Editorial for February 2011 Issue - IEEE Xplore

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT, VOL. 58, NO. 1, FEBRUARY 2011

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Editorial for February 2011 Issue I. SOME JOURNAL STATISTICS ROM time to time, we receive requests for information about the journal. According to the latest data provided by Manuscript Central, the average time to first decision during the last 12 months through November 9, 2010, was 70 days, and the acceptance rate was 18.9%. The number of new submissions from January 1 through November 9, 2010, was 234. Based on the Journal Citation Reports published by Thomson Reuters in 2010, the journal’s impact factor has risen to 1.248, and its five-year impact factor has risen to 1.964.

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II. TECHNOLOGY MANAGEMENT COUNCIL CONFERENCES Technology Management Council is cosponsoring four conferences in 2011: 1) The International Conference on Management of Innovation and Technology (ICMIT 2011) in Beijing, China, June 11–13; 2) The 3rd International Conference on Advanced Management Science (ICAMS 2011) in Chengdu, China, July 9–11; 3) The International Conference on Digital Information Management (ICDIM 2011) in Melbourne, Australia, September 14–16; and 4) The IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management (IEEM) in Singapore, December 6–9. Conference information appears elsewhere in this issue. 2011 IEEE International Technology Management Conference (ITMC 2011) The flagship conference of IEEE Technology Management Council, the 2011 IEEE International Technology Management Conference (ITMC 2011), will be held in San Jose, USA, on June 27–30, 2011. The Call for Papers appears elsewhere in this issue. III. FORTHCOMING SPECIAL ISSUES

IV. SPECIAL ISSUE PROPOSALS ARE ALWAYS WELCOME Proposals for special issues on topics of current interest in engineering, technology, and innovation management are always welcome. Please send a brief description of the concept for the issue to R. Sabherwal ([email protected]). I will circulate it to department editors, and if the initial response is favorable, I will request a specific plan and more detailed information to be used in the final decision about proceeding with the special issue. V. ONLINE SUBMISSION AND REVIEW SYSTEM

“The Impacts of Global Information Systems Sourcing on Engineering, Technology, and Innovation Management” (Guest Editors: Leslie Willcocks, London School of Economics; Joseph Rottman, University of Missouri—St. Louis; Julia Kotlarsky, Warwick Business School; Ilan Oshri, Rotterdam School of Management): The special issue will focus on the topic of Global Information Systems sourcing with a specific interest in social, managerial, and knowledge-related aspects of IS sourcing, and how these aspects affect engineering, technology, and innovation management. Managing a global team of software engineers is akin to managing a global team of engineers of other kinds. Global delivery of IS services encompasses both the relocation of effort as well as the utilization of talent located across the globe. This special issue aims to bring together viewpoints from various disciplines, including international business, strategy, information systems, and organizational behavior. Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TEM.2010.2092971

Call for Papers IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT is sponsoring a special issue on sustainable technology and engineering management research and practice (Guest Editors: J. Sarkis, Clark University; T. De Bruijn, Saxion University of Applied Sciences; Q. Zhu, Dalian University of Technology). Over the past three decades, the topic of sustainability has generated considerable attention in the society. Environmental and social concerns intertwined with economic development make sustainability a complex issue for nations, industries, and communities. These dimensions of sustainability go beyond the past or current study of organizations, but require consideration of intergenerational and interorganizational issues. According to The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, organizations need to be able to meet the requirements of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Thus, a balance of the “triple bottom line” of social, environmental and economic issues along with concerns for future generations are important characteristics of sustainability.

The journal office currently experiences many returned e-mails via the journal’s online system. Since e-mails are used to communicate with corresponding authors, coauthors, and reviewers during the review process, it is very important for users to keep updating their accounts in the system. Please login to http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/tem-ieee to update your contact information when you change your e-mail addresses. New users are also welcome to create their own accounts in the system. Also, please be sure that the spam filters on your own servers are set to receive mail from Manuscript Central. The journal’s online server should be whitelisted to mark it as a valid e-mail sender: 170.107.181.135. VI. ABOUT THIS ISSUE This issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON ENGINEERING MANAGEMENT includes 12 research articles and 1 research note.

