John Curtin of MISRC Member Firm Hexaware Keynotes Invited Panel on Emerging Managerial Issues in RFID

On Sunday, October 21 at the INFORMS Conference on IS and Technology in Denver, Colorado, John Curtin, long-time Unisys friend of the MISRC, and now a senior manager at Hexaware responsible for global marketing and relationship development, was the keynote speaker in an invited panel session on "Research Directions for RFID."

John initiated the discussion with an overview of the technologies associated with radio frequency identification (RFID), pointing out to the audience the range of issues that remain to be resolved before the technology's performance can match the business press hype. John also spoke about current forecasts of RFID tag costs for both passive and active tags, as well as the issues associated with developing widely- accepted standards to supportive effective interoperability and geographical differences in the use of the RF spectrum.

He also discussed a number of industry mini-cases that suggest the high potential value of RFID technology in use. The most interesting example involved the story of a large manufacturing firm in India with 15,000 shift-work manufacturing employees that uses RFID tags to improve workforce management. The firm puts RFID tags on employee badges to help identify workforce substitution needs in real-time, when employees don't come to work. The mechanism the firm uses is to put RFID readers in buses that move the shift employees from the main gate of the factory complex to their respective manufacturing activities. This permits plant managers to identify how to make workforce adjustments to ensure that production disruptions don't occur due to absentee workers.

Joining John for the invited panel were MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, and Assistant Professor, Fred Riggins, who recently initiated the MISRC's new RFID Research Project. Fred spoke presented the MISRC's new evaluative framework that helps to identify the research issues and directions associated with RFID. Rob spoke about applications of RFID for other kinds of real-time decision making, and pointed out the potential difficulties associated with organizations' ability to realize the business value of RFID in a variety of real-time and non-real-time business process settings.

MISRC Researchers Nominated for "Best Paper Award" at 2005 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science

MISRC Researchers Nominated for “Best Paper Award”
at 2005 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science for New Research on Changing Market Structure in the Digital Music Industry

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In October 2004, Information and Decision Science 2nd year doctoral student, Jesse Bockstedt, was nominated for a “best paper award” at the January 2005 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, in the Internet and Digital Economy Track. The paper, entitled “The Move to Artist-Led Music Distribution: An Analysis of the Changing Industry Structure of the Digital Music Industry,” is co-authored with MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, and Assistant Professor, Fred Riggins. The research grew out of a collaboration that was begun in the context of two linked doctoral courses on “Economics and Information Systems” in the Information and Decision Sciences Doctoral Program during Spring 2004.

The authors analyze the extent to which information technology is transforming the value chain and market structure of the music industry. They found that the production process for music in digital format changes the incentives of artists to increasingly consider creating and distributing music on their own. As a result, the role of music labels as “producers of music” has changed dramatically, as their position in the music industry value chain weakens.

Click here to view the Working Paper abstract (MISRC WP 4-22)

MISRC Researchers Win Another "Best Paper Award" at INFORMS Conference

MISRC Researchers Win Another "Best Paper Award" at INFORMS Conference on IS and Technology for Strategic Pricing and Information Technology Research

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Good news on the research front! Information and Decision Sciences doctoral student Dongwon Lee, with Marketing Professor Mark Bergen and MISRC Director Rob Kauffman, won the "best research paper award" at the INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology, held in Denver, Colorado in late October 2004.

Their paper, entitled "Store Quality Image and the 'Rational Inattention Hypothesis:' An Empirical Study of the Drivers of $9 and 9 ¢ Price Endings among Internet-Based Sellers," investigates the extent to which '9' price-endings occur in e-commerce. Such price endings have been recognized in Marketing as a powerful means for sellers to maximize profits, since the popular belief and evidence in traditional selling environments suggests that consumers don't pay attention to the final digits in posted prices. Another popular belief is that the quality of a store is signaled by its posted prices. Both higher prices and prices that have "round" endings are signals of higher quality. The authors employ theories of customer perceptions of store quality image and rational inattention to price-endings. These theories enable them to study what drives the observed variations in sellers' strategies.

