Deb Armstrong

Florida State University | FSU · Business Analytics, Information Systems & Supply Chain

Interpersonal interactions, such as impromptu face-to-face workplace conversations, facilitate knowledge transfer and spur innovation within individual work roles; however, the move to remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted these dynamics. This research examines how innovation can be maintained in remote work settings by considering Inf...

Information technology (IT) professionals are a strategic human resource for enabling competitive advantage through the application of data and technologies. Yet, it remains a challenge for organizations to retain top IT talent as the business context and the nature of work change. Retention strategies that have worked with other business professio...

Purpose The purpose of this empirical study is to explore the drivers and effects of a multidimensional conceptualization of burnout for information technology (IT) personnel using the job demands-resources framework. Design/methodology/approach Using survey data from 247 IT professionals, the authors analyzed our model using partial least squares...

Individuals are becoming more technologically savvy and self-sufficient, often transferring what they have learned in the personal realm of apps and chats into the organizational realm. Self information technology (IT) service, or an employees' attempts to solve their technological problem without first seeking the assistance of the IT department p...

This study explored the professional identity of information systems (IS) workers and explicated the set of salient characteristics that comprise the perceived distinctiveness of the IS profession. We developed a more complete picture of IS workers’ perceived distinctiveness, including its composition and outcomes. The perceived distinctiveness of...

In an online-to-offline (O2O) environment, a company operates multiple channels: online, mobile, and offline. A company attracts customers and triggers payments online or via mobile, and then leads customers to an offline store to receive the products or services. The authors argue that in this mixed shopping environment, customer perceptions of se...

It is a new year and a new editorial team. We are pleased to introduce the editors-in-chief for The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems for the next three years: Deb Armstrong and Tom Stafford. The DATA BASE for Advances in Information Systems has been in continuous publication since 1969, marking it as one of the longest-published resear...

The preponderance of the academic research focused on diversity in the IS field has emphasized the perspectives of women and racioethnic minorities. Recent research has found that following the appointment of a female CEO, white male top managers provided less help to colleagues, particularly those identified as minority-status (McDonald, Keeves, &...

This panel will highlight papers that have received the Best Paper Award at the SIGMIS CPR conference going back to 2000 (with those since 2004 named the "Magid Igbaria Best Paper Award"). We will start the panel with a high-level over-view of papers that received the Best Paper Award - a sum-mary of the topics, research methods, types of organizat...

While information technology has increasingly created various innovation opportunities in organizations, these opportunities have caused serious risks associated with information. Due to these potential risks, information security has become a major concern in organizations, and the role of the chief security officer has begun to attract research a...

In 2002, Manju Ahuja articulated the challenges women face in the information technology (IT) profession with the goal of developing a theoretical model of factors influencing career choice, career advancement, and career persistence for women in the IT profession. While Ahuja's work has been regularly cited in the IT workforce literature (citation...

Despite the recognition that information is a strategic asset for any state government, we lack research on the deployment and use of information systems in the U.S. state government context. Information systems are central for state agencies’ efforts to develop optimal responses to demands from their internal and external constituents. We examine...

Today, organizations tailor the practices from several agile methodologies to serve their particular environment. But are there situations that drive how an organization should tailor methodologies in a particular manner? This article places 12 commonly used agile development practices into a typology based upon whether they are primarily project m...

While the U.S. economy is recovering slowly, reports tell us that the supply of information systems (IS) professionals is declining and demand is once again on the rise. With organizations challenged in their efforts to hire additional staff, IS professionals are being asked to do even more, often leading to burnout, turnover, and turnaway intentio...

Web-based audio information systems have the potential to bring the full promise of the Internet to the developing world. However, these systems run into a practical difficulty - insufficient support for playback and recording of web-based multimedia from feature phones. At the moment, feature phones constitute more than 90% of all phone shipments...

The purpose of the Editors Panel session is to provide attendees with an opportunity to meet and interact with journal editors from leading international IS journals.

Using flow theory as our foundation, we empirically tested the impact of personality traits on the flow state experience and three user-generated content (UGC) usage types. The findings indicate that extraversion is positively related to UGC usage for entertainment and negatively related for communication and information, whereas neuroticism is pos...

Advocates of agile information systems development methods originally called for implementation of the method in full - either perform all of the method's practices, or don't call it "agile". Over time this quest for orthodoxy was replaced by the pragmatic tailoring of agile methods to the organization's environment. However, little empirical resea...

