Editorial Pointers

Sometimes the best way to beat the competition is to join it, at least when it comes to networking similar functions to work collectively rather than separately. Scientists, engineers, and IT and telecommunications experts have been working—collectively—to harness the power of business networks, embedded with intelligence, to coordinate business processes running on diverse business platforms. It’s a new direction in management science, one that is fast becoming the focus of industry interest.

Peter Vervest and Eric van Heck, professors at Erasmus University, Rotterdam, discuss how to create a joint business operating system able to separate the business logic from execution processes and activities. As a result, businesses can cooperate and compete, always with the goal of fulfilling customer needs in a more efficient way.

Also this month, while the Internet technical community has countered threats to the Domain Name System infrastructure with the DNS Security Extensions (DNSSEC) protocol, the global adoption of this protective standard has been slow to win adherents. Friedlander et al. explain the necessity of the standard and the challenges of encouraging its deployment. David Avison and Terry Young examine the technologies under development for the health care industry. The challenge, they contend, is convincing the IS community that health care applications are not the same as their business counterparts. Anand Jeyaraj and Vicki Sauter explain a big reason best practices have done little to slow the rate of project failures is that designers and users may think they understand each other’s needs, but that understanding is often woefully misinterpreted. And in "Viewpoint," Ben Shneiderman wonders if Web science will revitalize computer science.

Three articles this month spotlight mobile networks and services. Dekleva et al. explore the next generation of wireless services and applications, namely m-commerce and m-business, claiming future tools, e-services, and wireless Internet protocols will mark the next major set of developments in decision support systems. Constantiou et al. warn that when it comes to adopting mobile services, it is more effective to categorize potential users by what they have in common, regardless of how diverse their requirements and characteristics may be. And in "Technical Opinion," Cocosila et al. discuss the findings of a survey questioning whether a perceived health risk influences users’ perceived value of a technology as well as their willingness to adopt it, in this case third-generation cell phones.

Diane Crawford
Editor