- Email: [email protected]
Information technologies and systems
Decision Support Systems 13 (1995) 219-221 North-Holland
219
A Special Issue of Decision Support Systems
Information technologies and systems Robert W. Blanning, Sudha Ram and Richard Y. Wang
Keywords: Information
technology; Information systems; Computer science; Analysis and design; Logicbased systems; Data m a n a g e m e n t .
In his widely-quoted p a p e r presented at the First International Conference on Information Systems, Peter Keen pointed out that information systems, as a field of study, lacked a coherent view of its reference disciplines [2]. The problem was not that there were no reference disciplines, but that there were many of them and it was not clear how they related to each other. Keen expressed the frustration experienced by many in the field when he wrote: " T h e reference discipline is computer science, or experimental social psy-
" Robert W. Blanning is Professor of M a n a g e m e n t at the Owen Graduate School of M a n a g e m e n t of Vanderbilt University. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University, an M. S. in Operations Research from the Case Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from the W h a r t o n School of the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in operations research and m a n a g e m e n t information systems. He was a m e m b e r of the faculties of the W h a r t o n School and of the Schools of Business at New York University, a nuclear engineer at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory of the General Electric Company, and a research analyst in the Corporate Operations Research D e p a r t m e n t of the Mobil Oil Corporation. His research and teaching interests are in decision support systems, information economics, and in the application of artificial intelligence to organizational modeling. He has published in such journals as Management Science, Com-
munications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Natal Research Logistics Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Omega, Policy Analysis and Information Systems, International Journal on Policy and Information, Long Range Planning, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He has presented papers at the annual meetings of such conferences as the International Conference on Information Systems, the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, and the International Conference on Decision Support Systems. He is an Area Editor of Decision Support Systems, an Associate Editor of Information and Desision Technologies, and a m e m b e r of the Editorial Board of Journal of Managemant Information Systems. He is editor of the book Foundations of Expert Systems for Management, which was published by Verlag Rheinland in 1990 and co-editor, with David R. King, of Current Research in Decision Support Technology, which was published by I E E E C o m p u t e r Society Press in 1992.
i~
.
S u d h a R a m is Associate Professor of M a n a g e m e n t Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She received a B. Sc. degree in m a t h e m a t ics, physics and chemistry from the University of Madras in 1979, P G D M from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1981 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1985. Dr. R a m has published articles in such journals as: Communications of the ACM,
~41
IEEE Expert, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Science, IEEE Expert, and Management Science. She has also presented her research at several conferences such as
International Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on Data Engineering and other IEEE and A C M conferences. She was the guest-editor for the December 1991 issue of IEEE Computer " H e t e r o g e n e o u s Distributed Database Systems". Dr. R a m has served on the program committees of the Workshop on Interoperability among Databases (IMS-91), IMS-93, International Conference on Data Engineering 1993, International Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on Data and Knowledge Systems in Manufacturing and Engineering 1992, etc. She was a chairperson for the 1991 Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS-91) and is program chair for the 1994 International Conference on Data and Knowledge Systems in Manufacturing and Engineering. Her research deals with modeling and analysis of database and knowledge-based systems for manufacturing, scientific and business applications. Her research on distributed databases has been funded by IBM, NCR, US A R M Y , and NIST. Specifically, the research deals with Semantic Modeling, Data Allocation, Schema and View Integration, and Tools for Database Design. Dr. R a m is the Director of the Graduate Program in MIS at the University of Arizona. She serves as a m e m b e r of the editorial board of the Journal of Database Management, and is an editor for the IEEE Computer Society Press. She is a m e m b e r of ACM, IEEE C o m p u t e r Society and TIMS.
