ISQA 8060 - RESEARCH IN MIS

1. Please answer all parts of this question. Clearly state and explain all assumptions. Appended below is the introduction section of a proposed research project that you are planning to conduct. Based on this proposal, your assignment is to answer the following questions:
   1. State or define the problem under investigation… 10%.
   2. Specify all concepts and explain why you consider them to be a dependent variable, independent variable(s), intervening variable(s), and moderating variable(s)… 20%.
   3. Based on the answers above, now develop a complete theoretical framework and draw a schematic diagram. Provide a brief rationale for any relationships you may establish in your model… 10%.
   4. Develop four testable hypotheses and state each, both in the null and in the alternate forms... 20%.
   5. How would you establish the "scientific" quality of this research? … 10%.
   6. Would this be basic or applied research? Briefly state how, or under what circumstances, this very same research could become the opposite of whatever your answer is… 10%.
   7. Which research design would you use? Be sure to clearly explain your reasoning… 20%.

   Proposed Research Study - STUDYING MIS EMPLOYEE TURNOVER

   Retaining personnel in an organization, especially IT professionals, is widely accepted as a problem that is of serious concern to human resource managers. According to a recent telephone survey conducted by the Information Technology Association of America (ITAA), the average acceptable tenure of IT employees for non-IT companies is 36 months versus 30 months for the IT-companies. Non-IT companies retain their IT employees longer, with 82 percent remaining on board an acceptable length of time versus 74 percent for IT company employees (ITAA, 2001). In general, an employee's stated intention of leaving ("turnover intentions") an organization has been identified by many researchers as a much stronger predictor of actual turnover behavior than other affective variables such as job satisfaction and organizational commitment (Vandenberg et al., 1994; Kopelman et al., 1992; Mobley et al. 1978). However, prior research in the Information Systems (IS) field in the area of IT employee retention has produced evidence to show that demographic variables (age, organizational tenure, gender, education), roles stressors (role ambiguity, role conflict), career satisfaction, and some career-related variables (salary, promotability, career opportunities) have a relationship with job satisfaction and impact turnover intentions directly and through organizational commitment. There is also some evidence in the human relations and applied psychology literature to indicate that other variables such as intrinsic job characteristics (e.g., skill variety, task identity, task significance, job autonomy and feedback or communication quality), personality (e.g., self esteem, locus of control, generalized self-efficacy) and quality of work life (e.g., burnout, social interaction, and work schedule) can also impact organizational commitment, job satisfaction and potentially mediate the influence of demographic variables on an individual's intent to leave their current organization. [NOTE: This scenario is adapted from a research study proposed by Khazanchi, 2001]

2. Managing the Data Warehouse Development Contract (Bill Inmon, DM Review, December, 2000)

   In a few short years, data warehousing has gone from theory to conventional wisdom. As organizations build their data warehouse/corporate information factory environment, they are increasingly turning to consulting organizations. There is a natural progression to the reliance on external talent, because there simply is not enough in-house talent and experience to build and populate the warehouse environment.

   The following are some guidelines to assist you in the selection of a data warehouse consultant.

   Qualifications

   1. If your consulting salesman wants you to sign a contract for longer than six months for the first iteration, find another firm.
   2. Do not engage more than five to an absolute maximum of ten people for your warehouse development.
   3. Make certain the deliverables are well defined.
   4. Make certain your consulting firm understands architecture.

