Designing an Information Systems Performance Management System

Contribution of Information Systems (IS) to business has been widely debated among both business scholars and practitioners. Even though a consistent body of literature has examined the problem over a time frame of more than 20 years, and a plethora of theoretical contributions has been produced, the issue of evaluating IS effectiveness remains unresolved. Starting from the assumption that real-world experiences differ from theoretical explications, and with the intent to contribute to IS Performance Management field bringing evidences from the reality, this chapter describes and discusses the design of an IS performance management system implemented by an insurance corporation.

End-User Participation in Health IT Development

Despite there being extensive cumulative knowledge and many experiences about factors that contribute to health Information Technology (HIT) success, lessons are yet to be learned as many HIT developments still face a number of problems - many of them of an organizational nature. This chapter presents a new method - the EUPHIT method – for studying and understanding one of the most crucial organizational success factors in HIT development: end-user participation. The method was developed and used for the first time throughout a research study of an EHR planning process in a Danish region. It has proved effective in disclosing the interactions that occur between the different social groups involved in HIT development, and in understanding the underlying reasons for these. This allows HIT project management to explore new avenues during the development process in order to support, facilitate, and improve real end-user participation.

A Model to Assist the Maintenance vs. Replacement Decision in Information Systems

An extensive literature review shows that Information Systems (IS) are changed and eventually replaced by substitutes under the influence of productivity, popularity, and specialisation of IS along with associated available support facilities, maintenance activities, failures, and user feedback. This chapter compiles those factors emerged from software engineering, IS, software quality assurance measurements, and computer science literature. A final product is a proposed model bringing those factors together as they are suspected to raise a need for taking the decision of evaluating change requests that may lead to a further maintenance or replace the IS. While keeping in mind that limitations on advanced testing exist, an expected service of such a model may help decision makers to explain maintenance/replacement decision of IS/component in a more itemized manner, hence diminish overburden pressure of experience responsibility on them.

Measuring IT Service Management Performance

Prompted by the realisation that IT is now seen as a service, with a customer focus and process orientation, the authors propose a model to measure IT service management (ITSM) performance. Measuring ITSM performance will enable organisations to demonstrate the benefit from their investment. The model is based on a systematic literature review that progressed from considering the general areas of organisation performance measurement to examining commonly used performance metrics. Although there are a number of studies on ITSM implementation, only a few considered the performance measurement of ITSM. A structured method for the design of the model was adopted through a three-level analysis. A comparison of existing performance measurement frameworks was first made to identify those that are suitable for ITSM and that would facilitate communication between the business and IT function. This was done using appropriate dimensions from past work of various performance measurement researchers. The frameworks were then classified along these dimensions to identify their completeness, eliminate unnecessary dimensions, and identify the natural dimensions for ITSM.

Information Systems for Organizational Effectiveness Model

Despite the proposal of various Information Systems (IS) evaluation models and approaches, IS evaluation has never been straightforward. There are issues and challenges in proving the business value of IS. Adding to the difficulty, a vast number of measures have been employed conveniently for evaluation purposes without going through a rigorous validation process. Recognising the complexity for IS researchers, IS specialists, and business managers to agree on a common model for the evaluation of IS business value, this chapter presents an empirically validated IS evaluation model, the IS for organisational effectiveness (ISOE) model, for planning, designing, implementing, and appraising IS. There also emerges a new theory, the Information System business value (ISBV) theory, from the ISOE model to establish that IS business value is multifaceted and are observable in the form of improvements in organisational effectiveness.

Measuring Information Systems Success

Information System success is difficult to measure directly. Because of the influence of non-controllable variables, it actually seems to be impossible to directly compute or determine the contribution of Information Systems to organizational performance, or to overall organizational effectiveness. As an alternative, perception of system success is often used as a surrogate measure. However, this raises the question of the validity of this surrogate measure. In this chapter, the authors describe a survey aiming to investigate the validity of this surrogate measure. Results show that there is reason to doubt the usefulness and validity of surrogate measures for objective system success.

The Development of a Model for Information Systems Security Success

Information security has received a great deal of attention from a number of researchers. However, there has been little research aimed at understanding the dimensions critical for the success of organizational information security programs. This chapter considers a large body of information security literature and organizes the research based on their findings. This taxonomy is used to develop a parsimonious model for information security success within organizations. Also, the utility of the proposed model within the contexts of government and healthcare is considered.

A Model to Measure E-Learning Systems Success

E-learning involves adopting and exploiting the potential of new, advanced Information Technology in development and delivery of education. In spite of a rapid growth in the e-learning field there still exists a range of issues facing the stakeholders of e-learning systems. One of the key issues is how to measure e-learning system success. Although considerable attention has been paid to the Information Systems success issue, there remain arguments about the factors which are most effective for measuring Information System success. The issue of measuring Information System success has an impact on evaluating e-learning systems success. This chapter aims to fill this void by proposing an evaluation methodology model to assess e-learning systems success. The contribution of this study is the proposed model to evaluate the success of e-learning systems. The model is based on a thorough review of the e-learning success literature and existing Information Systems success models.

Enterprise Resource Planning Acceptance Model (ERPAM)

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems have been implemented in most organizations for few years. But most of the organizations cannot really expose promised benefits of ERP systems. One of the reasons might be ERP users who do not accepted and use ERP system properly. In IT/IS literature organizational users have been exposed as important factor, which has influence on IT/IS acceptance and usage. Technology acceptance model (TAM) proposed by Davis (1989) has been most widely used model for researching user acceptance and usage of IT/IS. While this research is not the first attempt to apply TAM to ERP context, the authors of this chapter aim to make more contributions to the topic. First, they focus on the ERP system use in routine (mature) stage, and because of that, they use construct extended use instead of actual use. In the latest research of ERP system usage, the relationship between work compatibility and usefulness has been examined. New relationships between work compatibility and attitude toward using ERP system have been added. In all TAM studies regarding ERP context, a small number of external factors have been researched. The groups of external factors that have influence on ERP extended usage have been researched. The proposed model has been empirically tested using data collected from a survey of 293 ERP users in 44 organizations across country.

Evolutional Patterns of Intranet Applications

The objective of this chapter is to propose a theoretical examination, strengthened by an empiric survey of intranet evolutional patterns and the neologism that designates a communication system, for access to and searching of business information based on Internet technologies. This chapter analyses intranet applications and functionalities in order to classify them according to a taxonomy that allows us to distinguish between an institutional intranet, a knowledge management intranet, and an operating intranet. The main research hypothesis is the existence of an intranet life cycle, as an evolutional model starting from an institutional intranet that moves to a knowledge management intranet and then to an operating one. This last one is considered as a proxy for successful IS implementation. To substantiate the above-mentioned hypothesis an empirical study was conducted among 110 large Italian corporations, with a response rate of 66% (73 corporations). The method used was a survey conducted during the months of March, April, and May 2010, applying a mix of random sampling (randomly selected interviewees from the directory) and “snowball” sampling (contacting interviewees through leads). The results show how, basically, companies approach intranet implementation processes in an incremental way, which begins with the integration of the basic functionalities as “communication channel,” “service platform,” or “document management.”