0167-9236/95/$09.50 ©1995 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 01 6 7 - 9 2 3 6 ( 9 3 ) E 0 0 4 3 - D
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R.W. Blanning et al. / Decision Support Systems 13 (1995) 219-221
chology, or alas, the International Case Clearing House. There is no clear theoretical base and no match between theory and method ...There is virtually no cumulative tradition..." [2]. After more than a decade, we can see that this condition persists, although many researchers and practitioners are apparently less frustrated by it and are accepting it as inevitable. Moreover, the variety of established reference disciplines have increased. Behavioral research is focussing on individual, team (via GDSS), and organizational (via ODSS) research [3]. The economics of information systems has progressed beyond its original concerns with pricing and hardware economies of scale to include such topics as agency relationships, interoganizational information systems, and information technology outsourcing [1]. In addition, the lack of suitable publication outlets noted by Keen (1980) is no longer a concern. The journals focussing on information systems have grown beyond MIS Quarterly and Information and Management to include Decision Support Systems, In-
formation Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Journal of Organizational Computing. As we encounter a growth in journals and reference disciplines, as well as growth in the field of information systems more generally, it is important to remember that the basic reference discipline in information systems is computer science. Without the enormous increase in the pro-
Richard Y. Wang is Assistant Professor of Information Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management, where he received a Ph.D. degree with a concentration in Information Technologies. Dr. Wang has published extensively in the fields of data quality management, database management systems, and connectivity among information systems. He is also the editor of the book "Information Technologies: Trends and Perspectives" (Prentice Hall, 1993). In addition, he teaches a number of IT-related courses at the graduate level, including one that provides a broad coverage of trends and perspectives in the computer industry. A principal investigator of several information technology related research projects, he has initiated a research program in Total Data Quality Management (TDQM). TDQM research investigates issues involved in data quality from both the technical and managerial perspectives. Dr. Wang is very active in professional services. He serves as a reviewer for many research journals, conferences and grant proposals. Most recently, he organized the annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS) which brings IT researchers and practitioners together to exchange ideas and results.
ductivity of information technology that has taken place during the past fifty years, the issues being investigated by researchers in the other references disciplines would not exist. Furthermore, if information technology does not continue to offer substantial increases in productivity and in the variety of new applications, research opportunities in the other reference disciplines will quickly vanish. Therefore, it is important, and also inevitable, that the relationship between computer science and information systems continue as a vital field of study. It is also essential that we understand how this relationship changes as the cost of computation and data communication rapidly decrease while their speed and reliability rapidly increase. This changing relationship between computer science and information systems, denoted "Information Technologies and Systems" (ITS) by Stu Madnick, was the subject of the first Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems held at MIT [4]. Twenty refereed papers, each about half of the length of a journal article, were presented. After the conference, the authors were given the opportunity to enhance their papers and submit them to this special issue. Thirteen papers were submitted, and they were rigorously refereed. The accepted papers are published here. The papers in this special issue span three topics. The first is the analysis and design of information systems. In "Box-Structured Requirements Determination Methods," Alan Hevner and Harlan Mills present a rigorous approach to requirements determination that allows the systems analyst to exert substantial control over requirements information. In "A Software Complexity Model of Object-Oriented Systems," David Tegarden, Steven Sheetz and David Monarchi develop measures of software complexity at different levels of an object-oriented system. The second topic is the design of decision support systems. In "Formal Semantics of the Unified Modeling Language Lv", Sa Neung Hong and Michael Mannino describe a logic-programming language for intergrating a variety of management science models in a variety of problem domains. In "A Knowledge-Based System for Reverse Engineering of Relational Databases," Roger Chiang develops an heuristic procedure for constructing an extended Entity-Relationship
R. W. Blanning et aL / Decision Support Systems 13 (1995) 219-221
