Detmar Straub

Temple University | TU · MIS Department

Professional question-and-answer (Q&A) communities have become important online social media platforms for peer-to-peer knowledge production. Such communities are vital for users seeking technical solutions and innovative methods for developing new products and features. A key challenge is ensuring information flows across areas of specialization,...

Realizing or appropriating value from individual firm-level IT investments has been a recurring theme in the IS literature for decades. Further, failure rates related to IT investments have been high for many years. However, realizing value from IT in settings where numerous organizations need to work together to co-develop sizable digital platform...

Weak passwords are one of the most pervasive threats in cybersecurity. Facing this threat, users require guidance on how to protect themselves. A method frequently used by IS practitioners and researchers to provide this guidance is fear appeals, persuasive messages intended to prompt behavioral changes in response to a threat. However, previous re...

Many online question-and-answer (Q&A) communities have tried to motivate knowledge contribution through the implementation of gamification mechanisms. We know little, though, about the effectiveness of specific hierarchical privilege levels (a.k.a. “leveling up”) and non-hierarchical incentives (e.g., independent reputation gains and achievement ba...

In pay-what-you-want (PWYW) pricing, buyers are allowed to pay any amount they want, often including a price of zero. Standard theory predicts that buyers are driven solely by their own interest and will always choose to pay nothing, making PWYW pricing impractical to use. Nonetheless, PWYW pricing has been consistently occurring in the marketplace...

Purpose The current research aims to answer the following question: To what extent and under what conditions does hiring consultants to implement a customer relationship management (CRM) system produce performance gains for companies? To answer this question, this research delves into the critical interdependent roles of CRM consultant resources (C...

Information technology outsourcing (ITO) relationships today are facing increasingly turbulent environments. This research examines ITO performance by focusing on client firms’ perceived legitimacy of vendors, termed “vendor legitimacy,” consisting of pragmatic, cognitive, and moral dimensions. Based on our surveys with executives and managers at 2...

While CRM technology implementation initiatives frequently end up as failures, most research has focused on user related reasons for understanding low success rates. This study extends CRM research backwards into the system implementation phase to improve understanding of the hitherto unexplored technical antecedents of CRM success. We advance a re...

Despite being the object of much interest, deep insights regarding why and when investments in big data resources enhance firm performance are lacking in the literature. Building on the resource-based view (RBV) and data provided by 301 senior marketing managers, this study reveals that big data resources primarily improve firm performance by enhan...

Health care consumers and patients are increasingly using online health communities (OHCs) to exchange social support and enhance their well-being. The success of OHCs in promoting health, however, depends not just on posting activity by participants, but, crucially, on whether or not responses are subsequently received. While previous studies have...

Drawing on Cultivation Theory, this research investigates how Twitter users perceive tweets about particular brands and how message types affect brand attitudes. We conducted a qualitative study of ten participants each following a different brand’s Twitter account, tracking tweets and participants’ perceptions for 12 weeks followed by a survey fou...

Health care consumers and patients are increasingly using online health communities (OHCs) to exchange social support and enhance their well-being. The success of OHCs in promoting health, however, depends not just on posting activity by participants, but, crucially, on whether or not responses are subsequently received. While previous studies have...

The goal of this paper is to determine holistic archetypes of information technology (IT) outsourcing strategy. It does this through an overarching theoretical framework that integrates three dominant theories of inter-organizational relations in the IT outsourcing literature, namely transaction cost economics, resource dependency, and social excha...

A principal concern of organizations is the failure of employees to comply with information security policies (ISPs). Deterrence theory is one of the most frequently used theories for examining ISP violations, yet studies using this theory have produced mixed results. Past research has indicated that cultural differences may be one reason for these...

A prime example of an emerging two-sided market is the driverless vehicle industry, an industry that will get much of its software from one side of the market: specifically, application developers. Consumers stand at the other side of this market. To what extent will this marketplace reward both the industry itself and application developers for te...

The rapid evolution of health information systems (Health IS) research has led to many significant contributions. However, while the Health IS subset of information systems (IS) scholarship has considerably grown over the past two decades, this growth has led to questions regarding the current intellectual structure of this area of inquiry. In an e...