This research is made possible through the development of a high-powered software tool--the price information gathering agent called "PIGA"--which Dongwon has been developing for his doctoral thesis during the past couple years. The authors specify and test a discrete choice model for price-endings using more than 1.9 million daily observations on multiple categories of products sold by hundreds of Internet-based retailers. (This use of software for gathering massive amounts of Internet data has been employed by others whose work is representative of some of the major themes in MISRC research. They include Gove Allen of Tulane University (on shopbot performances), Jungpil Hahn of Purdue University, Bin Wang of the University of Texas, Pan American, and Chuck Wood of Notre Dame University--all recent graduate of the Information and Decision Sciences Doctoral Program.)

The results show that a firm's online reputation, its average price in a product category, the relative price levels within a product category, and the total number of digits in the product's price have significant effects on the chosen price-endings with respect to different product categories. The authors also report that the results support an image theory of store quality. They only obtain mixed support for the theory of rational inattention, suggesting that Internet-based sellers are only partly recognizing a need to put prices on the Internet that play to consumer's inability to process full information about prices. The role of information technology in firm price-setting has become increasing important in recent years. This research offers new insights for marketers who wish to optimize price-setting decisions in the competitive online environment of Internet retailing. Interested readers can obtain a copy of this paper via the MISRC's Working Paper Series webpages. (See below.)

Dongwon Lee has had a highly successful year in research as a 4 th year student in the Information and Decision Sciences Doctoral Program. In addition to the INFORMS CIST award paper, he was invited to give another presentation in the Marketing Cluster at the INFORMS Main Conference, held just after CIST, on his "price rigidity" research. He is exploring the extent to which prices on the Internet, which others have hypothesized to be more flexible and easily adjusted due to the current technological capability for algorithmic and database-driven electronic pricing, are made more rigid by other underlying factors. His work involves the exploration of multiple theoretical perspectives from Behavioral Economics, Psychology, Macroeconomics, Marketing and Information Systems to provide a richer understanding of what we are observing with strategic pricing on the Internet. He also will be presenting papers on his work at the International Conference on Information Systems in Washington , DC in December 2004, and the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science in January 2004.

An interesting aspect of this research is the participation of Mark Bergen, a Marketing professor and expert on strategic pricing. Mark is known in the MBA Program and Executive Education as one of the remarkable teaching talents among the Carlson School 's faculty. He has had considerable experience with conducting empirical research on strategic pricing problems, and price flexibility and price rigidity, in particular. His research on strategic pricing appears in leading journals, such as the Quarterly Journal of Economics , the Journal of Money, Credit and Banking , Managerial Decisions and Economics , the Journal of Consumer Behavior and Management Science, among others. Mark, a past doctoral graduate in Economics at the University of Minnesota and a faculty alumnus of the University of Chicago 's Graduate Business School , brings exciting capabilities to the research team, based on his prior experience with strategic pricing issues in traditional marketing environments.

For additional details on this research on strategic pricing on the Internet, see the following MISRC working papers and presentation materials:

•  Bergen , M., Kauffman, R. J., and Lee, D. "Analyzing Strategic Price Adjustments at the Micro-Level: The Price Rigidity Hypothesis and Daily Price Change Activity on the Internet," 38th Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science, Kona, HI , January 2005. Working paper.

•  Bergen , M., Kauffman, R. J., and Lee, D. "Store Quality Image and the Rational Inattention Hypothesis: An Empirical Study of the Drivers and $9 and 9 ¢ Endings," INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technologies , Denver, CO, October 2004. Working paper.

•  Kauffman, R. J. "Massive Quasi-Experimental Methods and the Discovery of E-Business Knowledge," Plenary Speech, 2004 International Conference on E-Business, Beijing, People's Republic of China, December 2004. Presentation materials.

•  Kauffman, R. J. "Price Rigidity in the Digital Economy," Keynote Speech, 2 nd Conference on Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce, Kenting National Park , Taiwan , Republic of China , October 2004. Presentation materials.

•  Kauffman, R. J., and Lee, D. "Price Rigidity on the Internet: New Evidence from the Online Bookselling Industry," 25 th International Conference on Information Systems, Washington , DC , December 2004. Working paper.

