Given that there may be thousands of MIS Web sites on a global basis,
we envision information search to become a major obstacle to the
efficient dissemination of information. While indexing schemes will
clearly be helpful, we believe that the way we organize information on
an MIS Collaboratory should be a direct reflection of our
conceptualization of the field of MIS. We believe that MIS creates new
knowledge and value for both academics and professionals by combining
technological and managerial viewpoints
. The managerial viewpoints come through
multiple reference disciplines such as cognitive psychology,
economics, organizational behavior, marketing and technical
developments (such as GDSS, knowledge representation, etc.). In other
words, the technological and managerial viewpoints are complementary,
and new knowledge is created at the intersection of IT and the
reference disciplines. This visualization is shown in
Figure 2.
*********************Put Figure 2 about here*******************
IT refers to computing and communications hardware and software. The
reference disciplines enable us to understand how managers invest and
use IT, and how IT impacts various cognitive, social and economic
aspects of the organization. In other words, for the world of MIS, the
area represented by the intersection in the above diagram is more
valuable than the sum of the values obtained from pure IT and pure
reference disciplines. Through some examples provided below, we
suggest that organizing MIS and related information on a Collaboratory
according to the above conceptualization will lead to more efficient
dissemination of information.
Suppose a user is interested in issues arising in the course of migrating to a client/server environment. What are the technical issues (e.g., database servers, network operating systems, and front-end tools) to be dealt with? What are the organizational implications (e.g., user acceptance, learning, etc.) of moving to a client/server environment? What are the economic factors involved in such a transition? Are there any studies that document the cost-benefit analysis of such a move? Thus, one single issue like migration to client/server could pose questions that refer to a variety of different fields. The concept of complementarity and its application in the form of organizing the MIS domain provide a solid basis for addressing such questions.
Let us consider another issue that has received wide attention in recent times: Commercialization of the Internet. This aspect of Internet involves a wide variety of topics and sub-topics from advertising to legal issues, from technical challenges to economics analysis of pricing and resource allocation. Academics and professionals interested in this area could possess diverse backgrounds ranging from Economics and Computer Science to Law. If every aspect of the commercialization of the Internet were to be documented, it would be impossible to search through various documents to find one of interest and relevance with a reasonable amount of effort. However if the same issues were to be organized on the basis of our conceptualization, then commercialization of the Internet would fall under the MIS domain with documents annotated with links to commercial sites and academic articles on pricing and resource allocation on the Internet. If there is a reference to some auction or usage-based pricing, it would be easy to categorize such information under the pure Economics discipline. A link to such a document from the MIS domain will shed light on the details of such a pricing scheme. So the value to an user from such an arrangement will be far greater than that from traditional indexing of pages by author names or organizations.
In organizing information on our MIS Collaboratory, we found that almost every aspect of MIS problems could be accommodated under such a conceptual design. Academic and business articles, announcements (e.g., conferences, call for papers, etc.), MIS personnel information, etc. can be organized according to this complementarity paradigm. There is one additional benefit of organizing information in this manner. Since one of the objectives of having MIS Collaboratories is to increase the level of interaction with industry professionals, it is important to ensure that the latter find useful information on a Collaboratory with minimum effort. For example, listing research articles under faculty names can increase the effort required on part of professionals in accessing useful articles. It is unlikely that they will know the names of all MIS academics and their areas of interest. It may be more useful to list articles according to subject areas, and to have links to author resumes from the articles themselves.