January 1986 - Vol. 29 No. 1
Features
Data quality and due process in large interorganizational record systems
As societies have become more dependent on information systems to conduct and record transactions between organizations and individuals, interorganizational computer systems have become a widely used method of coordinating the actions of independent organizations. This article examines the quality of data in one important interorganizational system—the criminal-record system of the United States.
Summary of the second annual UCLA survey of business school computer usage
The compilation and analysis of data collected from 125 business schools reveal important trends and identify problems that arise when computers are integrated into education.
The design and building of Enchère, a distributed electronic marketing system
Building and prototyping an agricultural electronic marketing system involved experimenting with distributed synchronization, atomic activity, and commit protocols and recovery algorithms.
A workstation model for an interactive graphics system
By introducing the concept of an abstract graphics device called the workstation, an existing graphics system is generalized to support multiple devices in applications software.
Selected papers from the sixth international conference on information systems
There are a number of alternative tools and methods for building and designing information systems for organizational use. Each tool or design alternative has its advocates. Benefits and advantages are proposed or claimed; little empirical evidence is presented.
The two selected papers from the 1985 International Conference on Information Systems (Indianapolis, December 15-18) present empirical laboratory experiments to provide evidence as to tools and design alternatives. The first paper by Dickson, DeSanctis, and McBride describes three experiments to compare traditional tabular presentation with graphic presentation. The experiments are designed to build cumulative research results around the issue of the task the reader of the information is to perform upon receiving the information. The second paper by Vessey and Weber provides experimental evidence comparing methods for documenting a problem: decision tree, decision table, and structured English. The three methods are frequently presented as alternatives; the experiments compare them.
Two studies do not settle an issue as complex as comparison of alternative tools and methods: they begin to provide the evidence needed. They also illustrate one well-established research approach—the laboratory experiment. The advantage of laboratory experiments is the control that can be obtained; field studies and experience of practitioners can be understood more fully in the context of such laboratory results.
A total of 840 junior and senior-level undergraduate business students particpated in three experiments that compared computer-generated graphical forms of data presentation to traditional tabular reports. The first experiment compared tables and bar charts for their effects on readability, interpretation accuracy, and decision making. No differences in interpretation accuracy or decision quality were observed for the two groups, although tabular reports were rated as "easier to read and understand" than graphical reports. The second experiment compared line plots to tables for their effects on interpretation accuracy and decision quality. Subjects with graphical reports outperformed those with tables. There were no meaningful differences in interpretation accuracy across treatment groups. The third experiment compared graphical and tabular reports for their ability to convey a "message" to the reader. Only in situations in which a vast amount of information was presented and relatively simple impressions were to be made, did subjects given graphs outperform those using tables.
This program of cumulative experiments indicates that generalized claims of superiority of graphic presentation are unsupported, at least for decision-related activities. In fact, the experiments suggest that the effectiveness of the data display format is largely a function of the characteristics of the task at hand, and that impressions gleaned from "one shot" studies of the effectiveness of the use of graphs may be nothing more than situationally dependent artifacts.
Structured tools and conditional logic: an empirical investigation
Prior research has identified two psychological processes that appear to be used by programmers when they perform design and coding tasks: (a) taxonomizing—identifying the conditions that evoke particular actions; and (b) sequencing—converting the taxa into a linear sequence of program code. Three structured tools—structured English, decision tables, and decision trees—were investigated in a laboratory experiment to determine how they facilitated these two processes. When taxonomizing had to be undertaken, structured English outperformed decision tables, and decision trees outperformed structured English. When sequencing had to be undertaken, decision trees and structured English outperformed decision tables, but decision trees and structured English evoked the same level of performance.