•  Kauffman, R. J., and Lee, D. "Should We Expect Less Price Rigidity in the Digital Economy?" September 2004. Working paper, under review.

•  Kauffman, R. J., and Wood, C. A. "Revolutionary Research Strategies for E-Business: A Philosophy of Science View of Research Design and Data Collection in the Age of the Internet," September 2004. Working paper, under review.

•  Kauffman, R. J., and Wood, C. A. "Follow the Leader? Strategic Pricing in E-Commerce," Managerial Decisions and Economics , 2005. Working paper, forthcoming.

This award also represents the third "best research paper" award for MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, in the past calendar year. His work is known for balancing rigor and relevance in the study of important senior management issues in IS. He also presented some of this research on strategic pricing and massive quasi-experimental (MQE) research methods at the 2nd Conference on Knowledge Management and Electronic Commerce in Kenting, Taiwan during early October 2004 and at the International Conference on E-Business in Beijing, China in December 2004. Rob also previously won at the October 2003 INFORMS Conference on IS and Technology with University of Wisconsin economist, Hamid Mohtadi, for research on strategic information sharing in supply chain management, and with 5th year doctoral student from Thailand, Angsana Techatassanasoontorn, for research on the global diffusion of digital wireless phone technologies at the January 2004 Hawaii International Conference on Systems Science.

MISRC Working Paper Series Offers a Glimpse of Carlson School IS Faculty Research

Internet Enhances Exchange of Current Research

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The MIS Research Center's Working Paper series, over the course of the last five years, has become an important repository for the pre-publication research of Carlson School faculty in the Information and Decision Sciences Department. MIS Director, Rob Kauffman, comments: "When I first came to the Carlson School in 1994, I saw that there was an opportunity to build the MISRC's Working Paper series into a shared resource for the academic community within the Carlson School, as well as to showcase our research for the national and international audience. Recently, MISRC Assistant Director and I ran a few numbers to gauge the growth of our working paper series, and we were pleased to see that faculty and doctoral participation and contributions have grown substantially."

The following graph illustrates the growth in contributions.



These developments reflect well on the research productivity of the Information and Decision Sciences faculty and its doctoral students, and the Carlson School as a whole. Kauffman continues: "I'm always pleased and surprised when I travel to conferences and other universities in the United States, and faculty and doctoral students there tell me how innovative our IS and e-commerce research is. They tell me that the MISRC's Working Paper website is a frequent stopping place in their search for current research to inform their own work. In fact, on a recent trip to National Sun Yat-Sen University in Kaohsiun, Taiwan, I was interested to learn that doctoral students there knew a lot about our pre-publication research work, major research topics, and ongoing projects."

Recent News of Funded Research in the Information and Decision Sciences Department

The primary news regarding funded research at the MISRC for Fall 2004 is related to the MISRC's corporate members' support of our new business model. The MISRC receiving funding to conduct two new projects under the leadership of MISRC Director, Rob Kauffman, and Research Project Directors, Associate Professor Mani Subramani, for research on outsourcing and offshoring, and Assistant Professor Fred Riggins, for research on radio frequency identification technology (RFID) in various industry settings. The projects are intended to be "fast turnaround" projects, which will deliver results in the late Spring 2005, after project initiation in Fall 2004.

Carlson Chair, Professor Paul Johnson, during 2004 the work of his research group was supported by two 4-year grants from the Agency for Health Care Policy and Research and one 4-year grant from the National Institute of Health. The two grants from the Agency for Health Policy and Research are in their final year. The grant from NIH is new (awarded in September 2004). The general topic of research covered by the three grants is physician decision making and strategies for reducing the incidence of medical error in the treatment of patients with chronic diseases.

Assistant Professor Gedas Adomavicius, Associate Professor Alok Gupta and Rob Kauffman won a $25,000 grant with joint support from the University of Minnesota 's Digital Technology Center (DTC) and the Dean's Office of the Carlson School of Management for research on intelligent storage technologies. The three participate, with IDSc doctoral student Jesse Bockstedt, in the DTC's Digital Intelligent Storage Consortium (DISC), an industry sponsor group involving firms such as Cisco, Storage Technologies, Engenia and IBM. DISC also involved participants from among the Computer Science and Electrical Engineering faculty and doctoral students.