This study explores the relationships between career and psychosocial mentoring, and the employee outcomes of affective organizational commitment (AOC), job involvement, and turnover intention. The relationships between psychosocial mentoring and the employee outcomes of AOC and turnover intention were significant. Building from affective events th...

In 2006, Riemenschneider, Armstrong, Allen, and Reid [55] asked women working in the information systems (IS) department at a Fortune 500 C.ompany what unique workplace challenges and barriers they faced that men did not that had influenced voluntary turnover decisions. The current investigation offers further refinement of their theory. Specifical...

Much of the diversity literature in the IT field has focused on the perspectives of women and racioethnic minorities. We expand this exploration by looking at perceptions of the unique challenges and barriers to advancement facing men in the IT workplace utilizing a cognitive lens and schema accuracy theory. In addition to evoking the unique challe...

As the requests for technical solutions to meet the changing demands of the struggling US economy grow, the IT professional is once again in the spotlight. While a significant stream of research has studied IT professionals within the context of the job and/or organization, to date little research has focused on the context of the IT profession. We...

In 2006, Riemenschneider et al. asked women working in the IS department at a Fortune 500 company what workplace barriers they faced that had influenced their voluntary turnover decisions that men did not. The current investigation offers a replication and extension of the Riemenschneider et al. (2006) study. Specifically, this research begins to e...

This research investigated gender differences in the characteristics IS managers perceive to be unique to the IS profession. An interpretivist perspective, qualitative data collection (i.e., focus group interviews) and the revealed causal mapping data analysis method were used to evoke and represent mental models (i.e., cognitive structures) of men...

The persistently low number of women in the information systems (IS) field has led to numerous inquiries about barriers women might face to entry and advancement in the profession. Because IS has traditionally been male dominated, masculine values tend to predominate in the profession. In the current study, same sex focus groups of male and female...

The purpose of this session is to take stock of the gender and IT research being conducted within the SIGMIS community about factors affecting women's participation in the IT workforce. The ultimate goal is to better understand where we have been and where we need to go in the future with this research. The moderator, Eileen Trauth, will provide th...

Technological changes ripple through information technology (IT) development environments. IT professionals must often incorporate these changes into their job or risk obsolescence. This paper looks at the effects of technological change, and focuses on job environment conditions which affect individual performance, health, and well-being by applyi...

Public sector information technology (IT) departments are facing a myriad of challenges (e.g., budget cuts, service expansions, and political turmoil) in addition to the constant and rapid technological changes facing private sector firms. One way to meet these challenges may be through the development of the organization's absorptive capacity. Abs...

The software development process has undergone a considerable amount of change from the early days of spaghetti code to the present state of the art of development using strategic patterns. This has caused not only changes in the toolkits that developers use, but also a change in their mindset—the way that they approach and think about software dev...

The software development process has undergone a considerable amount of change from the early days of spaghetti code to the present state of the art of development using strategic patterns. This has caused not only changes in the toolkits that developers use, but also a change in their mindset—the way that they approach and think about software dev...

The software development process has undergone a considerable amount of change from the early days of spaghetti code to the present state of the art of development using strategic patterns. This has caused not only changes in the toolkits that developers use, but also a change in their mindset—the way that they approach and think about software dev...

IT employee retention is a serious problem facing many organizations. Building on person-environment fit theory and utilizing survey data drawn from 21 state government IT departments, in this paper we examine the relationship between voluntary turnover and various aspects of the working environments which IT employees perceive to be unique to thei...

While many of the changes that information systems professionals encounter are incremental requiring only modifications to an existing mind-set, others represent radical changes that require a fundamental shift in mind-set in order to fully benefit from the change. The goal of this study was to examine how software development concept thinking chan...

Organizations today face shortages of IT personnel. We investigated workplace factors in one state government in hope of identifying factors that influence perceived organizational support (POS) within an IT work environment. A combination of job characteristics (challenging job and perceived workload), job stressors (work exhaustion, role conflict...

The software development process has undergone a considerable amount of change from the early days of spaghetti code to the present state of the art of development using strategic patterns. This has caused not only changes in the toolkits that developers use, but also a change in their mindset-the way that they approach and think about software dev...

This article assesses the effects of psychosocial and career mentoring, leader—member exchange (LMX), and gender on the affective organizational commitment (AOC) of information technology (IT) employees working in one state government. Few studies have examined the relationship between mentoring and associated antecedents of the AOC of IT employees...

