Platforms and Ecosystems

Platforms and Ecosystems

The success of platforms such as Amazon, Alibaba, Google, Uber, Netflix and Facebook has generated great interest. There is now a large body of research in MIS Quarterly on platforms (and the closely associated concept of ecosystems). This curation brings readers up to date on the nature of research on platforms and ecosystems in MIS Quarterly, the major topics covered, and thematic advances over time.

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Societal Implications of ICTs

Societal Implications of ICTs

The ubiquity of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has generated growing enthusiasm for its prospects to contribute to human development. At the same time, this pervasiveness also carries the potential for unfavorable outcomes. The implications of ICTs on society constitute a complex and multidimensional phenomenon with ambiguous boundaries and often unintended consequences. In this curated collection on the societal implications of ICTs, we include studies focused on scrutinizing the consequences of digital technology on enabling or constraining different aspects of people’s lives, such as access to health and education services, economic opportunities, political participation, civic engagement, gender equality, and environmental sustainability.

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Data Management

Data Management

In our modern, digital world, the critical role of information technology makes data management an important research topic. This paper curates data management research at MIS Quarterly as it has progressed from its early context of understanding requirements of relatively simple information systems to the sophisticated and complex systems of today. We discuss different themes of data management, and the progression of research on data management over time.

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Information Systems Development

Information Systems Development

Information systems development (ISD) has been a fundamental topic in MISQ from its first volume (Juergens 1977, Kling 1977). We developed the following definition of ISD to focus this curation - ISD is the entire suite of development activities (e.g., planning, analysis, design, building, testing, and maintenance) undertaken by agents (humans [individuals/ collectives] or software) to create a working information system. ISD is embedded in a social, organizational, and technical context with stakeholders who influence and are influenced by the ISD activities.

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Online Word-of-Mouth

Online Word-of-Mouth

Online word-of-mouth (WOM) has been an important area of scholarly inquiry at the intersection between Internet technologies and marketing (where the concept of offline WOM was born). Though there is no consensus around what it refers to, we define online (or electronic) WOM as any statements publicly available on the Internet that are made by individuals about any object of their interest (e.g., a product, a seller, stock market, a political figure or event).

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IS Control & Governance

IS Control & Governance

Since the inception of MISQ in 1977, information systems (IS) control and governance have been, and continue to be, vibrant research streams of key interest to the IS discipline. While both IS control and governance are concerned with ensuring the alignment of IS-related activities and information technology (IT) artifacts and resources (including human resources) with an organization’s objectives and strategy, the two are often viewed as operating at different levels; with IS governance focusing on alignment mechanisms at the meso level and IS control focusing on managerial alignment mechanisms at the micro level.

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IT Project Management

IT Project Management

IT project management has long been a key area of interest among IS scholars and practitioners, since IT projects constitute a key vehicle for IS development and implementation. A project can be defined as an interrelated set of activities intended to accomplish certain desired objectives within a limited period of time, typically executed by a project team. IT projects involve developing and/or deploying IT artifacts (comprised of either software, hardware, or both). IT project management thus refers to the application of knowledge, skills, techniques, and processes to conduct such projects within agreed-upon parameters (e.g., budget, schedule, scope, quality), and in concert with organizational goals and priorities.

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IT Workforce

IT Workforce

IS researchers have devoted significant attention to the IT workforce since the inception of MIS Quaterly (Jenkins and Johnson 1977). From 1977 to 2017, MIS Quarterly has published 76 articles that have employed diverse methods for examining the individual, organizational, and market issues tied to staffing the IT function in an organization. These studies illuminate not only how changing technologies and market conditions affect demand for the skills and competencies of IT professionals, but also how …

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Information Systems Alignment

Information Systems Alignment

The alignment of Information Systems (IS) with the business (i.e., hereafter IS alignment) has been a top managerial concern for over 30 years and remains an ongoing research stream of key interest to the IS discipline. IS alignment[1] represents an emergent process of dynamic interactions and continual adjustments between business and IS across multiple organizational dimensions (e.g., strategic, operational and social) and also organizational levels (e.g., the organization itself, group level, and the individual level) that collectively can potentially result in greater organizational performance

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IS Sourcing

IS Sourcing

Information Systems (IS) Sourcing is a broad umbrella term that refers to the contracting or delegating of IS- or IT-related work (e.g., an ongoing service or one-off project) to an internal or external entity (a supplier). It encompasses various sourcing models that are typically based on the distinction between ownership (in-house or third party) and location (domestic, nearshore or offshore), as well as online sourcing models. The significance of this topic for the IS discipline is evident in the number of publications that have addressed different aspects of IS sourcing since 1998 when the first two MISQ articles on this topic were published.

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Health Information Technology

Health Information Technology

Health information technology (health IT) research is conducted at an intriguing intersection between societies, organizations, and consumers. Health IT is defined as “a broad concept that encompasses an array of technologies to store, share, and analyze health information.”  The rapid increase in adoption and use of health IT since the mid-2000s has afforded considerable research opportunities to evaluate and test existing theories (e.g., Paul and McDaniel Jr 2004) as well as to create and refine new ones (e.g., Gao et al. 2015).

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Knowledge Management

Knowledge Management

The notions of knowledge and its management have been at the core of the information systems (IS) field almost since its inception. Knowledge has been viewed in several ways in the prior literature, including as a state of mind, an object, a process, access to information, and a capability. A commonly-used definition characterizes knowledge as a justified belief that increases an entity's capacity for effective action (Alavi and Leidner 2001, p. 109). Relatedly, knowledge management (KM) has been defined as a systemic process to acquire, organize, and communicate individual knowledge so that others may make use of it (Beck et al. 2014). Knowledge-management systems (KMSs) support these processes for creating, exchanging, and storing knowledge (Beck et al. 2014), and have been viewed as being either repository-based or network-based (Kankanhalli et al. 2005).

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IS Use

IS Use

Information systems (IS) use is among the most central constructs in the IS discipline (Straub and del Guidice 2012).  It is reported to be the most widely-studied construct in our field (Cordoba et al. 2012), and it is certainly one of the most consequential, for the nature, modalities and extents of information systems use significantly impact outcomes at individual, group, organization, network, society, and country levels.

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Information Privacy

Information Privacy

This curation highlights the 22 articles with a primary focus on information privacy that have been published in MIS Quarterly (see Table 1). Almost all of the definitions of information privacy in these articles have relied on the concept of a data subject’s control of information about himself or herself, and we embrace such a definition here: “the ability of the individual to personally control information about one’s self” (Awad and Krishnan 2006; Smith et al 1996). Note that Bélanger and Crossler (2011) offered definitions of information privacy concerns (distinct from, but obviously related to, definitions of information privacy itself) at the group, organizational, and societal levels.

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Trust

Trust

Trust is the enabler of social interaction. Although the origins of research on trust traditionally lie outside the Information Systems (IS) domain, the importance of trust for IS research rapidly grew in the late 1990s, and it is still growing with the increasing ubiquity and advancement of technology in organizations, virtual teams, online markets, and user-technology interactions.

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Securing Digital Assets

Securing Digital Assets

The security of digital assets has grown from being the concern of a few technologists to an issue that impacts society at large in virtually every sector, including government, business, and healthcare. This general trend is mirrored in the pages of MIS Quarterly. Although the importance of securing digital assets was recognized as early as the journal’s second year of publication (Halloran et al. 1978), research on security was relatively sparse until the last decade which has seen a marked increase of published articles on the topic.

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