Fred Riggins and Rob Kauffman also received a DTC small grant of $5,000 to support the August 2004 MISRC Research Symposium on the Digital Divide. The funds were to support bringing in a keynote speaker from the Pew Internet Foundation, and for general support for conference activities. The event was co-sponsored by the University of California at Irvine's Center for Research on Information Systems.

Rob Kauffman and Associate Professor Dave Naumann obtained a $15,000 grant from the Carlson School's Dean's Office to support a portion of the May 2005 Gordon B. Davis Research Symposium. The event will celebrate the extraordinary career of the Information and Decision Science Department's recently-retired Honeywell Chair, Gordon Davis. Gordon is popularly known as "the father of the academic field of Information Systems," and he contributed tremendously to the Department's doctoral program, especially to its graduate who have focused on MIS research.

IDSc Professor Carl Adams and Assistant Professor Weidong Xia received additional funding for their multi-year "CIO Project," which has been focusing on issues of infrastructure flexibility, strategic alignment and governance of the IT organization. The project team includes 5 th year doctoral student, Nick Ball, who is completing thesis research in the context of this project.

Letter from Beijing and the International Conference on E-Business

MISRC Director Presents Keynote Speech in Beijing, China

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I was fortunate this month to have the opportunity to give the keynote speech in the 2004 International Conference on E-Business, in Beijing , China on Monday, December 6, 2004. This year, I have been to China a couple times, and the rapid pace of economic growth and the extraordinary interest I see in information technology and technology-based products gives me the same feelings I had in 1998 and 1999, as the expansion of e-commerce and the related emerging technologies took hold in the United States . It's exhilarating to visit this place and see all of the new development--and have time to practice my Chinese.

My Beijing speech, entitled "Massive Quasi-Experimental Methods and the Discovery of E-Business Knowledge," tells the story of the innovations my research colleagues and I at the Carlson School of Management have made since 1998, in the use of software agent technologies for acquiring massive amounts of data from the Internet. We have developed a range of new automated, agent-based data collection techniques during the past five years to study a variety of interesting topics: strategic price leading and following behaviors on the part of Internet firms; the inner workings of bidding behavior in group buying websites; weekend and picture-based effects on final bid prices in electronic auctions; and Internet-based markets for fixed income securities. Our focus in the past couple years has been on the study of price rigidity and price changes in e-commerce. This work has been developed in collaboration with Professor of Marketing, Mark Bergen, and IDSc doctoral student, Dongwon Lee, who is doing his doctoral thesis in this area.

In my speech, I provided the conference audience with a new vision of massive quasi-experimental research. This is a methodology that I have been exploring together with research colleagues in the Carlson School and elsewhere, as a means to structure the process of discovering knowledge about e-commerce and e-business operations. I gave the audience some ideas about the strengths and weaknesses of collecting data via the Internet in terms of traditional evaluative dimensions for research methods including considerations like data collection power, obtrusiveness, tendency to bias data, collection cost, data completeness and quality, reliability, ability to replicate and other dimensions. I illustrated this perspective with recent research on "9" price-endings, and other pricing patterns that are observed in Internet-based selling, based on the research with Dongwon and Mark. I also provided an overview of other research that has been completed to show the application of the evaluative framework that I advocated for understanding where the opportunities to make new research contributions lie.

I look forward to returning to this place and spending more time with my new friends at Qing Hua University in Beijing, where there are a number of research efforts underway that reflect a similar approach to the study of e-business and Internet auction research. I also want to take this opportunity to personally thank Professor Jian Chen, who was a most welcoming and charming host. We look forward to having him and his students visit the MIS Research Center and the Carlson School of Management, when time and circumstances permit.

