Editorial

Abstract

William Kettinger and Donald Marchand attempt to operationalize the constructs that together help define the ‘knowing organization’. Their intention to develop a construct that measures the capability of companies to manage their information is a substantial undertaking. According to the life cycle of information management, ‘information management practices’ is defined as a second order construct that involves sensing, collecting, organizing, processing, and maintaining information to enhance its use for decision making. The authors develop measures for these five sub-capabilities. Empirical data were collected from multinational firms to test the construct with confirmatory factor analysis used as the major method for statistical analysis. The authors have created a model of information use and conducted an extensive evaluation across a broad array of institutions to validate this measure of information management practices. Considering that effective information management and usage have become an asset for firms to achieve competitive advantage and that there is no existing comprehensive measurement for this important capability, this paper is valuable to practitioners and academics since it can be used to compare firms' information management capabilities. This paper lays a foundation towards the improvement of organizational use of information. Kweku-Muata Osei-Bryson and Ojelanki Ngwenyama explore the potential of data mining technology, specifically decision tree generation, for providing support for systematic theory testing. This data mining technology is itself built on the principles of abductive inference and evaluating hypotheses based on Peirce's scientific method. They assert that this approach could assist scientists to explore alternative hypotheses for existing theories. They demonstrate their approach with empirical observations collected from twenty organizations in two countries using instruments from the user performance area of IS research, specifically task-technology fit and user satisfaction studies. The paper aims to help overcome the problem of the paucity of hypotheses for theory development in the positivist approach of Popper and others. The approach therefore aims to achieve significant savings in terms of the time and cost of conducting systematic theory testing and development. Stefan Henningsson and Sven Carlsson investigate the problem of information systems integration in the context of mergers and acquisitions. Information systems integration is critical for achieving the intended goals. The topic is eternal and timely in this current climate as financial institutions rise and fall and many of the challenges this brings are related to integrating information systems and maintaining operations. The authors have an ambitious approach as they try to combine existing research on both information systems integration and mergers and acquisitions with a multiple site case study into a model on information systems integration issues. They develop a six dimensional theoretical framework for information systems integration in corporate mergers and acquisitions. This can be used by companies since, through the combination of dimensions, it shows the information systems integration issues, decisions, and actions that a company has to address in the mergers and acquisitions process.