Health consumers are increasingly participating in consumer-toconsumer (C2C) online health communities (OHCs) to receive health-related support and to provide assistance and support to others. However, questions remain as to how individual OHC participants are affected by the relationships they have established within an OHC and how the content exc...

Participants are increasingly using online knowledge communities to access and share information and to collaboratively solve problems. However, in online communities that address technical questions (i.e., utilitarian, rather than hedonic or supportive, in nature), a key problem is encouraging sufficient, ongoing knowledge contribution. While many...

The rapid evolution of health information systems (Health IS) research has led to many significant contributions. However, while the Health IS subset of information systems (IS) scholarship has considerably grown over the past two decades, this growth has led to questions regarding the current intellectual structure of this area of inquiry. In an e...

Online communities are increasingly being used by technical professionals and aspirants to access information and knowledge, discuss and share experiences, and collaborate in solving problems. Recently, the application of gamification in non-game contexts has attracted the attention of both practitioners and researchers and has generally been found...

Social network services (SNSs) are fundamentally transforming the way businesses communicate with customers. Key issues in understanding social media and such services include how to generate more information traffic and how to increase information exposure. Unlike previous studies in the research stream studying patterns of information diffusion,...

While work with benefits realization requires organizational learning to be effective, emphasis on organizational learning is hard to find in benefits realization studies. To remedy this research gap, we study how organizational learning theory can contribute to improve benefits realization processes. A qualitative approach was used to gain in dept...

Firms have made extensive use of interorganizational systems (IOSs) to share knowledge and pursue superior joint performance. Contemporary firms are using IOSs to collaborate widely across the value chain and in an ever-expanding geographic landscape. Thus, institutional distance, which is the difference between the firms’ respective institutional...

What factors affect client perception of vendor preference in a crowdsourcing marketplace? We approach this question from two theoretical perspectives in this study. First, extending the knowledge of e-commerce transaction, we propose the concept of vendor-task fit in this study and test its relationship to vendor preference. Second, we posit that...

In this article, we explore the different roles that knowledge sharing and exploitative learning play in employees’ innovative behaviour, and investigate the different moderating effects of employees’ espoused national cultural values on the relationship between exploitative learning and innovative behaviour in the Chinese IT-enabled global service...

Information security management programs have long included “fear appeals”, managerial communiqués designed to promote secure behaviors among organizational insiders. However, recent research has found a conflict between the predictions of contemporary fear appeal theory for how we expect individuals to experience fear appeals and what actually occ...

With the rise of online health communities, patients or consumers are using these communities to exchange support through enhanced social relations and interpersonal transactions. An emerging and interesting area of research is to comprehensively understand the interaction dynamics within online health communities. The current study examined the im...

Previous research has proposed different types for and contingency factors affecting information technology governance. Yet, in spite of this valuable work, it is still unclear through what mechanisms IT governance affects organizational performance. We make a detailed argument for the mediation of strategic alignment in this process. Strategic ali...

Despite decades of heavy investments in information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) in government systems and considerable amounts of research on how IS contributes to organizational performance and success, IS investments are still considered risky business. Fewer than 50% of IS projects deliver the expected functionality on time and...

Insightful histories of an academic field can only be written when there is sufficient raw material to serve as “grist for the mill” for historians. This is the first task for those who are monumentally interested in preserving the origins of a field from the ravages of time is to collect artifacts—written, verbal, visual, and physical—that can lat...

The development of information technology (IT) in the last decade has ushered us into the ‘big data’ era. Whereas sampling error has been of high interest in such studies over the last century, extremely large datasets will virtually rule out the possibility that statistics generated from samples are not also true of the population. The critical di...

Aguirre-Urreta and Marakas [Aguirre-Urreta M, Marakas G (2013) Research note—Partial least squares and models with formatively specified endogenous constructs: A cautionary note. Inform. Systems Res., ePub ahead of print September 5, http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/isre.2013.0493] aim to evaluate the performance of partial least squares (PLS) path modeli...