Robert J. Kauffman
Director, MIS Research Center
Professor and Chair, Department of Information and Decision Sciences

[ View pdf of keynote presentation ] (10,235 kb)
[ View pdf of keynote paper ] (206 kb)

Kudos to the IDSc Faculty, Dave Naumann, Fred Riggins and Mani Subramani

For Outstanding Contributions to the IDSc Department in 2004

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The Information and Decision Sciences Department and the MISRC recognize Associate Professor Dave Naumann, Assistant Professor Fred Riggins, Associate Professor Mani Subramani and MISRC Assistant Director Donna Sarppo for their outstanding service contributions to the Department and the MISRC during 2004.

Dave Naumann has been highly effective in developing and managing the technology infrastructure for IDSc teaching and research over the past 10 years. He also was instrumental in the development of Jarrod Davis, who has provided highly competent technical services from the Strategic Management Organizations/Information Decision Sciences (SMOIDS) Cluster until just recently, when he joined the Carlson School 's Office of Information Technology. In Spring 2004, Dave took on the development and site management of the Gordon B. Davis Research Symposium, set for May 2005. He has also been a continuing force in the management and vision behind IDSc's efforts to rebuild its MBA and Undergraduate Curriculum. He has been especially effective in the past several years, and deserves our warm thanks.

Mani Subramani recently completed one year of service as the Undergraduate IS Core Course Coordinator. During the time he managed this course, he was able to reorganize its structure and orchestrate the efforts of the teaching faculty to achieve teaching performance ratings that ranged from "acceptable" to "outstanding." He was also highly responsive to the goals and targets that were laid out by IDSc Department Chair, Rob Kauffman, and Undergraduate Program Dean, Bob Ruekert. Since then, Mani has moved to the MBA IS Core, where he teaches both full-time and part-time students. He is also in the midst of developing a new course on offshoring and global management, and will lead an MBA group to India during January 2005.

Another extraordinary contributor in the past year is Fred Riggins. Fred acted as the MBA Information Systems and Technology (IST) Portfolio Faculty Leader until earlier this year, and effectively managed the internal departmental processes that led to the market research and development of a new generation of IDSc MBA courses. In addition, Fred has been instrumental in bringing IS curriculum to the MBA Program, where he has taught full-time and part-time MBAs, as well as the Carlson Executive MBA (CEMBA) Program, and the joint Carlson School-Engineering School Management of Technology Masters Program. During Spring 2004, he had outstanding teaching rating in the MBA IS Core, as well as in courses that he taught for the Executive Development Center's programs.

Kudos to the faculty for their outstanding service contributions.

The TIES Strategy: Information and Decision Sciences Faculty Articulate New Directions for Curriculum and Research

Executive Advisory Board for Curriculum and IDSc Faculty Major Forces in the Change

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Since the heyday of e-commerce and the DotCom firms, the IS jobs market and the demand for IT capital in the American business economy have fallen sharply. As a result of this, many leading business schools have seen their MBA and Undergraduate IS concentration enrollments plummet, and waning interest on the part of leading firms to recruit their graduates.

The Carlson School of Management, which offers an Information Systems and Technology Portfolio, a Consulting Enterprise and an Undergraduate IS Concentration has not been immune to these trends in the market, despite its top 5 ranking for IS at the MBA and Undergraduate levels. These changes in the market have challenged the faculty to rethink "relevance" in the curriculum that the Information Systems and Decision Sciences Department offers, from the point of view of students whose continuing interest is to do as well as they can in the job market.

Every six weeks or so, the MISRC hosts meetings of the Information and Decision Science (IDSc) Department's Executive Advisory Board for Curriculum (EABC). The model for this board during the past several years was established by Jennifer Samson (Guidant Corporation), Les Wanninger (past Information Industry Initiative Director and MISRC Co-Director) and Rob Kauffman (past Co-Director and current MISRC Director). Their shared vision was to operate the EABC with external leadership—in particular, an external chair—to ensure that its agenda would be industry-led, in lieu of university-led. The idea was to make the advisory influence of the board direct and immediate, so that it would be a greater force in influencing IDSc faculty to make positive, market-responsive changes in their individual courses.

