April 2002 - Vol. 45 No. 4

What determines if a system implementation will be successful?

If IT professional development is good for overall corporate performance, as well as for IT professionals' employment prospects, security, self-esteem, and climbing the corporate ladder, why don't more of them do it?

The tools track IT assets, performance, budgets, and resources, managing system development and deployment in the interests of the organization's strategic goals.

An important aspect of the global, knowledge-based, technology-enabled economy is that organizations must invest in continuous training [4]. Managers, now exposed to concepts such as knowledge economy, organizational intelligence, learning organization, knowledge era, and organizational learning, [2, 3, 12], need to establish the optimum mix of continuous training activities to leverage organizational knowledge to its fullest potential. Several methods and models aimed at managing organizational knowledge at a macro level are now available [2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 11]. But these methods don't address the micro level problem of planning and selecting continuous training activities while taking into account manager and employee preferences, and constraints such as budget or deliverables. The analysis of empirical data presented in this article incorporated factors, criteria, and weights into a model named Econof. Our findings provide managers with valuable tools to implement a continuous training management process aligned to organizational strategy---a step toward the development of knowledge management strategies.

In recent years, many organizations have recognized the potential of e-commerce to improve profitability by increasing productivity and market penetration while reducing costs. But the vision of an electronically interconnected world requires the global adoption of e-commerce, not just in industrialized nations, but also in developing ones, where most of world's population lives. To successfully encourage the embrace of the Internet and e-commerce, one must carefully study the unique socioeconomic and cultural aspects of such nations. This article discusses ways to stimulate the worldwide adoption of e-commerce, based on our case study of Greece, a nation that has been slow to embrace Internet technologies.

Information quality (IQ) is an inexact science in terms of assessment and benchmarks. Although various aspects of quality and information have been investigated [1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12], there is still a critical need for a methodology that assesses how well organizations develop information products and deliver information services to consumers. Benchmarks developed from such a methodology can help compare information quality across organizations, and provide a baseline for assessing IQ improvements.

A substantial portion of most organizational budgets goes toward developing IT applications. Despite the existence of many tools and methodologies, Information Systems Departments (ISDs) continue to face burgeoning costs and delays. In this article, we explore methods of improving the productivity and effectiveness of the application development process using the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) by the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie Mellon University as a benchmark for process maturity levels.

How good is a company's data quality? Answering this question requires usable data quality metrics. Currently, most data quality measures are developed on an ad hoc basis to solve specific problems [6, 8], and fundamental principles necessary for developing usable metrics in practice are lacking. In this article, we describe principles that can help organizations develop usable data quality metrics.