This research analyzes patterns of artifact generation and knowledge contribution of design science researchers based on a meta-analysis of contemporary work. We derive these analyses based on prior classifications of design science artifacts and knowledge outcomes. Our analyses reveal a complex picture of what is produced and how by scholars in th...

This paper addresses Rönkkö & Evermann’s (2013) criticisms of the partial least squares (PLS) approach to structural equation modeling (SEM). We contend that the alleged shortcomings of PLS are not due to problems with the technique, but instead to three problems with Rönkkö & Evermann’s (2013) study: (1) the adherence to the common factor model, (...

While most research on website has focused on functional tasks, the Internet offers many opportunities for leisure as well as experiential activities. Because of the evolution of developed society towards an experience economy, analyzing the role of technologies in the presence of prior user experiences makes sense. This research identifies variabl...

With the development of global crowdsourcing marketplace, clients now search for online vendors that meet their various requirements. In spite of this popularity, little research to date examines how clients make the vendor selection decision. In that vendor selection in outsourcing has long been an important IS research topic, this issue is worthy...

Scientific disciplines are self-defined and self-evolving to a large extent, but acknowledging that disciplines develop organically does not diminish the continuing need to more fully understand the underlying dynamics of their intellectual structures. Intellectual structures bespeak the topics (including paradigms) that a discipline selects, the s...

Passwords remain the dominant authentication mechanism for information security. Unfortunately, research has shown that most passwords are highly insecure. Given the risks of using weak passwords, there is a need to effectively motivate users to select strong passwords. In this study we examine the influence of interactivity, as well as static and...

Employee engagement is a relatively new construct in academic literature and an increasingly popular idea in practice. Proponents claim a strong positive relationship between employee engagement and business success, and outcomes including retention, productivity, profitability, and customer loyalty and satisfaction. Despite numerous academic and p...

This study examines the knowledge sharing practices of academics in Higher Education Institutions(HEI) in Ethiopia in the process of conducting research and disseminating their research outputs. Based on the understanding that Knowledge Sharing is a key enabler of Knowledge Management, the study analyses how individual based variables determine kno...

This study examines the knowledge sharing practices of academics in Higher Education Institutions(HEI) in Ethiopia. Based on the understanding that Knowledge Sharing is a key enabler of Knowledge Management, the study analyses how individual based variables determine knowledge sharing practices. The major relevant variables are drawn from the Theor...

Information system research has examined client-vendor trust relationship and governance structures in outsourcing context. Extending the complementary relationship between formal controls and relational governance, this study investigates how formal controls and relational governance influence trust in a crowdsourcing marketplace setting. Furtherm...

Creolization seems to play a key role in driving success in global IT sourcing, but the impacts of creolization on trust and knowledge sharing between the supplier and the client have not been study. We attempt to theorize why and how creolization affects performance through trust in IT-enabled global services sourcing. In this paper, we theoretica...

Existing research has long considered service quality as a primary determinant of user satisfaction with information technology (IT) service delivery. In response to the knowledge-intensive and collaborative nature of IT service delivery in the contemporary business context, we advance the theoretical understanding of user satisfaction by re-concep...

This research investigates information security management as an administrative innovation. Although a number of institutional theories deal with information systems (IS) innovation in organizations, most of these institutional-centered frameworks overlook external economic efficiency and internal organizational capability in the presence of pressu...

This article discusses the role of commonly used neurophysiological tools such as psychophysiological tools (e.g., EKG, eye tracking) and neuroimaging tools (e.g., fMRI, EEG) in Information Systems research. There is heated interest now in the social ...

The peer review process that has been in place for many years has recognized shortcomings. The Internet provides a means for changing this process. This paper offers a more transparent and inclusive design for peer review referred to as open knowledge ...

Aguirre-Urreta and Marakas (A&M) suggest in their simulation "Revisiting Bias Due to Construct Misspecification: Different Results from Considering Coefficients in Standardized Form," that, like Jarvis et al. (2003), MacKenzie et al. (2005), and Petter et al. (2007) before them, bias does occur when formative constructs are misspecified as reflecti...

