In the February, 2014 issue of The DataBase for Advances in Information Systems, we have three great papers with a diverse set of topics, covering measurement, social media, and cyber security.  All of these are relevant in particular today as our field comes to grips with assessing ever more complex phenomena, evaluating the influence of near-ubiquitous networks on how we interact, and how we can secure the systems upon which society depends to an ever-greater extent. 

In Don’t Mind the GAP: A Conceptual and Psychometric Analysis of the Individual Evaluation of Discrepancies in the Context of IS User Service Satisfaction, Chin, Junglas, Schwarz and Sundie present a psychometric analysis of the various measures available to capture perceived discrepancies or gaps, which are relevant when researchers are interested in capturing perceived discrepancies (e.g. as pertains to the perceived alignment between organizational and business-unit strategies, or the perceived gap between expected and received service delivery). More specifically, a set of comparative survey-based measures, drawn from published research across various disciplines, including marketing, information systems, and organizational behavior, are examined for their applicability.  The paper contributes to the work on perceived discrepancies by empirically assessing both the current approaches, as well as multiple new measurement approaches. Findings suggest that neglecting to attend to the conceptual underpinnings of a discrepancy measure can lead to model misspecifications and misinterpretations.

Appleford, Bottum and Thatcher offer their manuscript, Understanding the Social Web: Towards Defining an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda for Information Systems, in which they identify issues that must be considered by Information Systems scholars interested in helping to build a rich, interdisciplinary community to support applied research into the impact of the social web. They describe challenges and opportunities presented by the social web for Information Systems research and assert that an interdisciplinary approach may address the challenges of pursuing research questions about ephemeral social web phenomena. By creating communities of practice that bring together faculty, IT professionals, and students from a wide range of disciplinary and professional perspectives scholars may realize new opportunities for behavioral, design science, business intelligence, and IS strategy research.

Finally, many are familiar with so-called Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition (SCADA) systems.  For those who are not, there are two things you should know.  First, they are the heart of many industrial and utility control systems, which means they controls things such as delivery of natural gas and electricity, or in one case the speed of centrifuges in a nuclear power plant.  As these systems are moved more and more online (e.g. the planned “Smart Grid”), vulnerabilities may be more readily exploited, and given what they control this could be problematic.  Second, the nature of these systems means that they have special considerations that should be taken into account for securing them.  In Evaluation of Security Solutions in the SCADA Environment, Larkin, Lopez, Butts and Grimaila examine the employment of traditional IT security mechanisms for SCADA systems. They provide a discussion of considerations that should be evaluated prior to deploying security controls to mitigate negative impacts on operations. A case study is provided that evaluates a host-based intrusion detection system and a petrochemical fuels management SCADA system.

We hope you find the articles as interesting as we did.  As always, we invite you to consider submitting your best work to The DataBase for Advances in Information Systems. 

Best, 

Andy and Dave

 

 

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Dr. Andrew Schwarz

Associate Professor, Information Systems

Milton J. Womack Developing Scholar

Francis M. Coates MBA Professor

 

Louisiana State University

E. J. Ourso College of Business

 

Editor-in-Chief, The Data Base for ADVANCES IN INFORMATION SYSTEMS (http://www.sigmis.org/DataBase.html)

 

Academic Coordinator for Online Graduate Programs (MBA)

 

Linked In: http://www.linkedin.com/in/drandrewschwarz

Skype: andyhsphd

Text: 225.267.7216

Phone: 225.578.9075

Fax: 225.578.2511

aschwarz@lsu.edu

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