Engine Room
(Editor's Corner)
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MISQ Discovery Engine Room (Editor's Corner) |
Introduction |
MISQ Discovery now closed [December, 2005] I regret to announce that MISQ Discovery is now closed and is no longer accepting submissions. This decision was taken by the Editorial Board of MIS Quarterly due to the very low number of submissions. Best wishes Senior Editor (2004-2005) MISQ Discovery
New Senior Editor [January, 2004] I was delighted to be appointed as the new Senior Editor for MISQ Discovery effective January 1, 2004. I intend to re-vamp MISQ Discovery and hopefully inject more life into it. One immediate decision I made was to integrate MISQ Discovery more closely with the rest of MIS Quarterly. MISQ Discovery is now a regular department of MIS Quarterly. As such the following changes have been made:
Please watch this space as more changes are made. Best wishes Senior Editor MISQ Discovery |
Page Contents |
Third Edition Announcement [December, 1998] |
Third Edition
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I am pleased to announce publication of the third contribution to MISQ Discovery. The contribution, "Survey Instruments in Information Systems" by Peter Newsted, Sid Huff, and Malcolm Munro is a repository of information on survey methodology as applied within an information systems context. It includes background information on the survey methodology as well as an archive of constructs and references to measures of those constructs. In some cases actual measures are also accessible. There is both an archival and a dynamic, or "living" version of the work. The former, now an official part of MISQ Discovery, reflects the status of the work at the time it was accepted. A dynamic version of the work can be further enhanced by the authors and is their responsibility to maintain. This is our second example of living scholarship, the first was "Qualitative Research in Information Systems" by Michael Myers [ static version | dynamic version]. As with that previous work, the contribution from Newsted, Huff, and Munro was first published in ISWorld Net and then, after several rounds of a very rigorous reviewing process, has been published in MIS Quarterly Discovery.
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MISQ
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This month marks my last month as Editor of MISQ Discovery and perhaps my last formal affiliation with MIS Quarterly. My first contact was as a doctoral student in Minnesota in 1976, when the Quarterly's founder, Gary Dickson, dragooned me into proofing the typesetting for the first issue. I have since been fortunate to have been a member of the Quarterly's Editorial Board for over half of my academic career. In that time, I am hopeful that I have left a few enduring, and valued, marks on the journal. There are two of these that I particularly value having been associated with. One is our leadership within the academic information systems community in promoting electronic scholarship. We were the first information systems journal to have a web site and the status information we provide authors is still, four years later, a leading edge application. We pushed fairly early for our board members to use email and now rely heavily on electronic means for much of our reviewing process. We have also published a variety of our best papers in electronic form and were the greatest among equals in the founding of ISWorld Net. Still, neither MISQ Discovery nor ISWorld Net, have fully lived up to my expectations for them. The former because of low submission rates and the latter because of the tragedy of the commons. But there are enough brilliant lights in both of these creations to suggest that the vision was correct. The devil, unfortunately is in both the details and the reward system. Nevertheless, the status quo is changing, albeit rather slowly. I am pleased to see, and to have participated in the design of, The Association for Information Systems two new electronic journals - the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and Communications of the Association for Information Systems. The former of these, JAIS, has some commonality with MISQ Discovery, meaning that contributors to both journals now have electronic alternatives from which to choose. I was also pleased to see that the call for a new editor of Information Systems Research included some discussion of the need to promote electronic publishing. Overall, however, our field can hardly be considered as leading the academy in these activities. Given the subject matter of our area of expertise, this is disappointing and even embarrassing. Nevertheless, we will eventually make the transition to an electronic infrastructure and I am pleased that the Quarterly was among the first to lend its reputation to the initiative. The second area that I have valued during my affiliation with the Quarterly is the further development of its unique culture, a transition that has been considerably accelerated by our use of electronic communication vehicles. At the center of that culture is our shared belief in rewarding value adding reviewing and editorial contributions. During my term as Editor-in-Chief we moved responsibility for selecting reviewers to the Associate Editors, but backed up by our database of information on reviewer quality and timeliness. We also increasingly relied on that database to help in the selection of our Associate Editors. For a time we also ran a program intended to educate doctoral students in the review process. It had also previously not been a tradition at the Quarterly to return the reviewer packet to reviewers - a simple step that helped our new reviewers learn from those with more experience. With the expansion of our Senior Editorial board, we also looked for candidates with a history of previous work with the Quarterly, not only as an Associate Editor but as an author. We wanted people with ownership of,and commitment to, the journal. These individuals also provided some autonomy in decision making within