model of a relational database from the schema and instances of the database. The third topic is extensions of database management systems. In "Rule-Based Joins in Heterogeneous Databases," Abhirup Chatterjee and Arie Segev define an entity join and apply a probabilistic framework that takes into account the possibility of wrong matches in a heterogenous environment. In "Approximate Dependencies in Database Systems," Aditya Saharia and Terence Barron extend the notions of fuzzy dependencies and probabilistic dependencies to cluster dependencies for approximate functional relationships. In "Toward Quality Data: An Attribute-Based Approach," Richard Wang, M.P. Reddy and Henry Kon present a method for tagging data at the cell level of a relational database with quality indicators and develop a quality indicator algebra for processing the indicators and helping a user to assess the believability of retrieved data. These are not the only topics that make up the emerging field of ITS. Other possibilities, which may be represented in future conference proceedings, special issues, or other publications, include machine learning, voice and character recognition, image processing, multi-media systems, graphical user interfaces, massively parallel processing, telecommunications, client/server computing, interoperability among heterogeneous systems, and distributed systems (and especially distributed interactive systems). As the field of
22l
ITS progresses, we may be able to add even more topics, such as virtual reality, executive workstations, persornal digital assistants, and high-definition television. We are now living in the "good old days" of ITS. Although the observation that computer science forms the foundation of information systems is not new, it has been obscured by the emergence of other reference disciplines. However, it is now entering a renaissance occasioned largely by the realization that ITS makes these other disciplines possible, and we believe that this realization will give further stimulus to the development of ITS as an interesting and fruitful area of research. This is brought out forcefully in the postcript to this special issue: "Integration Technology: The Reinvention of the Linkage Between Information Systems and Computer Science," by Stuart E. Madnick.
References [1] J.Y. Bakos, Special Issue on Information Systems and Economics, Decision Support Systems 8 (5) (1992). [2] P.G.W. Keen, MIS Research: Reference Disciplines and a Cumulative Tradition, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems (December 1980). [3] Information Systems and Decision Processes, E.A. Stohr and B.R. Konsynski eds. (IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 1992). [4] R. Wang and S. Ram, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Information Technologies & Systems (December 1991).
219
A Special Issue of Decision Support Systems
Information technologies and systems Robert W. Blanning, Sudha Ram and Richard Y. Wang
Keywords: Information
technology; Information systems; Computer science; Analysis and design; Logicbased systems; Data m a n a g e m e n t .
In his widely-quoted p a p e r presented at the First International Conference on Information Systems, Peter Keen pointed out that information systems, as a field of study, lacked a coherent view of its reference disciplines [2]. The problem was not that there were no reference disciplines, but that there were many of them and it was not clear how they related to each other. Keen expressed the frustration experienced by many in the field when he wrote: " T h e reference discipline is computer science, or experimental social psy-
" Robert W. Blanning is Professor of M a n a g e m e n t at the Owen Graduate School of M a n a g e m e n t of Vanderbilt University. He holds a B.S. in Physics from the Pennsylvania State University, an M. S. in Operations Research from the Case Institute of Technology, and a Ph.D. from the W h a r t o n School of the University of Pennsylvania, specializing in operations research and m a n a g e m e n t information systems. He was a m e m b e r of the faculties of the W h a r t o n School and of the Schools of Business at New York University, a nuclear engineer at the Knolls Atomic Power Laboratory of the General Electric Company, and a research analyst in the Corporate Operations Research D e p a r t m e n t of the Mobil Oil Corporation. His research and teaching interests are in decision support systems, information economics, and in the application of artificial intelligence to organizational modeling. He has published in such journals as Management Science, Com-
munications of the ACM, Decision Support Systems, Natal Research Logistics Quarterly, Decision Sciences, Omega, Policy Analysis and Information Systems, International Journal on Policy and Information, Long Range Planning, and Technological Forecasting and Social Change. He has presented papers at the annual meetings of such conferences as the International Conference on Information Systems, the Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems, the Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences, and the International Conference on Decision Support Systems. He is an Area Editor of Decision Support Systems, an Associate Editor of Information and Desision Technologies, and a m e m b e r of the Editorial Board of Journal of Managemant Information Systems. He is editor of the book Foundations of Expert Systems for Management, which was published by Verlag Rheinland in 1990 and co-editor, with David R. King, of Current Research in Decision Support Technology, which was published by I E E E C o m p u t e r Society Press in 1992.
i~
.