Some of the important empirical studies using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) and published in MIS Quarterly in the 20-year period from 1992 through 2011 are examined. A review indicates that the average number of indicators is significantly smaller in formative than in reflective constructs. Diamantopoulos et al. point...

While there is a fairly robust literature on information and communications technology (ICT) national policy, there are missing elements in the existing research. First, nation states at different stages of development are generally not considered in terms of what kind of ICT national policy is optimal. Second, a stakeholder perspective on the crea...

Although creolization has been shown to contribute to project success in IT-enabled global services sourcing, the components of the construct have received little theoretical scrutiny and the construct has not been instrumented by a set of systematized measures. This study attempts to provide a better understanding of creolization and advance a sys...

In response to Österle et al.'s ‘Memorandum on Design Oriented Information Systems Research’, this commentary disputes, and expands the context of, several premises used to justify the main argument in the memorandum. These include: (1) claims about the evolution and role of design science research in the broader IS community and its position in th...

Advances in information technologies and the growth of a knowledge-based service economy are transforming the basis of technological innovation and corporate competition, and this transformation requires taking a broader, institutional and political view of information technology and knowledge management. The globalization of new enterprises and th...

System response delay has been cited as the single most frustrating aspect of using the Internet and the most worrisomeaspect of Web application design. System response time (SRT) research generally concludes that delay should be eliminated where possible to as little as a few seconds, even though delay reduction is costly. Unfortunately, it is not...

The importance of high quality reviews given by several reviewers and editors to the journal is presented. It is critical to consider, in the final analysis, MIS Quarterly (MISQ) is in the business of publishing manuscripts when considering reviews and how these affect manuscripts. There are a number of good practices that will enhance the reviewin...

SEM has potential advantages over linear regression models that make SEM a priori the methods of choice in analyzing path diagrams when these involve latent variables with multiple indicators. What SEM does is to integrate the measurements and the hypothesized causal paths into a simultaneous assessment. SEM can analyze many stages of independent a...

A divorce between IS academicians and those in practice is premature. First, researchers have produced evidence that the topics attacked by scholars are what practice needs and wants to know about. Second, there is no credible evidence that knowledge transfer is not taking place. The first gap relates to the topics or themes that researchers tackle...

Extant research is equivocal about the organizational performance effects of CRM technology use, with some studies reporting positive effects and other studies reporting no effects at all. The present research effort posits that these mixed findings may potentially be explained by two factors: (1) CRM technology use may have different effects on di...

This article introduces Internet group purchasing (IGP) as a novel e-commerce phenomenon. Drawing on collective cognition and other relevant theories, we investigate the management of IGP by analyzing the four stages of IGP: (1) information accumulation, (2) interaction, (3) examination, and (4) accommodation. Netnographic methods were employed to...

System response delay has been cited as the single most frustrating aspect of using the Internet and the most worrisome aspect of Web application design. System response time (SRT) research generally concludes that delay should be eliminated where possible to as little as a few seconds, even though delay reduction is costly. Unfortunately, it is no...

Information security (IS) research has become more sophisticated, relevant, and rigorous with increasing number of scholars in the IS community turning their attention to security research. The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT) at Carnegie Mellon University are aimed towards reporting inform...

The information systems field emerged as a new discipline of artificial science as a result of intellectual efforts to understand the nature and consequences of computer and communication technology in modern organizations. As the rapid development of ...

According to Benbasat and Barki (2007), systems usage has remained a black box in spite of the fact that the construct lies at the heart of a host of studies in the field. We know very little about how exactly users cope with information technology (IT), especially disruptive IT. To answer such questions, we grounded our current work in Beaudry and...

Human life is dependent upon the natural environment, which, most would agree, is rapidly degrading. Business enterprises are a dominant form of social organization and contribute to the worsening, and enhancement, of the natural environment. Scholars ...

