Mary J. Culnan

• Ph.D.
• Professor Emeritus at Bentley University

In October 2019, the information systems community was shocked and saddened to learn that H. Jeff Smith had passed away after battling lymphoma. While primarily known for his pioneering work on privacy, Jeff made a number of significant contributions to the field of information systems. In this invited editorial, we examine the impact of Jeff’s sch...

Bentley 2011 MBA with the comparative analysis of the security regulations and the helpful comments of Mark MacCarthy and the PLSC attendees. Alan Friedman coined “shock and awe” as one way to describe enforcement actions.

Social media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook enable the creation of virtual customer environments (VCEs) where online communities of interest form around specific firms, brands, or products. While these platforms can be used as another means to deliver familiar e-commerce applications, when firms fail to fully engage their customers, they al...

Government agencies often face trade-offs in developing initiatives that address a public good given competing concerns of various constituent groups. Efforts to construct data warehouses that enable data mining of citizens’ personal information obtained from other organizations (including sister agencies) create a complex challenge, since privacy...

Concerns about information security and privacy continue to make headlines in the media and pose serious challenges to business. While there are many good practices that an organization can adopt to manage information security and privacy, there are also underlying areas of contention about the protection of personal information in a digital enviro...

Protecting the privacy of personal information continues to pose significant challenges for organizations. Because consumers are vulnerable in their dealings with businesses due to a lack of information about and an inability to control the subsequent use of their personal information, we argue that organizations have a moral responsibility to thes...

Personal information is a valuable resource in the information age and every college and university needs to guard its information assets. Universities collect and maintain online stores of sensitive personal information, putting students at risk for security breaches. Ohio University (OU) unanimously voted to spend up to $ 4 million on enhanced in...

Computers used at home are a growing security threat to corporate information systems because some employees have failed to implement appropriate security protections. Many employees now work-from home for at least part of the time, or store corporate data on their home computers or other mobile devices, potentially placing corporate assets at risk...

In the public sector, tradeoffs between individual citizen concerns and the public good can be complex, since individual goals can conflict with the government’s goals for assuring equity and social welfare. This paper reports on a case study of the Integrated Non-Filer Compliance (INC) system used by the California Franchise Tax Board (CFTB). Data...

This field study investigated the use of nine information sources (personal subscriptions to periodicals, company library, data bases, superiors, subordinates, peers, internal documents, consultants, and other outsiders) for environmental scanning by 362 professionals employed in the corporate headquarters of two large commercial organizations. The...

In 2005, 52% of taxpayers filed their federal returns electronically. This is far short of the IRS goal of having 80% of returns filed electronically by 2007. Using the e-commerce technology adoption literature, this exploratory study investigates factors that differentiate e-filers from non-e-filers. People who e- file perceived e-filing to be les...

This study evaluates the readability of a set of 312 online privacy notices across two periods and finds that the readability has declined and notices have grown in length over the period. The authors assess these findings against the public policy backdrop and make recommendations for improving current online privacy notices based on the study res...

Providing consumers an opportunity to remove their names from mailing lists is one method for addressing rising consumer concerns about privacy. Name removal is also central to the success of the industry's self-regulatory programs. However, 52 percent of the public, including 45 percent of those who shop by mail, are not aware of name removal proc...

Online privacy notices are intended to promote consumer choice and reduce the risks of disclosing personal information online. However, these effects result only if consumers read and use the information contained in the notices. This study used an online survey of 2,468 U.S. adult Internet users to investigate why online consumers read privacy not...

Consumer privacy is at the center of an ongoing debate among business leaders, privacy activists, and government officials. Although corporations face competitive pressures to collect and use personal information about their customers, many consumers find some methods of collection and use of their personal information unfair. We present a justice...

In the United States, Congress has had a long-standing interest in consumer privacy and the extent to which company practices are based on fair information practices. Previously, public policy was largely informed by anecdotal evidence about the effectiveness of industry self-regulatory programs. However, the Internet has made it possible to unobtr...

The author assesses the extent to which 361 consumer-oriented commercial Web sires post disclosures that describe their information practices and whether these disclosures reflect fair information practices. Although approximately 67% of the sites sampled post a privacy disclosure, only 14% of these disclosures constitute a comprehensive privacy po...

this paper by Bob Bies, Ronnie Goodstein and by our colleagues and students during a spring 1998 seminar. We also recognize the help we received from Stevan D. Mitchell on creating non-regulatory incentives for the private sector.

The paper introduces the concept of the second exchange in customer relationships that is distinct from the first exchange of goods or services. The second exchange is based on the information consumers disclose in the course of a marketing transaction where personal information is exchanged for benefits derived from the use of the information. Pro...

this paper. 2

This research addresses the tensions that arise between the collection and use of personal information that people provide in the course of most consumer transactions, and privacy. In today's electronic world, the competitive strategies of successful firms increasingly depend on vast amounts of customer data. Ironically, the same information practi...