This article explores the affective organizational commitment, job involvement, and job satisfaction of an increasingly important segment of the public sector workforce: information technology (IT) employees in state government. We propose a model that explores job characteristics and work experiences variables that together influence affective org...

The purpose of this article is to ascertain how state IT departments, specifically Chief Technology or Information Officers (CTOs/CIOs) view changes in their external environment and their departments' ability to adopt and implement new information technologies. The research is based on a recently completed national survey of state IT departments i...

In June 2003, Wal-Mart asked its top 100 suppliers to begin using radio frequency identification (RFID) tags on pallets and cases beginning January 2005. Since that announcement, the business value of RFID in the consumer packaged goods supply chain has been periodically questioned.Recently, a Wall Street Journal article asserted that RFID is not l...

IT employees are critical to the successful functioning of contemporary governmental agencies. Researchers and practitioners have long sought to identify workplace factors that influence employee retention. In this chapter we review the existing literature on factors that may reduce the voluntary turnover of public-sector IT professionals. Examples...

Information systems professionals increasingly face changes in their work environment. Some of these changes are incre- mental, but many require fundamental shifts in mindset (referred to as a mindshift). Within the domain of software development, previous research has determined that veteran developers experience difficulty making the transition t...

The purpose of this panel is to share lessons that four female researchers have learned over several years working together on numerous IT workforce research projects. The advantages, disadvantages, and risks of conducting research in interdisciplinary settings that we have experienced will be shared. The panel will address issues that we believe c...

We used quality of work life theory and the causal mapping method to evoke the concepts and linkages of women's cognitions about work–family conflict in order to better understand the issues contributing to advancement barriers and voluntary turnover of women in IT. The major concepts (Managing Family Responsibilities, Work Stress, Work Schedule Fl...

This study reports the findings of 6 focus groups conducted with male and female managers working in information technology (IT) at three different companies. The views the managers shared regarding the barriers that men who work in IT face that their female counterparts do not are presented. The themes which emerged in the analysis are viewed thro...

While much research has been conducted on the adoption of complex technologies, relatively little has addressed the post-adoption deployment of that technology. This research presents a hierarchy of RFID assimilation which proposes that the creation of supplier business value is dependent upon the depth of assimilation (extent of use). The hierarch...

IT employees are critical to the successful functioning of contemporary governmental agencies. Researchers and practitioners have long sought to identify workplace factors that influence employee retention. In this chapter we review the existing literature on factors that may reduce the voluntary turnover of public-sector IT professionals. Examples...

Two theoretical perspectives (i.e., standpoint theory and the communication boundary management theory) were used to investigate the comments that 39 female information technology (IT) employees made during focus groups as they discussed issues related to workplace barriers and voluntary turnover. The revealed causal mapping method was used to anal...

The percentage of women working in Information Technology (IT) is falling as revealed by the 2003 Information Technology Association of America (ITAA) Blue Ribbon Panel on Information Technology (IT) Diversity report; the percentage of women in the IT workforce fell to 34.9% in 2002 down from 41% in 1996. Several studies have indicated this issue i...

To improve our understanding of individual motivations to remain employed in governmental agencies this study focuses on a specific segment of a state government agency workforce. Information technology (IT) employees possess skills that transfer easily to other sectors, which make them an important group when examining factors that influence the a...

The sample, method, and fundamental concepts, or quarks of object-oriented (OO) development and applications of these concepts to fit together, are discussed. The simplified OO taxonomy may reinforce OO thinking by helping learners to see how the concepts come together into the OO approach through the structure and behavior constructs. A taxonomy f...

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Over the last two decades, public sector organisations have responded to increasing demands for reforms and downsizing with accelerating cycles of organisational change. Researchers have suggested that public sector managers need to do more in assisting employees to cope with the change-induced stress. This study examined whether mentoring moderate...

In this chapter, we compare the findings from causal maps derived from semi-structured interviews with that obtained from survey respondents, using a data set originally constructed to characterize object-oriented (OO) software development expertise. To compare the results, we invoke three different theories to capture evoked concepts in the interv...

Software developers face a constant barrage of innovations designed to improve the development environment. Yet stress/strain among software developers has been steadily increasing and is at an all-time high, while their productivity is often questioned. Why, if these innovations are meant to improve the environment, are developers more stressed an...

Realizing the benefits of continuous software process improvement.