Through the work of EABC Chair, Mike McFarlane (Cargill Inc.), with vigorous input from other EABC members (representing the Twin Cities firms Guidant, 3M, Supervalu, General Mills, IBM, Syntegra, Cargill, Minnesota Life, Unisys, Thomson West, Marsh Risk Consulting, Mayo Foundation, and Hexaware). The IDSc Department has largely realized the envisioned positive impacts. During the past couple years, the EABC encouraged the IDSc faculty to broaden the department's curriculum to more fully address issues of integration across the business disciplines through technology, the role of enterprise systems and the importance of outsourcing and offshoring, business intelligence and technology in supply chain management contexts. The results have been dramatic.

On the basis of the EABC discussions, consultation and fact-finding by IDSc faculty on the activities of other business school IS departments around the United States , the IDSc Department debated a repositioning of its curriculum. It worked towards articulating a strategy that would provide a new basis for making strong contributions to the Carlson School 's teaching mission and the Twin Cities business community, as well as capture the essence of the portfolio of research and teaching activities that faculty are undertaking.

This strategy is called "TIES."

TIES means "technology, information, economics and strategy," which characterizes the essential building blocks of the research and teaching capabilities of the IDSc Department's faculty.

• "Technology" reflects their knowledge of infrastructure, software development, decision support systems, and emerging technologies. It also points to the Design Science and Computer Science disciplines that underlie some of the department's leading research.


• "Information" emphasizes information as an endowment or as a commodity for using in managerial decision making. It's intended to capture the Decision Science, Behavioral Science and Cognitive Science disciplines where we have significant faculty capabilities.


• "Economics" points to the economic issues, and the need for managers to understand firm, industry, market and economy levels of analysis involving IT, technology standards, emerging technologies, and shifting bases for competition. Its referent disciplines are Managerial Economics and Management Science, where we also have built considerable faculty strength in the past 10 years.


• Finally, "Strategy" captures the interest associated with organizational, strategic and behavior issues that relate to the use of IT by individuals, groups, strategic business units, and firms, in pursuit of high performance business operations. The referent disciplines are Organizational Theory, where some of the IDSc Department's traditional faculty strengths lie, as well as Strategy and Microeconomics.

TIES is intended to represent the linkages that our IS curriculum and faculty research have with the various business disciplines, including Strategy, Finance, Healthcare, Marketing, Operations, Accounting and Human Resources.

The TIES approach in the IDSc Department's teaching mission today is reflected in a series of relatively new courses that enable students to obtain in-depth knowledge and access to important managerial perspectives about critical issues. Today, with encouragement from the EABC and the curricular innovations of the IDSc faculty, the IDSc Department is rolling out a new generation of courses that are intended to flesh out the TIES strategy in the Carlson School of Management's MBA and Undergraduate Programs.

The following courses are now a part of our new curriculum at the MBA and Undergraduate levels: Business Intelligence (Gedas Adomavicius), Auctions and Electronic Markets (Alok Gupta), Enterprise Systems (Norm Chervany), Business Process Excellence (Weidong Xia), Information Security (Alok Gupta), Information-Based Goods (Fred Riggins), and Accounting and Auditing Information Systems (Steve Parente). These courses compliment our existing TIES offerings, including Knowledge Management (Paul Johnson), Financial Information Systems and Technology (Rob Kauffman), Managerial Decision Making (Shawn Curley), and Decision Support Systems (Shawn Curley).

In addition, the TIES strategy is also well represented in the research that is showcased in the MISRC Working Paper series by the IDSc Department faculty. Our TIES research explores leading issues in data mining and recommender systems, firm strategy IT infrastructures, digital wireless technologies, technology forecasting, Internet auctions, knowledge management, technology adoption and diffusion, technology and strategic pricing. The faculty and IDSc doctoral students are also studying business technology problems in Supply Chain Management, Marketing and Operations, Decisionmaking, Risk Management, Strategy and Healthcare. The work reveals a range of interesting theoretical perspectives and methodologies as well, including survey research, massive quasi-experimental and traditional experimental methods, analytical and mathematical modeling, biostatistics and econometrics, interpretative and non-positivist approaches, and other empirical methods. The levels of analysis represented in the research range from individual decision makers, to groups and teams, to business processes and projects, to firms and industries.