S u d h a R a m is Associate Professor of M a n a g e m e n t Information Systems at the University of Arizona. She received a B. Sc. degree in m a t h e m a t ics, physics and chemistry from the University of Madras in 1979, P G D M from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta in 1981 and a Ph.D. from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, in 1985. Dr. R a m has published articles in such journals as: Communications of the ACM,
~41
IEEE Expert, IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering, Information Systems, Information Science, IEEE Expert, and Management Science. She has also presented her research at several conferences such as
International Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on Data Engineering and other IEEE and A C M conferences. She was the guest-editor for the December 1991 issue of IEEE Computer " H e t e r o g e n e o u s Distributed Database Systems". Dr. R a m has served on the program committees of the Workshop on Interoperability among Databases (IMS-91), IMS-93, International Conference on Data Engineering 1993, International Conference on Information Systems, International Conference on Data and Knowledge Systems in Manufacturing and Engineering 1992, etc. She was a chairperson for the 1991 Workshop on Information Technology and Systems (WITS-91) and is program chair for the 1994 International Conference on Data and Knowledge Systems in Manufacturing and Engineering. Her research deals with modeling and analysis of database and knowledge-based systems for manufacturing, scientific and business applications. Her research on distributed databases has been funded by IBM, NCR, US A R M Y , and NIST. Specifically, the research deals with Semantic Modeling, Data Allocation, Schema and View Integration, and Tools for Database Design. Dr. R a m is the Director of the Graduate Program in MIS at the University of Arizona. She serves as a m e m b e r of the editorial board of the Journal of Database Management, and is an editor for the IEEE Computer Society Press. She is a m e m b e r of ACM, IEEE C o m p u t e r Society and TIMS.
0167-9236/95/$09.50 ©1995 - Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved SSDI 01 6 7 - 9 2 3 6 ( 9 3 ) E 0 0 4 3 - D
220
R.W. Blanning et al. / Decision Support Systems 13 (1995) 219-221
chology, or alas, the International Case Clearing House. There is no clear theoretical base and no match between theory and method ...There is virtually no cumulative tradition..." [2]. After more than a decade, we can see that this condition persists, although many researchers and practitioners are apparently less frustrated by it and are accepting it as inevitable. Moreover, the variety of established reference disciplines have increased. Behavioral research is focussing on individual, team (via GDSS), and organizational (via ODSS) research [3]. The economics of information systems has progressed beyond its original concerns with pricing and hardware economies of scale to include such topics as agency relationships, interoganizational information systems, and information technology outsourcing [1]. In addition, the lack of suitable publication outlets noted by Keen (1980) is no longer a concern. The journals focussing on information systems have grown beyond MIS Quarterly and Information and Management to include Decision Support Systems, In-
formation Systems Research, Journal of Management Information Systems, and Journal of Organizational Computing. As we encounter a growth in journals and reference disciplines, as well as growth in the field of information systems more generally, it is important to remember that the basic reference discipline in information systems is computer science. Without the enormous increase in the pro-
Richard Y. Wang is Assistant Professor of Information Technologies, MIT Sloan School of Management, where he received a Ph.D. degree with a concentration in Information Technologies. Dr. Wang has published extensively in the fields of data quality management, database management systems, and connectivity among information systems. He is also the editor of the book "Information Technologies: Trends and Perspectives" (Prentice Hall, 1993). In addition, he teaches a number of IT-related courses at the graduate level, including one that provides a broad coverage of trends and perspectives in the computer industry. A principal investigator of several information technology related research projects, he has initiated a research program in Total Data Quality Management (TDQM). TDQM research investigates issues involved in data quality from both the technical and managerial perspectives. Dr. Wang is very active in professional services. He serves as a reviewer for many research journals, conferences and grant proposals. Most recently, he organized the annual Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems (WITS) which brings IT researchers and practitioners together to exchange ideas and results.