   Competitive Qualifications

   Competitive qualifications are those that are important but can be negotiated. They are the difference between the consulting firm that gets the business and the firms that don't get the business. The following are some competitive qualifications:

   1. Does your consultant have a spiral development methodology? Many consulting firms still have an operational waterfall approach to the development of systems.
   2. Does your consultant want to spend huge amounts of time interviewing the end user? While it is true that end-user involvement is crucial, spending huge amounts of time up front in the gathering of end-user requirements smacks of an older operations approach to building systems. The truth is that the end user is not going to know many requirements until the second or third iteration of development is completed.
   3. Does your consultant understand where a data mart is appropriate and where a data warehouse is appropriate? Does your consultant understand the difference between multidimensional design and normalized design? Does your consultant understand where each design does and does not fit?
   4. The volumes of data that accompany a properly built data warehouse are enormous. Coping with the volumes of data requires special design skills. What approaches has your consultant used for managing large volumes of data?
   5. In any data warehouse, there is a need for movement and transformation of data from the operational/legacy environment. Does your consultant want to unload a small army of programmers on you to do manual integration and transformation coding? (Where there is any amount of transformation that needs to be done, the automated approach of ETL software is vastly superior.)
   6. As shops become more experienced with data warehousing, they discover that exploration processing is an attractive activity that can be done. Has your consulting firm ever built an exploration warehouse? Has your consulting firm ever done true exploration processing?

   These are some thoughts and guidelines to keep in mind as you go forward with the contracting process and the selection of a consultant for the development of your data warehouse/corporate information factory. If you follow these guidelines, you have a greater chance of implementing a successful and sustainable environment.

   QUESTION

   Develop a draft of a research proposal to test Inmon's assumptions of what is required for a successful consulting contract for a data warehouse. Make certain you include a description of the research design you plan to use, proposed hypotheses and theoretical framework. Also, discuss what you will do to assure the research you conduct is of quality.

1. Describe unstructured programming. What are the results from using unstructured code in commercial programming?

2. Describe a Design Phase CRC session, including inputs, participants, processes and activities, and outputs. Do not omit critical decisions that must be made during the Design Phase.

• The Rational Unified Process (RUP) is a comprehensive system development method that is based on the object-oriented paradigm. RUP is a commercial method that uses the Unified Modeling Language for representing system artifacts. (For example, see http://www.rational.com/products/rup/ for details.) Some people claim that there is no reason to use any systems development method other than the Rational Unified Process. Other people criticize RUP for being too complex and not easily usable for small-scale projects that involve quick development and rapid prototyping.

  Suppose that you are the Director of Systems Development for a Fortune 500 company. Your systems development group is a large one that does a wide variety of things, including in-house development, buying packaged programs and customizing them, and dealing with integration issues. Your department supports a wide variety of user needs, ranging all the way from small decision-support type applications to large-scale systems that involve the entire organization and web systems that involve customers and business partners.

  You have decided that RUP will be the method that the entire department will use to develop all projects, but you have some misgivings for how you will convince the Chief Information Officer that this is the right decision, especially with the criticisms about RUP not being adaptable to different kinds or sizes of projects.

  Write your take-home paper as a report to the company's CIO. The purpose of the report is to convince the CIO that RUP should be used as the development method for all your new development projects. At a minimum, the report should include:

  1. A brief description of the Rational Unified Process, in order to set the stage for your arguments.
  2. An evaluation of the pros and cons of RUP for your system development department. (Make whatever assumptions you need to make about the department based on the limited information provided - just be sure to state any assumptions you are making.) Summarize this evaluation in a table.
  3. A discussion of the project management implications for using RUP as your single development method.

1. Designers of modern data communications systems are implementing new technologies and tools to upgrade their networks. Discuss the following data communications applications:
   1. Smart Cards. How are smart card companies using their products worldwide and revolutionizing commerce, healthcare, and recreation as well as maintaining high level of user security and trust?
   2. E-commerce Applications in Restructuring Corporate Distribution Channels. How are corporations improving and reengineering their distribution channels by implementing modern applications of Information Systems (IS)?
   3. Managing Electronic Interchange in Business. How can corporations establish a framework for controlling growth of electronic documents using the Internet?

   Explain how the above technologies and tools are used to transmit voice and data through modern networks. What are the advantages and disadvantages of each in optimizing secure electronic transmissions?

2. Data communication network performance can be assessed according to several criteria. Two important criteria are throughput and delay. Explain the meaning of throughput and delay as network performance measures. As part of you answer, discuss at least three types of network delay. Please be specific in your answer.