See the following URLs for additional information on the Information and Decision Science Departments' MBA and Undergraduate Programs and curriculum, as well as the MISRC Working Papers series: http://misrc.umn.edu/courses/sponsorship/ and http://misrc.umn.edu/workingpapers/.

50th Year Survey of IS Research in Management Science

MISRC Director Rob Kauffman's Survey of the Field Published in March 2004 Issue

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In March 2004, the INFORMS published a survey in Management Scienceof the Information Systems literature that has appeared in journal since 1954. The article, by MISRC Director Rob Kauffman, is entitled "The Evolution of Research on Information Systems: A Fiftieth Year Survey of the Literature in Management Science," and is coauthored with Rajiv Banker, currently business school Dean at the University of California , Riverside . The year 2004 marks the 50th anniversary of Management Science, the flagship journal of the Institute for Management Science (INFORMS).

Rob Kauffman comments: "This was a unique writing opportunity for me. It brought together two different threads in my career in academic research. First, my training from my masters and doctoral study at Cornell and Carnegie taught me to appreciate the innovations that come from interdisciplinary research and the blend of different theoretical and methodogical perspectives that are possible. Second, the time I have spent over the past few years teaching in the IDSc 8511 Conceptual Foundations of Information and Decision Sciences Research course with Professor Gordon Davis has had a profound effect on my thinking, and has helped me to develop a breadth of knowledge of the literature in Information Systems and its multiple theoretical perspectives that my experience at Carnegie did not provide."

Kauffman offers some additional insights into the research streams that he explored in his efforts to write the literature survey: "My 50th year survey of the IS literature in Management Science recognizes five distinct streams of research in the field, some of which appear to predate some of the IS research that was conducted at Minnesota and elsewhere in the mid-to-late 1970s, and which is popularly viewed as forming the foundations of the academic discipline. I now believe that there are even earlier roots though, especially involving the Management Science, Economics and Decision Support perspectives in this research discipline."

"I noted five separate streams:

• The Decision Support and Design Science Stream studies the application of computers in decision support, control, and managerial decision making. It forms the conceptual and theoretical basis for current developments in the IS field that are associated with Design Science and the Workshop on IT and Systems (WITS). It also recognizes some of the work done by past IDSc faculty, Gerardine DeSanctis on group decision making. This stream seemed to begin back in the mid-1950s—much earlier than originally thought.


• The Value of Information Stream reflects the early relationships that were established based on economic analysis of information as a commodity in the management of the firm. Although its development did not continue primarily in the IS field, there are nevertheless seminal papers published in this stream whose ideas are closely associated with current thinking about information value in decision making and IT investment analysis. Some of this work was also done in the 1960s and 1970s, ahead of the time that many IS researchers typically think.


• The Human-Computer Systems Design Research Stream emphasizes the cognitive basis for effective systems design. Among the articles in this stream are the well-known 1970s "Minnesota Experiments" of IDSc Professor Norm Chervany, and his past IDSc faculty colleague, Gary Dickson, and their graduate students. My knowledge of this work comes from my first-hand interactions with Norm, and my experience teaching doctoral students here with Gordon Davis.


• The IS Organization and Strategy Research Stream shifts the level of analysis away from the system user to the locus of value of the system investment and the impacts on the strategic capabilities of the firm. Traditionally, research in the Information and Decision Sciences Department at the Carlson School has been best known for some of this work, and is associated with past IDSc faculty members Cynthia Beath, Fred Davis, Gordon Davis, Dale Goodhue and Detmar Straub, and their doctoral graduates, who are now among the leaders in IS research. Much of this work occurred in the 1980s and 1990s, and is continuing within the field.


• The Economics of Information Systems and Technology Stream emphasizes the application of theoretical perspectives and methods from analytical and empirical economics to managerial problems involving IS and IT. This new tradition of research in the IDSc Department has been contributing to this stream at Management Science and in the leading IS journals (e.g., MIS Quarterly, Information Systems Research and the Journal of Management Information Systems). Some of that work is by ex-Carlson School Accounting professor, Rajiv Banker, and by Assistant Professor Fred Riggins and Associate Professor Alok Gupta. Some of my own research involving Economics and IS since I have been at Minnesota is included."