0018-9391/$26.00 © 2010 IEEE

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The managerial relevance of each paper is summarized in the following. Internet has brought unprecedented opportunities for entrepreneurship. However, the high failure rates of digital intermediaries indicate the frustrations of managers. “Bridging and Bonding in Exchange Networks: A Structural Embeddedness Perspective of B2B Digital Intermediation” (by Tang, Rai, and Wareham) takes a unique network perspective to explore factors that may influence the success of business-to-business (B2B) digital intermediaries. By comparing and contrasting two in-depth cases of Omnexus and e-gatematrix, the authors reveal that the existing network structures, specifically the network’s tie architecture and exchange structure, present different opportunities and serve as the push force for B2B digital intermediaries. To capture these opportunities and increase their chance of success, the intermediaries can develop distinct capabilities for bridging and bonding. The study also brings it to the attention of the managers that bridging benefits may be easier to obtain but harder to defend and scale, while bonding benefits are harder to obtain but easier to defend and scale. The developed theoretical propositions based on the findings not only provide a starting point for further empirical investigations, but also serve as a practical framework for managers to evaluate digital intermediation opportunities and manage challenges. For the past 20 years, user acceptance research has looked at single applications without comparing them with each other. “Understanding Competing Web Application Platforms: An Extended Theory of Planned Behavior and its Relative Model” (by Lin, Chan, and Wei) extends prior research, which indicated that examining single applications without considering their competing alternatives may yield incomplete conclusions, By contrast, this paper proposes an extended theory of planned behavior, drawn from social psychology and marketing theories, and applies it to predict choice intention and subsequently the choice of two products in a single analysis based on relative value. The results support the value of applying the model to analyze and understand competing products. The time-cost trade-off problem is one of the most important issues in the scheduling of industrial projects. “Time-Cost Trade-off Analysis in Project Management: An Ant System Approach” (by Mokhtari, Kazemzadeh, and Salmasnia) provides a new multimode approach for the stochastic time-cost trade-off problem in program evaluation and review technique (PERT) networks to maximize the project completion probability subject to a limited budget. To deal with the problem considered, an effective ant colony system approach is developed and an overall measure is devised to set its parameters. “The Optimal Division of Business Processes Into Subtasks With Specialization and Coordination” (by Giachetti and Jiang) examines that whether a process should be broken into subtasks, and if yes, how many? The paper presents a model that includes productivity gains from specialization of labor, which suggest many small, simple tasks are preferable. However, the greater the number of tasks a process is divided into, the greater the demand for coordination of these tasks. The managerial decision involves trading off the benefits from increased specialization with the demands for greater coordination. The paper presents

a queuing network model to examine this question. It finds that the optimal number of subtasks initially decreases dramatically when coordination load is increased, but then levels offs. It finds that division, when all the subtasks have equal durations, is superior to unequal division of labor. The model presented in this paper highlights the need of process designers to consider the competing concerns of coordination and specialization, and provides the analytical foundation to find optimal divisions of labor. “The Role of Trust in Post-Adoption IT Exploration: An Empirical Examination of Knowledge Management Systems” (by Thatcher, McKnight, Baker, Arsal, and Roberts) illustrates how trust in the information technology (IT) artifact relates to postadoption exploration of knowledge management systems, a process necessary for organizations to reap performance benefits from information systems. When firms build systems that users’ trust, they are more likely to innovate and identify means to increase IT-enabled productivity and efficiency. In order to foster trusting beliefs such as predictability, functionality, and helpfulness, this paper directs attention to the relationship between the technology itself and the resources supplied by the organization. This paper suggests that trust in IT support is an important influence on trust in IT. By examining how trust in IT and trust in IT support relate to beliefs about the technology as well as intention to explore, this paper identifies means through which managers can increase innovation with, and infusion of, IT in their organization. “A Double-Edged Sword: The Effects of Challenge and Hindrance Time Pressure on New Product Development Teams” (by Chong, van Eerde, Chai, and Rutte) demonstrates the usefulness of considering the nature of time pressure when considering its effects on new product development (NPD) teams. In general, practitioners have predicted the effects of time pressure on performance by associating the relationship to be an inverted-U model. However, the association alone may be insufficient to explain why some teams can still perform exceedingly well under tremendous time pressure. This paper introduces time pressure as a 2-D construct; challenge and hindrance time pressure, and provides theoretical and practical insights into how such understanding can refine the way practitioners facilitate performance despite rising time pressure at the workplace. “Impact of a Stretch Strategy on Knowledge Creation in Quality Improvement Projects” (by Choo) examines Six Sigma projects and finds that the direct and synergistic effects of the use of stretch goals on knowledge creation are mediated by a sense of challenge in teams. The findings suggest managers and engineers need to ensure that Six Sigma teams are sufficiently and appropriately challenged by the focal problems in their respective projects. Otherwise, the common use of stretch goals to encourage innovation can be ineffective and futile. “A Multiobjective Optimization Approach for Product Line Design” (by Kwong, Luo, and Tang) argues that the NPD teams of companies commonly consider various objectives simultaneously for a product line design. The objectives may have intrinsic conflicts with each other. Therefore, an NPD team needs to carry out a tradeoff while considering the objectives. Based on team judgment, the tradeoff cannot be easily conducted and