Modern political campaigns have increasingly turned to direct marketing to disseminate their message, “get out the vote,” and raise funds. Because the information used to create these lists is acquired from a variety of external sources, the lists come into conflict with individual privacy. This article explores the nature of modern political campa...

Strategic uses of information technology based on personal information may raise privacy concerns among consumers if these applications do not reflect a common set of values. This study addresses what differentiates consumers who object to certain uses of personal information from those who do not object. Data collected by questionnaire from young...

A prior study by the authors on management information systems (MISs) is updated to include development in the 1980s. It is found that MIS continues to emerge from the foundations of these reference disciplines, i.e., computer science, management science, and organization science. The MIS literature in the core journals approximately doubled from t...

The conventional view of transaction processing, which has focused primarily on highly structured transactions, oversimplifies the information processing environment confronting most organizations. This exploratory field study investigates how U.S. Senate offices answer constituent mail on legislative issues. The study develops a model which views...

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Using citations which appeared in published research from 1972 to 1984 (from the Social Sciences Citation Index), the study identifies the subspecialties that constitute the foundations of current research. It focuses on two fields organizational behavior and organization theory. The matrix of raw cocitation counts was factor-analyzed using a princ...

An analysis is made of three types of transaction-processing systems which support customer feedback in terms of four message system processes, namely: routing, summarizing, delay, and modification. The ability of transaction-processing systems to facilitate intelligent decision-making is seen as a function of the extent to which an organization is...

A short problem on topic description is given by the task force leader, followed by the title, author, and short abstract of the working papers that were prepared in advance. The papers were: contextual influences on design and use of document-based DSS, technology assessment, and object-oriented approach

This study is the second of two studies which assess the intellectual development of MIS. The present study documents the current intellectual structure of MIS research based on an author co-citation analysis. Five invisible colleges, or informal clusters of research activity, were identified (foundations; psychological approaches to MIS design and...

This article examine the progress of MIS as a scholarly field of study since 1980. In this examination, MIS is identified as emerging from a supporting base of three foundational fields: computer science, management science, and organization science. Hypotheses related to this emergence are tested by an analysis of data on 271 MIS articles publishe...

Researchers in all academic disciplines benefit from an understanding of the intellectual development of their field. This understanding is essential for conducting studies which build systematically on prior research. The purpose of this study is to document the intellectual development of the ideas represented by published research in Management...

If special librarians are to be able to capitalize on new opportunities for applications of traditional skills provided by changing context of corporate information services, they must be trained to take a broader view of these skills, understand new technologies, develop basic quantitative skills, and understand unique role of corporate libraries....

Perceived accessibility to information is proposed as a unifying concept for the design and evaluation of a wide variety of information systems and services. This field study measured end-user perceptions of three sources of information (computer-based, libraries, and individuals) for three samples of individuals. The results suggest that 1) access...

Prior research has found a positive correlation between the perceived accessibility of information and information use. The underlying dimensions of information accessibility, however, have not been investigated empirically. The present field study measures end-user perceptions of three online information retrieval systems and one electronic mail s...

Much of what white collar workers do in offices is communication-related. White collar workers make up the majority of the labor force in the United States today and the majority of current labor costs. Because office automation represents more productive structured techniques for handling both written and oral communication, office automation ther...

This field study investigated the task and individual characteristics of 184 professionals who accessed commercial database services to acquire external information directly (as "end users") or through an intermediary ("chauffeur"). Chauffeured access appears to be most appropriate when the individual has a one-time need for new information while d...

The citation practices of academics and practioners who have published papers in the proceedings of a national computer conference are analyzed in order to measure how the two groups differ in their use of published information. The comparison is based upon types of documents cited, age of cited literature and core journals cited. The study found t...

The role of document-based information systems in management has been relatively neglected. However, during the last few years, a certain number of document-based systems for use within a management context have been reported in the literature. A framework for the classification of these systems is developed here, and the results of a literature su...

The traditional manually-controlled circulation records of the Burroughs Corporation Library in Goleta, California, presented problems of inaccuracies, time time-consuming searches, and lack of use statistics. An automated system with the capacity to do file maintenance and statistical record-keeping was implemented on a Burroughts B1700 computer....

In 2005, 52% of taxpayers filed their federal returns electronically. This is far short of the IRS goal of having 80% of returns filed electronically by 2007. Using the e-commerce technology adoption literature, this exploratory study investigates factors that differentiate e-filers from non-e-filers. People who efile perceived e-filing to be less...

Microform. Ann Arbor, Mich. : Xerox University Microfilms, 1980. 1 microfilm reel : 35 mm. Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California at Los Angeles, 1980. Includes vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 170-180).

Twenty-six science and technology and chemistry libraries kept a record of unanswered science and technology reference questions received during a 1-month period. The 47 questions collected are listed and reasons why they were not answered are given. Unanswered questions and types of questions that are difficult or impossible to answer were collect...