ductivity of information technology that has taken place during the past fifty years, the issues being investigated by researchers in the other references disciplines would not exist. Furthermore, if information technology does not continue to offer substantial increases in productivity and in the variety of new applications, research opportunities in the other reference disciplines will quickly vanish. Therefore, it is important, and also inevitable, that the relationship between computer science and information systems continue as a vital field of study. It is also essential that we understand how this relationship changes as the cost of computation and data communication rapidly decrease while their speed and reliability rapidly increase. This changing relationship between computer science and information systems, denoted "Information Technologies and Systems" (ITS) by Stu Madnick, was the subject of the first Workshop on Information Technologies and Systems held at MIT [4]. Twenty refereed papers, each about half of the length of a journal article, were presented. After the conference, the authors were given the opportunity to enhance their papers and submit them to this special issue. Thirteen papers were submitted, and they were rigorously refereed. The accepted papers are published here. The papers in this special issue span three topics. The first is the analysis and design of information systems. In "Box-Structured Requirements Determination Methods," Alan Hevner and Harlan Mills present a rigorous approach to requirements determination that allows the systems analyst to exert substantial control over requirements information. In "A Software Complexity Model of Object-Oriented Systems," David Tegarden, Steven Sheetz and David Monarchi develop measures of software complexity at different levels of an object-oriented system. The second topic is the design of decision support systems. In "Formal Semantics of the Unified Modeling Language Lv", Sa Neung Hong and Michael Mannino describe a logic-programming language for intergrating a variety of management science models in a variety of problem domains. In "A Knowledge-Based System for Reverse Engineering of Relational Databases," Roger Chiang develops an heuristic procedure for constructing an extended Entity-Relationship
R. W. Blanning et aL / Decision Support Systems 13 (1995) 219-221
model of a relational database from the schema and instances of the database. The third topic is extensions of database management systems. In "Rule-Based Joins in Heterogeneous Databases," Abhirup Chatterjee and Arie Segev define an entity join and apply a probabilistic framework that takes into account the possibility of wrong matches in a heterogenous environment. In "Approximate Dependencies in Database Systems," Aditya Saharia and Terence Barron extend the notions of fuzzy dependencies and probabilistic dependencies to cluster dependencies for approximate functional relationships. In "Toward Quality Data: An Attribute-Based Approach," Richard Wang, M.P. Reddy and Henry Kon present a method for tagging data at the cell level of a relational database with quality indicators and develop a quality indicator algebra for processing the indicators and helping a user to assess the believability of retrieved data. These are not the only topics that make up the emerging field of ITS. Other possibilities, which may be represented in future conference proceedings, special issues, or other publications, include machine learning, voice and character recognition, image processing, multi-media systems, graphical user interfaces, massively parallel processing, telecommunications, client/server computing, interoperability among heterogeneous systems, and distributed systems (and especially distributed interactive systems). As the field of
22l
ITS progresses, we may be able to add even more topics, such as virtual reality, executive workstations, persornal digital assistants, and high-definition television. We are now living in the "good old days" of ITS. Although the observation that computer science forms the foundation of information systems is not new, it has been obscured by the emergence of other reference disciplines. However, it is now entering a renaissance occasioned largely by the realization that ITS makes these other disciplines possible, and we believe that this realization will give further stimulus to the development of ITS as an interesting and fruitful area of research. This is brought out forcefully in the postcript to this special issue: "Integration Technology: The Reinvention of the Linkage Between Information Systems and Computer Science," by Stuart E. Madnick.
References [1] J.Y. Bakos, Special Issue on Information Systems and Economics, Decision Support Systems 8 (5) (1992). [2] P.G.W. Keen, MIS Research: Reference Disciplines and a Cumulative Tradition, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Information Systems (December 1980). [3] Information Systems and Decision Processes, E.A. Stohr and B.R. Konsynski eds. (IEEE Computer Society Press, Los Alamitos, 1992). [4] R. Wang and S. Ram, Proceedings of the First Workshop on Information Technologies & Systems (December 1991).