   Also, networks often experience congestion. What does it mean for a network to be congested, and what are possible (most likely) causes? Provide an example if it helps clarify your answer.

   One technique implemented by network protocols to deal with congestion is "flow control". Explain what flow control is and how it works. Please be as detailed in your response as possible. As part of your answer, explain which layer(s) (in the TCP/IP protocol stack) handle flow control and how flow control is accomplished.

1. XML has emerged as a very important concept in recent years, with a rather wide spectrum of uses. Provide a tutorial-like discussion of XML, including some definitions, a discussion of the kinds of problems XML may help solve, some current uses of XML, related technologies and standards, and some some challenges presented by the use of XML.

2. In the context of distributed computing, what do we mean by "infrastructure"? What are the function and desirable qualities of an infrastructure? How might these qualities be achieved? Identify both technologies and organizational approaches that might be applied to achieving these qualities. Choose two or three of these an discuss them in some depth. Identify exactly how the technology or organizational approach yields the qualities desired. Also indicate what challenges are faced by a company seeking to apply the technology or organizational approaches you've discussed.

1. Read the following scenario and answer the questions below.
   The ACME company is seeking to develop a database to keep track of its employees and facilities. The company is organized into departments, each with a unique name and a unique budget code. All employees are assigned to a department, and may be assigned to single office (some employees are not assigned to an office, but some offices may be assigned to more than one employee). Each office is identified by a building code plus a room number. In addition, each office has a maximum capacity indicating the maximum number of people that can be in a room at one time. Each office is located within a building, which is identified by a building code. In addition, the ACME company keeps track of the number of floors for each building and the number of spaced in the building's parking lot. Some buildings have no offices in them. Each employee is given a badge, which has a unique badge number as well as an issue date an an expiration date. The badge number doubles as the employee's employee identifier. ACME corporation would also like to store in the database a photograph of the employee, which appears on the badge. For each employee, the company tracks the social security number, name, address, date of hire. Employees are classified as either staff or manager. Staff employees are paid an hourly rate and have a specific number of vacation days given to them each year. ACME would like to keep track of this number in the database. Managers have a salary, and a date on which they received their last bonus. All employees, whether managers or staff, also have a job code that indicates which of three categories of employee they belong to. Programmers have a title, a programming language which is their principal strength, and an operating system which also represents the programming environment there are strongest in. For technical writes, the company records the number of years of experience and their mother tongue (e.g. English, Chinese, Hindi, German). For engineers, the company records the number of years of industrial experience and the type of engineer they are. In addition, each employee can have one or more skills, which are stored in the database, and may be assigned a computer. If so, then the serial number, make, model, disk capacity, and RAM capacity are recorded. Not all computers are assigned to an employee.
   1. Create a conceptual or logical data model for the above scenario. You may make make assumptions, provided they do not contradict what is written in the scenario.
   2. Define a set of appropriately normalized tables consistent with the data model.
   3. Provide SQL statements that will answer the following questions:
      1. Create the employee table
      2. Which employees have been assigned computers with hard drives smaller than 20 Gbytes?
      3. List the staff members who have not been assigned a computer.
      4. List the departments in which the average hourly rate of staff members is greater than $20.

2. Outline the steps to be taken in the design of a data warehouse. As you do so, elaborate on any design principles that should be applied, clearly indicating why this design principle exists and what can happen if the principle is violated. Contrast these steps with those that should be taken to design a set of tables for a transaction processing system.

1. Using the list of acronyms in the following table, prove a written definition of each and explain how you would interpret the number in terms of a project. Use the following table as a guide to format your answer in your blue book.

   Term	Define	Interpretation and use in project control
   BCWS
   BCWP
   ACWP
   BAC
   CV
   CPI
   SV
   SPI
   EAC
   ETC
   VAC

2. What techniques have you learned the can be used to control a project?