Issues in Information Systems Research & Research Methods

IL IMAssistant ProfessorInformation Systems DepartmentNew Jersey Institute of TechnologyE-mail: il.im@njit.edu

Agenda

Trends in information technology

Trends in Information Systems research

What I have learned in doctoral program– What is theory?

– What is good research?

– Why literature review is important

– Journals and conferences

Trends in Information Technology (3 P’s)

Price down

Pervasive

– Every where, any time, in any devices

Personalized

– Customized to each user’s needs and tastes

Price Down

Moor’s law

– Capacity of computers (same price) doubles in every 18 months

– Processor Memory Bandwidth Sensor

– Mega Giga Tera ?

New applications

– Convergence (PDA + PC + Cell phone + GPS + Camera + … )

– More intelligent system

Pervasive IT

Pervasive and ubiquitous computing devices

More devices will have integrated micro computer – Continuous sensing and data collection– Examples: E-Z Pass, PDA + phone, Smart Card, Active badge

More devices will be connected – Bluetooth – networking standard for nearby devices ( < 10m)– 802.11 – wireless network card standard– IPv4 IPv6

Recent technology– location aware devices (GPS), MEMS

Smaller and Smaller Devices

MicroElectroMechanical System (MEMS)

Location-Aware Wireless Internet

Personalized Information Systems

Customizing services for personal tastes

Internet technologies

– User configured system – Yahoo!, MSN

– Opportunistic links – travelocity.com, expedia.com

– Recommendations – amazon.com

Recent technology – location-aware personalization

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Research Issues

Identifying customer tastes– How to identify and use customer taste information

Developing new services and application in the pervasive computing environments– What types of services and applications are possible– What application is good for what

How do people use new information technologies (IT) – Acceptance and adoption of IT– Impact of IT on people

Research Issues in Marketing

From Segmentation to personalization– Personalized marketing

– New type of marketing (real-time marketing)

Customer information overflow– Various sources of customer data

– How to extract useful information

Theory in Research

Theory – Tested model about the relationships between variables

Why is it important?– You don’t have to invent the wheel again

– A good thinking exercise

Good theory– Parsimonious

– Generalizable

What is Good Research

Rigorous (research methodology)– Reliability: repeatability

– Validity: generalizability

Significant (research topic)– Contribution to practice

– Simple

Journals and Conferences

Journal– Communication medium for researchers– Most journals are online

Why is literature review important?– Check if similar study has already been done– Know related research– Know research trends

Conference– Communication channel for state-of-the-art research– Networking with other people

How to Write A Paper (Thesis)?

Find interesting phenomenon

Search for previous studies and related studies– Develop “SPECIFIC” research questions (ask managers)– Find out what has been done

Framework development– Apply theories– Synthesize two or more theories (develop a framework)

Design research– Data collection methods (experiment/survey, sample/subject)– Analysis methods