the particular senior editors area of specialization. But we have also tried to reach out beyond our traditional roots. Jim Emery, my predecessor as Quarterly Editor in Chief, worked hard to expand the international composition of the Board. Both Bob Zmud and I tried to follow Jim's leadership there. During my term, I also sought to involve more researchers with skills and interests in qualitative research methods. We have, over the past seven years, appointed many such individuals to our editorial board, the most recent being Allen Lee as Editor-in-Chief. In recent years such decisions generally have not been made in isolation. Our senior editorial board accomplishes a great deal by email conferencing, including nomination of new board members, additions of new sections, and so on. In one recent discussion of the Senior Editorial board, I indicated that I felt it was important that any future Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly have previous experience on the editorial board. Others might find my position as stifling change. I do believe that we must fight against complacency and that we must, in particular, strive to add more non-North Americans to our boards, and, in the not to distant future, promote a woman to the position of Editor-in-Chief. But, I also feel strongly that there must be more commonality to the Quarterly than the tan covers of each issue. A shared culture and collaborative policy making among a heterogeneous editorial board provides both editorial breadth and consistency. The terms of editorial board members are three years long and staggered. Thus, the board can eventually all be replaced by any Editor-in-Chief during her or his three year term. The Editor-in-Chief also is free to ignore the Senior Editors and, in fact, to disband them. Thus, in three years a single element of "new blood" could completely makeover the journal - for instance, re-positioning it with an economic, technology, qualitative, or application's focus. This might essentially capture the journal for a particular sub-discipline. We have created a powerful culture within the Quarterly that is focused on improving quality and rewarding those who help to do so. At the same time, we continue to seek the disciplinary and geographical breadth necessary in a field as interdisciplinary and global as is our own. Our experience over the past years suggests that this model works and that it is both prudent and open to new areas of research and research methods. I am pleased to have had the opportunity, with the help of the senior board and the leadership of Bob Zmud to have played some role in bringing this to fruition. I know from working with him over these past several years that incoming Editor-in-Chief, Allen Lee, shares that culture and will pass the Quarterly along as a better and more innovative journal than when he took on responsibility for it. It is a big responsibility, but the biggest challenge will be to keep the responsibility from paralyzing us to the need and opportunity to change.
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New Editor
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As of January 1st, 1998 Bob Zmud will take over as the Editor of MISQ Discovery. Bob will make the same transition that I did four years ago -- from Editor-in-Chief of MIS Quarterly to the head of its primary enterprise in electronic publishing. This again reaffirms the Quarterly's commitment to the creation of an electronic infrastructure for knowledge creation and dissemination. It has been my pleasure to work with Bob for some five years on the Quarterly and far longer through various other professional associations. I have particularly valued the opportunity to watch Bob build upon our commitment to value adding reviewing and the expectation that board members be selected from among reviewers who provide such reviews. Bob has also shared my commitment to moving our discipline towards greater use of electronic media. It was thus both a pleasure and relief when Bob agreed to take over as editor of MISQ Discovery when my term expires. I will watch with considerable interest to see Bob's efforts to further pull Discovery into the mainstream of information systems research. I also look forward to competing for some of Discovery's virtual pages.
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Second Edition
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I am pleased to announce publication of the second contribution to MISQ Discovery. Our first contribution demonstrated a number of ways that new media can be employed in the reporting of traditional research, this new publication demonstrates a new variety of scholarly contribution. We have called this "living scholarship" to reflect its dynamic nature. In the section that follows I describe living scholarship in more detail. This particular work, "Qualitative Research in Information Systems" by Michael Myers, provides a dynamic repository of information and sources of value to both newcomers and experienced qualitative researchers. There are currently two versions of the work. A static version reflects the content of the contribution on the day that it was accepted for publication in May of 1997. That version resides in the MISQ Discovery archive. A second, dynamic version, will continue for the foreseeable future to be maintained by Michael Myers on his university's server in New Zealand and is a section of ISWorld Net. The former version captures the work at a point-in-time, while the latter reflects up-to-date information on qualitative research methods. The difference between the two should represent the continued improvement of the resource as well as refinements in qualitative methods. This work has gone through a rigorous reviewing process, including considerable efforts expended by several of the leading IS scholars working in the area of qualitative research methods. Michael Myers, the developer of this resource, has, partially in recognition of the contribution he has made, been invited to become a member of the MIS Quarterly editorial board.