Detmar W. Straub, editor-in-chief, MIS Quarterly, describes two papers that define blue oceans, a term used to describe breakthrough ideas that essentially make competition irrelevant. These two papers are 'Exploring human images in website design: a multi-method approach' by Dianne Cyr, Milena Head, Hector Larios and Bin Pan, and 'Estimating the e...

Organisations are increasingly impacted by employee failures to implement readily available systems security countermeasures that result in security lapses. An area where this is most intriguing is among those organisational members who know how to implement security measures but do not do so. Important suggestions have been made, but despite them,...

One of the most welcome recent developments in Information Systems scholarship has been the growing interest in individuals' continuing use of information technology well after initial adoption, known in the literature as IT usage, IT continuance, and ...

Some of the significant factors associated with the submission and selection procedures of review papers are presented. Reviewers need to encourage authors to develop their ideas in the constructive ways as suggested by the review team. Some people say that rejection of a paper leads to the risk that the review team has missed an opportunity to hig...

This paper argues that Web 2.0 tools, specifically wikis, have begun to influence business and knowledge sharing practices in many organizations. Information Systems researchers have spent considerable time exploring the impact and implications of these ...

There is growing interest in the role and contribution of national information infrastructure (NII) to the quality of governance and the socio-economic development of nation states. In this paper, we use publicly available archival data to explore the relationships among NII, governance, and socio-economic development in developing countries. Resul...

System response delay has been cited as the single most frustrating aspect of using the Internet and the most worrisomeaspect of Web application design. System response time (SRT) research generally concludes that delay should be eliminated where possible to as little as a few seconds, even though delay reduction is costly. Unfortunately, it is not...

Forced journal self-citation, as defined in this paper, has serious implications for the IS field. We introduce a statistical perspective on how common the practice is, discuss whether it is appropriate or not, and evaluate its ethicality. We find that journal self-citations do influence journal impact factors, a measure of journal quality and a to...

Some of the significant issues associated with paper cycle times, quality and usefulness of the reviewing, readability of articles, managerial implications of published work, policy constraints, and quality of papers of academic and scholarly journals, are discussed. The ideas associated with these issues are focused upon, without referring to the...

Organizations and individuals are increasingly impacted by misuses of information that result from security lapses. Most of the cumulative research on information security has investigated the technical side of this critical issue, but securing organizational systems has its grounding in personal behavior. The fact remains that even with implementi...

This is the second part of a two-part article that describes and analyzes a program of research (PR) in international IT studies that began in the fall of 1992. The first part spans the years 1992 through 2000 and discusses the concept of a PR, the inception of our PR, and its maturation in terms of theory and methodology, research team dynamics, a...

This case study is about the first Information Systems PhD program in Ethiopia and the region, a collaborative effort of thirteen universities around the globe. Fifteen faculty members traveled to Ethiopia to launch the program for classes, which will start in 2009. This paper depicts the program design and program development and an outline of the...

The editors views and comments on the top information systems journals are discussed with. The editor, says that the Type I problems occur when there is a difference in opinion between the review team and the IS community about the worth of a published paper. The journal may lose reputational capital in publishing weak papers, but the system on the...

When managers outsource all or part of IT, the motivation is to create business value for the firm. One means of creating business value is by achieving dramatic cost savings through outsourcing; another is through decisions that lead to strategic control of IT resources. In the former, IT outsourcing returns profits to the firm by taking advantage...

The topic of trust in information technology (IT) artifacts has piqued interest among researchers, but studies of this form of trust are not definitive regarding which factors contribute to it the most. Our study empirically tests a model of trust in IT artifacts that increases our understanding in two ways. First, it sets forth two previously unex...

Editor-in-Chief at MIS Quarterly (MISQ), a renowned institutions in the field of information systems, has expressed his views about the information services provided by MISQ on its completion of 4th decade of journal publication. The editor reveled that MISQ has ranked first in impact factor among all the business and information science. The const...

Several IS studies have shown that well-designed websites positively influence users, capturing visitor attention and encouraging return behaviors. However, little attention has been paid to non commercial and cultural websites such as museum websites. This study draws on human-computer interaction literature and sociology of culture to determine t...