Grandon Gill, Professor and Academic Director of the Doctor of Business Administration program at the Muma College of Business (MCOB) of the University of South Florida, pondered the question. A few months before, he had volunteered to take on the creation of two open access journals, to be called the Muma Case Review (MCR) and the Muma Business Review (MBR). The first of these would publish business discussion case studies and technical notes intended for educational purposes and would exist entirely online. The second would publish research of interested to business practice and would initially publish online and would also provide printed volumes.
Just a week before, Gill had committed to launching the MCR within two months. At the time, this deadline did not seem unreasonable. He already had sufficient case studies to provide a year’s worth of content. What he did not have, however, was a specific plan for delivering the content. Originally, he had planned to use the publishing component of the review system that would be handling submission and review of manuscripts. The MCOB’s dean, however, had indicated that he wanted a level of branding that could not be accommodated by the review system. Thus, a new solution to the reader-facing front end of the two journals was required.
Gill’s instinctive reaction had been to propose a front-end solution that employed WordPressTM, a content management system that provided flexible functionality that could be adapted to a journal front end. According to the web survey group W3Techs, as of early 2015, nearly a quarter of the top 10 million websites in the world used WordPress. Gill, himself, had used it for years for his personal blog and was comfortable with its capabilities.
As he thought about it further, however, Gill also recalled that his personal website had been taken down at least five times by anonymous hackers. In each case, WordPress had been identified as a likely source of the problem—although that had never actually been confirmed. His dean would not be pleased if similar disruption of the MCOB’s flagship journal websites took place. Should Gill be considering alternative solutions? And, even if he did choose WordPress or a similar content management system, there were many possible ways it could be deployed: as a service provider, as an application hosted in the cloud or on a local server. Each had its own pros and cons from a security standpoint. And the costs could be very different. This decision was proving to be far less straightforward than he had first thought.
Systemic Design: Two Canadian Case Studies