"My view of research in the IS field is an optimistic one, but also one that suggests some movement of the boundaries of our field and changes in how we define our research. In my Management Science article I wrote that:

[F]uture IS research will continue to be characterized by the study of problems in IS management, including systems analysis and design science, the management of software and IT investments within the firm, the configuration of business processes and the formation of business strategies that rely on IT, and the continued use of IT to create unique capabilities for users, decision makers, work groups, organizations and industry sectors. At its best, IS research has the potential to inform managers and academicians about how to understand, interpret, adapt to and effectively manage technologies that have been in use, as well as emerging technologies whose impacts are just being felt. If this capability can be brought to bear more strongly on the IS management function, there will be significant leverage to make one of the important business functions within the contemporary firm deliver on the promises that IT investments are supposed to offer. Clearly, however, much research is still to be done to accomplish this. IT infrastructure development, software project practices, setting up for the development of technology standards, optimizing networking capabilities for the firm, and structuring interorganizational IS investments all need to be treated as central problems that deserve increased attention. All of these issues require careful consideration of how IT impacts other management functions. Consequently, we also expect that the extent of interdisciplinary research in the IS field will increase, as other fields recognize the importance of developing knowledge related to specific problems that arise that are best assessed with an information systems view in mind.

Although other fields, including Economics, Operations Research, Organizational Theory and Strategic Management, will continue to play a key role in the development of managerial knowledge of IT, researchers in the IS field have an opportunity to leverage their in-depth knowledge of technology and the work group, organizational, market and economy settings in which it is deployed. This will require thoughtful problem selection, exploitation of knowledge of the role of information systems, and the capability to recognize situations where management science techniques make a difference.

Note: The citation for this article is as follows: Banker, R. D., and Kauffman, R. J. "The Evolution of Research on Information Systems: A Fiftieth Year Survey of the Literature in Management Science," Management Science , 50, 3, March 2004, 281-298. A second major survey article on Economic and Electronic Commerce by Rob Kauffman with past doctoral student, Eric Walden, provides another perspective on one stream of IS research that has made a major impact among e-commerce researchers. The citation is: Kauffman, R. J., and Walden, E. A. "Economics and Electronic Commerce: Survey and Directions for Research," International Journal of E-Commerce, 5, 4, Summer 2001, 5-116.

IDSc Faculty Member, Alok Gupta, Named Faculty Director of MBA Carlson Consulting Enterprise

Faculty Involvement Brings Additional Depth to MBA Consulting Training

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In September 2002, Associate Professor of Information and Decision Sciences, Alok Gupta, was named Faculty Director of the Carlson Consulting Enterprise (CCE). CCE is one of four "MBA Enterprises" that encourage student leadership and experiential learning in the context of externally-funded real world project projects. The other enterprises are: the Carlson Fund Enterprise (for funds management), the Carlson Entrepreneurship Enterprise and the Carlson Branding Enterprise. The Carlson School 's strategy with these four enterprises is to supplement students' classroom training in a manner that will set them apart of competitors from other business schools, when they enter the job market.

Alok brings a unique set of skills to the Carlson Consulting Enterprise. His training in Management Science, Computer Science and Information Systems at Purdue University and the University of Texas at Austin enable him to employ a range of perspectives in bringing advisory help to the MBA students. In addition, during his time as a faculty member at the University of Connectity, Alok gained experience in a variety of business school consulting project settings with leading firms such as Priceline.com, General Electric and UBS Bank. He is a past National Science Foundation Career Award winner, for his research on electronic auctions and markets, and currently has research interests in technology forecasting, online consumer behavior, price transparency and mechanism design in Internet-based transaction-making, and information security. He also currently acts as Ph.D. Coordinator for the Information and Decision Sciences Doctoral Program.

His primary role is to anchor CCE's academic quality and direction, and to assist the students in the development of solution approaches to the consulting problems that they are undertaking. Alok works cooperatively with CCE Professional Directors, Laura Terwisscha and Curtis Moore, who are in charge of business development for the student-led projects, and day-to-day management of the enterprise.