and the Editors reflect on the papers that have been published over that period and the changes that have occurred in the discipline of information systems. In the opening paper of ISJ, we suggested that the ‘launch of a new journal in information systems prompts thought and debate concerning the state of the subject area and some contemplation of its past and future’. We discussed three areas of this ‘not‐yet‐established discipline’: practice, education and research. In this follow‐up paper, we forgo our convention of ISJ editors not publishing in the Journal. We examine the issues raised in the first paper and consider what has happened in the intervening years as charted in the ISJ. The overview is necessarily selective, probably Anglocentric (with, perhaps, a slight Francophile tinge), sometimes downright opinionated, as well as over‐estimating, perhaps, the contribution of one particular IS journal.     

A Framework for Design Tradeoffs

Designs almost always require tradeoffs between competing design choices to meet system requirements. We present a framework for evaluating design choices with respect to meeting competing requirements. Specifically, we develop a model to estimate the performance of a UML design subject to changing levels of security and fault-tolerance. This analysis gives us a way to identify design solutions that are infeasible. Multi-criteria decision making techniques are applied to evaluate the remaining feasible alternatives. The method is illustrated with two examples: a small sensor network and a system for controlling traffic lights. Dr. Anneliese Amschler Andrews is Professor and Chair of the Department of Computer Science at the University of Denver. Before that she was the Huie Rogers Endowed Chair in Software Engineering at Washington State University. Dr. Andrews is the author of a text book and over 130 articles in the area of Software Engineering, particularly software testing and maintenance. Dr. Andrews holds an MS and PhD from Duke University and a Dipl.-Inf. from the Technical University of Karlsruhe. She served as Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. She has also served on several other editorial boards including the IEEE Transactions on Reliability, the Empirical Software Engineering Journal, the Software Quality Journal, the Journal of Information Science and Technology, and the Journal of Software Maintenance. She was Director of the Colorado Advanced Software Institute from 1995 to 2002. CASI's mission was to support technology transfer research related to software through collaborations between industry and academia. Ed Mancebo studied software engineering at Milwaukee School of Engineering and computer science at Washington State University. His masters thesis explored applying systematic decision making methods to software engineering problems. He is currently a software developer at Amazon.com. Dr. Per Runeson is a professor in software engineering at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests include methods to facilitate, measure and manage aspects of software quality. He received a PhD from Lund University in 1998 and has industrial experience as a consulting expert. He is a member of the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering and several program committees, and currently has a senior researcher position funded by the Swedish Research Council. Robert France is currently a Full Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Colorado State University. His research interests are in the area of Software Engineering, in particular formal specification techniques, software modeling techniques, design patterns, and domain-specific modeling languages. He is an Editor-in-Chief of the Springer journal on Software and System Modeling (SoSyM), and is a Steering Committee member and past Steering Committee Chair of the MoDELS/UML conference series. He was also a member of the revision task forces for the UML 1.x standards.     

Human Factors in the 1990s: sealing transition cracks

This is an account of my 8-year tour as Human Factors editor during the last decade of the past century. I accepted this appointment with the understanding that the journal, although highly successful, was entering a period of transition during which problems were surfacing that would require some strategic redirection. Together with Human Factors and Ergonomics Society staff and my editorial board, which in addition to peer review I relied on heavily for advice on journal policy, we effected a number of changes. In this article, I review those changes along with the issues they were designed to address and the reasoning behind each. It remains for the reader to judge whether the net effect of these changes has been for the better.