sometimes even impossible. In this paper, a new approach to product line design is proposed, by which the nondominated solutions of the optimization problem can be generated and displayed on a graph. An NPD team can compare the nondominated solutions, perform a tradeoff among the objectives, and interactively select the best solution for their companies. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is quite dependent on the accuracy of the estimation of some parameter values such as product utilities, cost indexes, and market sizes. The parameters can be estimated based on the human experts or some other techniques such as statistical regression. If the products to be developed are very new to a company, the company may not be able to estimate those parameters easily and accurately that would affect the quality of the solutions to be obtained based on the proposed approach. “Transition to IS Project De-Escalation: An Exploration Into Management Executives’ Influence Behaviors” (by Pan and Pan) provides much-needed empirical insights into the formation and execution of project stakeholder influence strategy in an information systems project deescalation context. In particular, the development of a set of effective deescalation influence tactics could help engineering managers extricate themselves from future project escalation predicaments. “The Effect of Information Technology Investments in Healthcare: A Longitudinal Study of its Lag, Duration and Economic Value” (by Das, Yaylacicegi, and Menon) takes a resource-based view of IT investments. It disaggregates investments in IT resources in healthcare organizations into four categories—patient management IT, transaction support IT, communications IT, and administrative IT. Subsequently, this paper examines both the lag and durability of the effect of these investments on healthcare operating costs, medical labor productivity, and administrative labor productivity. The empirical findings provide insights to hospital administrators on what return expectations could be set for different types of healthcare IT investments. “Competition, Dedicated Assets, and Technological Obsolescence in Multistage Infrastructure Investments: A Sequential Compound Option Valuation” (by Huang and Pi) develops a real-option approach for the valuation of telecommunication, rail systems, and other infrastructure network investments that involve dedicated assets and technological obsolescence under diverse competition policy. They show how dedicated assets, technological obsolescence, and competition policy will affect

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the value of flexibility in an incremental or multistage infrastructure investment strategy. Huang and Pi’s approach can apply to the valuation of complex infrastructure projects, as well as the analysis of infrastructure concession and regulatory design. Engineering managers have always struggled in the matter of exiting their firms when a new technology appears in the market and newcomers based on the technology increase market competition. During their struggle, they often vacillate over whether or not their firms remain on their own path. “Path Dependence and the Incumbent’s Survival in Cross Industries under Radical Circumstances: Lessons from the Samsung Case” (by Park) is valuable to engineering managers as it indicates that the firm’s tendency to depend on its own path might work positively for its survival and performance. The paper also suggests three key factors—dynamic technological capability, top management capability, and internal selection process—for the survival of an incumbent facing radical changes, and explains in great detail how Samsung successfully evolved in a new domain through the use of the three factors. These three key factors can be useful references to define what path of an incumbent, by itself, has evolutionary and competent characteristics. The research note titled “A Linguistic Screening Evaluation Model in New Product Development” (by Huynh and Nakamori) points out that the subjective definition of membership functions of fuzzy sets in the fuzzy-logic-based screening model can sensitively influence the final solution recommended to managers for their screening decision in NPD projects. The authors propose a new linguistic screening evaluation model for NPD with the computation solely based on the order-based semantics of linguistic terms and the two-tuple linguistic representation. The proposed model overcomes the limitations of the fuzzy-logicbased screening model, yet retains the flexibility for managers in making their decisions. Practically, it provides an additional methodology of screening evaluation, which hopefully helps managers to have a proper utilization of evaluation models when dealing with linguistic information in NPD.

RAJIV SABHERWAL, Editor-in-Chief College of Business Administration University of Missouri-St. Louis MO 63121, USA