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Living Scholarship
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"Living Scholarship" as illustrated by this month's publication, represents a new form of scholarly contribution made possible by advances in computer and communications capabilities - particularly the World Wide Web. MISQ Discovery provides a formal and formidable reviewing process for scholarly contributions that are dynamic in nature. In this particular case the contribution provides a resource for information systems researchers working with qualitative research methods. Similar publications in the future might include an archive of theoretical models, a repository for survey measures, or living laboratories for experimental research. Living scholarship will have value at a point-in-time and be so assessed and archived. But it will also have value as a dynamic repository that continues to be maintained. As long as the author/editor continues to enhance the resource it will retain its status as "living scholarship". After three years the work can be re-reviewed and, if accepted, a new version moved to the archive. If the living version of the work should begin to falter or the author/editor loses interest in maintaining it, it can be "retired." Further information about MISQ Discovery "living scholarship" can be found in the about MISQ Discovery section. |
First Edition
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We are pleased to announce the publication of the first edition of MISQ Discovery, an electronic publishing outlet of the Management Information Systems Quarterly. MISQ Discovery, including exciting new graphics by Mike Parks, can be found on the worldwide web at http://www.misq.org/discovery/home.html or at mirror sites at University College Dublin or Melbourne University. You can also access it from MISQ Central or ISWorld Net's home page. Our first publication is "Teledemocracy: using information technology to enhance political work" by Ytterstad, Akselsen, Svendsen, and Watson. This work includes many illustrations of electronic media including context sensitive maps, a bulletin board, animation of the software's interface, a demonstration version of that software, and access to a spreadsheet of data. Works published in MISQ Discovery will be abstracted in MIS Quarterly, be listed in MIS Quarterly's table of contents, and carry MIS Quarterly volume and issue numbers. From the perspective of the Quarterly, this will be a new department that joins our existing departments. Via its presence on the world wide web (WWW), MISQ Discovery also presents the image of a stand alone publication. We welcome submissions that press further in exploring this new media. We value submissions that exploit electronic media to provide new methodologies, interfaces, and development tools that can be directly applied by other researchers or practitioners. We also value leading edge use of this technology for education - such as online case studies, educational simulations, and so on. Such submissions should exploit the technology, push us towards new frontiers of knowledge creation and/or dissemination, and be embedded in relevant literature and, particularly, appropriate theory. Our call for submissions describes both "archival works", illustrated by our first publication, as well as "living works" that are intended to be continually maintained by their authors. Potential examples include a reference archive related to qualitative research methods, an archive of measures used in information systems survey research, or experimental tasks used in experimental research. Living works may exist as part of other electronic entities such as ISWorld Net. They will carry the MISQ Discovery logo and the date of publication but can otherwise continue to evolve. Periodically, if they continue to be enhanced, they can be reconsidered for renewed publication. We encourage prospective authors to consider MISQ Discovery as a publication outlet for for work that uses this new electronic infrastructure in innovative ways. Blake Ives
Senior Editor for Electronic Productions, MIS Quarterly
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Thanks
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Several members of our board have played important roles in helping us to roll out MISQ Discovery. I am particularly indebted to Rick Watson of the University of Georgia and Michael Parks of the University of Houston. Rick challenged us, in an MIS Quarterly "Issues and Opinion" article in September of 1994, to move towards a new electronic intellectual infrastructure. Over the next two years he worked tirelessly, first as a member of our board, and now as one of the first MISQ Discovery author's to help make that vision a reality. Mike Parks, chief graphic designer for ISWorld Net, has offered his considerable creative and technical talents to the design of our interface - particularly, the various signs, icons, and other graphics. Those interested in learning more about how "Parks" produces these designs, may wish to look at the ISWorld Net engine room, also created by Parks. Here you will find an exciting glimpse of the future of education. Mike and Rick have pursued this initiative, even with the recognition that the time invested would not necessarily or immediately appear on the radar screens of institutional reward systems that remain deeply mired in a paper-based world. While others nervously wring their hands, Rick and Mike have jumped in with the enthusiasm of true explorers. In doing so, they have set a rich example for our field's other leaders to contemplate. They have certainly earned my respect and admiration and kept me inspired when my enthusiasm might otherwise have fallen off. They deserve thanks from all of us who will benefit from their creativity and leadership. I am also indebted to Bob Zmud, editor-in-chief of MIS Quarterly and to Gordon Davis at the University of Minnesota, for their complete support over the past 18 months. Enterprises such as this require mentors and organizational sponsors. Bob and Gordon have played these roles with skill and patience. |
