From the editors

Abstract

Happy New Year! We look forward to serving you in 2006 which marks our fifth, and final, year as co-editors of Data Base. We will work with the next co-editors to make the transition as smooth as possible.As of January 1, 2006 Andrew Scwartz at Louisiana State University is taking over the managing editor position that has been held by Tim Kayworth at Baylor University for the past four years. We thank Tim for the excellent work that he has done. Andy has kindly agreed to take on the role and we look forward to working with him. The point of contact for submissions and paper information remains data_base@baylor.edu.As part of our international expansion, we are adding Jose Roldan from Spain and Jens Dibbern from Germany to the editorial board. They will be handling papers from their respective countries. This will compliment the work that Emmanuel Monod has been doing for us with papers submitted in French, the first accepted one of which will be published in the final issue of 2006!This coming year we will publish the special issue on Research Notes edited by Wynne in a two-issue special (Volume 37, issues 2 and 3). This was a very popular special issue and we are glad that it was so successful. Issues 1 and 4 will both be comprised of regularly submitted research articles.The current issue is comprised of 5 papers, all of which were submitted after we commenced our term as co-editors in chief. It has been very rewarding to see the progression of these papers from the original submission to the published paper. The first paper, by Vital Roy, Carmen Bernier and Lucie Léveillé, compares the roles of project directors involved in high organizational transformation projects with project directors involved in low organizational transformation projects. Using a qualitative method, the study examines the transactional and tranformational leadership styles enacted by the project managers to determine which style is more effective under which circumstances. The second paper, by Rajiv Kohli and Ellen Hoadley, reports on a case study of three firms that examines the organizational effects of IT-enbaled BPR. Also using a case study methodology, the third paper by Hee-Woong Kim and Shan L. Pan reports a process model of CRM implementation. The paper compares one successful CRM implementation with two failed efforts. The fourth paper is a conceptual one that considers data retrieval anddocument retrieval models as examples of informations systems with lower and higher levels of representational indeterminacy. The final paper by Alexander Pons presents a new method technique of web object prefetching that improves a web browser's cache-hit percentage while lowering web page latency. We are grateful to Roger Chiang for handling this, and all other, submissions that have a technical orientation. Prior to Roger's joining the board, we simply did not have the editorial expertise necessary to review technical papers.