I am delighted to present the first Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research (JITCAR) issue of 2017. The contents of this issue are: an Editorial Preface by Anil Kumar, Poonam Kumar, Shailednra C. Jain Palvia, and Sanjay Verma; a Research Article co-authored by Mahsa Mehrpoor, Dirk Ahlers, Jon Atle Gulla, Kjetil Kristensen, and Ole Ivar Sivertsen; a second Research Article co-authored by Arup Kumar Das and Sangeeta Shah Bhardwaj; an Expert Opinion report by Mahesh S. Raisinghani; and a Book Review by Saji K. Mathew and Saman Nihal. Summary information of these items is as follows.
In their Editorial Preface titled, “Online education worldwide: Current status and emerging trends,” the authors emphasize the ubiquity of information technology which has impacted almost every aspect of our lives: the way we work, interact with others, process, analyze, and share information. E-education is changing the way we approach teaching and learning. Changes in education delivery models due to recent advances in digital technologies have created a very dynamic education landscape that has generated a lot of interest among researchers, educators, administrators, policy makers, publishers, and businesses. Many institutions are experimenting with innovative models. Fast emerging online education presents many opportunities as well as challenges for all stakeholders.
The first Research Article is titled, “Investigating contextual ontologies and document corpus characteristics for information access in engineering settings.” Knowledge and information resources play a pivotal role in enterprises for solution reuse and learning. Identifying relevant information from a rapidly growing number of unstructured resources is challenging. This article focuses on creating a recommender system meant to provide relevant documents for users in a specific work context (a multidisciplinary engineering project building an energy-efficient vehicle) based on domain-specific ontologies. This article validates the ontology-based content matching approach by evaluating the level of retrievability and coverage of the ontology against the indexed document corpus. The results show that even a simple domain ontology is able to match a majority of documents from a domain-oriented corpus.
The second Research Article is titled, “Framework for alignment of service provider value drivers with client expectations in IT services outsourcing.” Service providers are keen to create value for their client organizations for long-term survival and sustenance. There is a gap between client expectation of value and the vendor’s actual value provided. This is caused by: (a) lack of understanding by the vendor of the client organization’s needs; (b) even after understanding the client organization’s needs, not having matching product/service offerings; (c) even after having the first two conditions met, failing to deliver; and (d) even if delivering properly, the vendor is unable to adjust to the client’s changing needs. This article proposes a framework for three levels of alignment between client and vendor—contractual, knowledge, and business.
The Expert Opinion report documents an interview by Mahesh S. Raisinghani with Lia A. DiBello, president and director of research at Workplace Technologies Research, Inc. (WTRI). DiBello has developed many innovative (non-verbal) methods of assessing skill and business judgment among executives. She is the innovator behind the FutureView Profiler, which has been recognized as a theoretical and methodological breakthrough in knowledge elicitation and executive intelligence. This Profiler was also awarded an Innovative Technology Award by TechAmerica in 2008. Questions posed to DiBello include: (a) How important is information technology (IT) and virtual reality (VR) in your industry, and your organization?; (b) What has been the role of IT/VR in the internationalization of your business?; (c) What have been the most important technologies (such as mobile, Internet-based, imaging, satellite communications) that have facilitated international expansion?; (d) What have been the key technical challenges/problems in the overseas implementation of IT applications?; (e) Have you faced specific issues dealing with trans-border data flows and data privacy?; (f) What are some of the lessons learned in these applications of IT /VR?; and many others.
The Book Review by Saji K. Mathew and Saman Nihal provides a detailed critique of the 2016 book titled Global Sourcing of Services: Strategies, Issues and Challenges edited by Shailendra C. Jain Palvia and Prashant Palvia. The book is published by World Scientific and now publishers’ Series in Business. The book consists of four sections: (a) the first section consisting of three chapters is devoted to explaining the conceptual and research frameworks governing sourcing of services, including imparting an understanding of what sourcing is, how it can be used, under what circumstances can it be used for competitive advantage, and where it can be used; (b) the second section articulates what client and vendor issues are or might be; (c) the third section focuses on how the global sourcing process works, including veracious business models and the global sourcing life cycle; and (d) the fourth and final section identifies inherent risks in global sourcing, including strategies to mitigate the risks and the role of social capital. Salient features of the book as extracted from the Book Review are as follows:
…Global Sourcing of Services can be positioned as a ready reference for managers at all levels in client as well as vendor companies to understand the nuances of global sourcing of services. The book … provides a comprehensive view of what sourcing of services is all about at a global level. The authors of various chapters in the book have used examples from extant research, industry practices, and case studies that clearly elucidate the current status of the sourcing industry. The mini-cases at the end of most chapters illuminate the key concepts and issues described in the chapters.… A key strength of this book is the logical flow of concepts. Each section leads to the other as it would while trying to make decisions for an outsourcing project.… This book is very well compiled and rightly addresses all the concerns of sourcing services globally for both managers and also for researchers who look for quality research papers to conduct further research in this area.
Routledge, in line with the ongoing trends, has published this journal online since 2014. The website to find all JITCAR issues is: http://www.tandfonline.com/utca. All authors and reviewers are encouraged to start using Routledge’s online manuscript submission and reviewing system at http://www.editorialmanager.com/jitcar/. I urge all our current and future authors and reviewers to familiarize themselves with this system.
I hope you will enjoy reading all the items in this issue.
With best regards,