The Old Empire
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"The Editors and reporters drink too much. And so, in the summer of 1996 Pravda, once the publishing right arm of an empire, ceased publication. With the demise of the Soviet Union and the market reform inspired growth of a free press, Pravda's readership had shrunk from 11 million to 200,000. Even after massive infusions of cash from its new owners, the editors resisted the new world that apparently was evident to everyone but the members of this elite editorial club. Although Pravda's demise came through a revolution in markets and politics, there are lessons here for revolutions in technology as well. For surely today, we are at sea in a revolution in knowledge creation and dissemination that will prove to be as wrenching to our own institutions as the demise of communism has been to Pravda. And, as with Pravda, there will be many who will cling feverishly to the old schemes even as their institutions fail from lack of adaptation to the changing world. The revolution we face today is that of an inexpensive, point-to-point global network. A network that permits me to type this today and publish it moments later to colleagues all over the world. The implications of this emerging revolution are staggering to the academic community. Among the more obvious benefits are:
There are numerous justifications as to why our discipline has moved, thus far, so slowly in harnessing these new technologies to our own infrastructure for knowledge creation and opportunity. In a keynote address delivered to the European Conference on Information Systems in July 1996, I discuss the opportunities these technologies offer us, our progress thus far, and the barriers to further progress. But, we must also recognize that there are very real risks of failing to move more quickly. While cycle times in industry continue to shrink, the time to create and publish new scholarship in information systems continues to be measured in multiple years. Recently, I received a manuscript from a leading journal that had taken six weeks from receipt at journal headquarters until the associate editor sent the paper out for review. As I was out of the country, it took another three weeks for the paper to catch up with me. A quick read convinced me that I was not an appropriate reviewer - over two months lost off someone's tenure clock because of failure to use electronic means (what a department editor of that journal has described with derision as "an industrial engineering approach") in at least part of the process. As practitioners begin to rely increasingly on online resources our credibility will further suffer if we refuse to migrate away from paper. And, in a field such as ours, where change is so rapid, we face a real risk of being seen by our own students or colleagues from other disciplines as out-of-date in the very subject matter that we profess. The creation of new intellectual infrastructure should be at the center of the discipline of information systems. The opportunity to forge this new architecture will give us first hand experience in collaboratory work, group decision support, global information technology, interface design, and so on. As the Apollo moon landing program spun off considerable side benefits for science and humanity, so too will the creation of new intellectual infrastructure provide benefits for our field and those fields that mirror our successes. Pravda was not the only publishing arm of the Soviet Union to find itself facing revolutionary change. It's sister publication, Izvestia has done much better. "Izvestia has sloughed off its past, embraced the market reforms of the new era and become the nations leading liberal newspaper" [Specter, 1996, p. 8]. Even in a revolution, apparently, institutions willing to adapt can play important leadership roles. Thus, I am pleased that MIS Quarterly has, among the various institutions of our academic discipline, been at the forefront of the creation of this new infrastructure. We have already instituted an electronic reviewing process at both MIS Quarterly and MISQ Discovery. We are proving on line manuscript status information to our prospective authors and publishing our best papers in full text format. With this first publication in MISQ Discovery we take the next important step towards realizing a reengineered intellectual infrastructure. We intend to continue to push the frontiers and welcome co-conspirators from other professional organizations within the information systems discipline. Specter, Michael, "Every Red, but not Read," International Herald Tribune, No. 35, 278, August 1, 1996, pp. 1, 8. |
Collaborating on the Interface Design