Realizing the benefits of continuous software process improvement.

This paper describes a usage-based pricing scheme for distributing digital content over peer-to-peer networks that rewards peer users who actively participate in the distribution process. We present a dynamic distribution model that is used to compare ...

Causal mapping is a technique that can be used to represent cognition because it captures the structure of the causal assertions of an individual or group. As causal mapping becomes more prominent in the IS field, it is important that we understand the method, its strengths and limitations and its place within the spectrum of available research met...

Texts can be coded and analyzed as networks of concepts often referred to as maps or semantic networks. In such networks, for many texts there are elements of social structure — the connections among people, organizations, and events. Within organizational and social network theory an approach called the meta-matrix is used to describe social struc...

The cognitive diversity of top management teams has been shown to affect the performance of a firm. In some cases, cognitive diversity has been shown to improve firm performance, in other cases, it has worsened firm performance. Either way, it is useful to understand the cognitive diversity of a top management team. However, most approaches to meas...

This research project gathered data about the use of UML and object-oriented analysis and design as the approach to the development of information systems. The data collection method consisted of interviews with information systems application developers with wide ranging differences in background. The authors used causal mapping for analysis of th...

Analysis of the behavior of casual maps is not as well developed as the analysis of their content and structure. In this chapter, we propose a set of approaches to examine the behavior of causal maps. Simulation approaches that invoke computer simulations, influence diagrams and fuzzy causal maps are eminently suitable to examine the intrinsic beha...

Comparing, contrasting, and collectivizing causal maps provides a useful way for extending representations of individual-level cognitions to an organization-level of analysis. Carrying out these processes can be tricky, however, because the terms used to denote nodes within causal maps are often so terse that important nuances and meanings critical...

Knowledge management practices in software development and engineering have been focused mainly on knowledge sharing and maintenance whereas less attention has been devoted to knowledge elicitation and codification issues. In this chapter we present a methodology based on causal mapping for the investigation and management of knowledge created and...

In this chapter, we compare the findings from causal maps derived from semi-structured interviews with that obtained from survey respondents, using a data set originally constructed to characterize object-oriented (OO) software development expertise. To compare the results, we invoke three different theories to capture evoked concepts in the interv...

Revealed causal mapping (RCM) represents one of the best ways to study a phenomenon in a discovery or evocative setting. The RCM method provides rich data that facilitates a deeper understanding of the cognitive facets of a phenomenon not available with other methods. In this chapter I will share insights gained from conducting several interactivel...

Identifying what different stakeholders in a business need from Information Systems development has always been seen as problematic. There are numerous cases of failure as projects run over time, over budget, and, most significantly, do not meet the needs of the user population. Whilst having a structured design process can go some way towards redu...

The formulation and implementation of effective strategy at every level within an organization requires that those involved in the process have not only a good overall understanding of the present situation, but also an understanding of the underlying cause and effect relationships which underpin strategy at those levels. This includes understandin...

Some dial-up Internet access providers, such as the market leader AOL, require customers to install proprietary connection software to use their service. This is puzzling, because while the software helps certain users, it creates disutility for others ...

In spite of a more "feminine" nature of the IS disciplinedue to its greater perceived social component, stereotypes and educational prejudices that are prevalent in the computerscience discipline are assumed to exist in the information systems ...

A compact OO course teaches the expert procedural programmer to "think" OO without falling back into old habits.

This paper examines the Intergroup Coordination key process area (KPA) for theoretical significance and measurability. The Software Engineering Institute (SEI) has developed a framework called the Capability Maturity Model (CMM) which enables organizations to measure their “maturity” in doing software engineering. The CMM is not theoretically deriv...

Information systems (IS) is a complex discipline constantly in need of additional operationalized theories and constructs. The need exists for methodologies that are qualitative and interpretive but result in theories and constructs that can be subjected to empirical testing. This paper proposes that revealed causal mapping (RCM) is a methodology t...

While much research has been conducted on the adoption of complex technologies, relatively little has addressed the post-adoption deployment of that technology. This research presents a hierarchy of RFID assimilation which proposes that the creation of supplier business value is dependent upon the depth of assimilation (extent of use). The hierarch...

As the field of Information Systems (IS) continues to advance, organizations will constantly be facing the challenge of paradigm shifts. This paper extends prior work on IS personnel training by emphasizing the retraining of IS professionals during a paradigm shift. The application of the Osgood (1949) transfer surface to the software development d...