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The current interface for MISQ Discovery was designed over a one month period by Mike "Parks", Rick Watson, and me. During this time I migrated from Europe to the US, Parks moved back to Houston from California, and Rick was travelling as well. Nevertheless, we stayed in regular contact via email - sending perhaps a total of 50 messages - and used the web to quickly evaluate and provide feedback on one another's suggested design attributes. Parks developed all the graphics while Rick and I did most of the page layout for pages other than the home page. Park's design perspective generally reflected a sense that this was a clean design opportunity, while, as senior editor for electronic productions, mine leaned towards using the graphics to draw on the established reputation of the MIS Quarterly. Thus, I would have preferred that the signs use a serif type font, similar to that of the Quarterly and the same blood red color that appears in the type on our cover. This is, as of this writing, approximately the same color as appears in the page headers and first letters of the section headers. Similarly, the initial page sign graphics typically said "Discovery" with no mention of MIS Quarterly. Over time we reached a compromise approach that recognized the relationship with MIS Quarterly while retaining Park's artistic license. From my perspective, the process tended to work as follows. Parks (graphics), Rick (page layout), or I (editorial content and coordination) would put out on the web a sample for comment. One or both of the other two participants would then comment upon it. In Parks' case this usually resulted in him producing either a changed version or his seemingly just ignoring the comment. If I felt strongly enough about something he ignored - like ensuring that the MIS Quarterly name was on page banners, I would bring it up again - sometimes by phone. Rick, on the other hand, would usually respond to comments either by making the change or by a rational explanation of why he had chosen not to. Collectively, the design reflected a series of tradeoffs around consistency with MIS Quarterly, artistic license, a desire to present something of professional quality that could help market the journal, consistency within the various elements of the design, ease of subsequent maintenance, a desire to get it done, conformance with standards, our personal skills and taste, and somewhat different ways of working. Parks artistic skills most dominated the outcome as, in the graphics arena, Rick and I, lacking Parks skills, could only offer ideas, not prototype alternatives. One particular area, that of intra-article and inter-article navigation, consumed a great deal of time and energy. Parks felt strongly that a frame-based solution was required to ensure users could quickly move about among MISQ Discovery's various articles. Thus he developed several examples of frames, using principles of navigation laid out in the ISWorld Net Engine Room. The last of these included on the frame-based home page, an animated banner, a scrolling table of contents, pointers at various editorial pages, and a window for looking at a particular article. Rick and I both felt, however, that this involved using too much space for navigation versus presenting content. Moreover, the animation distracted from reading and the frames implementation provided a variety of problems with intra-article navigation - e.g., once you had jumped out of the article to look at an entry in the references or visited an external site, it was difficult to get back to the jumping off point. Moreover, inter-article navigation, a real strength of the frame approach, was of little use when there were no other articles in our archive. This latter problem did lead us to an interesting idea, not yet implemented, of automating the the production of a virtual table of contents to accompany every article, that would include pointers at similar articles published previously. Initially, this might be done with MIS Quarterly abstracts or perhaps those of the Association of Computing Machinery. Feedback appeared easiest to accept when it came before the other members of the design team had invested too much in the old scheme. For instance, once Rick had all of his pages formatted in a particular way - say in two columns - , he was not anxious to reformat them again. Thus, we spent considerable time just working with a single page to get the format right. Parks' tendency to focus primarily on the graphics, left him pretty much out of these deliberations until late in the process - and probably not fully satisfied with what Rick and I came up with. Similarly, each of us was travelling for several days during this process, with the design proceeding in our absence. Thus feedback sometimes came too late. . The above might suggest that criticism fueled our message traffic. Creativity also freely flowed. For instance, the building portrayed on our home page is modeled loosely on the model of an English pub - welcoming and fun. As Parks worked on adding details to the pub he commissioned me to go look at some real English pubs and report back on what I saw. Laptop in hand, and in the back of a London Black Taxi, I prepared a message about pub front furniture to send back to him. We also each learned from one another - about process improvement, tools and techniques, editorial mission, and so on. [Michael Parks, designer of the interface graphics, and contributor to our navigation scheme, provides here a rich and historically anchored perspective of the interface design, with particular emphasis on the constraints he was working within.]Note: the previous home page of MISQ Discovery is
available here. |
This page is maintained by the Senior Editor of MISQ Discovery who welcomes your feedback at m.myers@auckland.ac.nz.. It was last updated on December 20, 2005.