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Causal Mapping for Research in Information Technology provides an introduction to causal mapping for IS researchers and practitioners and goes further to provide IS researchers and practitioners everything they need to use causal mapping for both research and application.

In this chapter, I provide an historical overview of the use of causal mapping, and its migration from political science to organization theory, and more recently into research efforts in Information Technology (IT). Since this migration has brought in its wake a diversity of perspectives and...

Causal mapping is a technique that can be used to represent cognition because it captures the structure of the causal assertions of an individual or group. As causal mapping becomes more prominent in the IS field, it is important that we understand the method, its strengths and limitations and its...

Texts can be coded and analyzed as networks of concepts often referred to as maps or semantic networks. In such networks, for many texts there are elements of social structure — the connections among people, organizations, and events. Within organizational and social network theory an approach called...

The purpose of this chapter is to demonstrate the use of the evidential reasoning approach under the Dempster-Shafer (D-S) theory of belief functions to analyze revealed causal maps (RCM). The participants from information technology (IT) organizations provided the concepts to describe the target...

Recently, capturing and evaluating group causal maps has come to attention of IS researchers (Tegarden and Sheetz, 2003; Lee, Courtney & O’Keefe, 1992; Vennix, 1996; Kwahk and Kim, 1999). This chapter summarizes two studies that formally compare three approaches to building collective maps: aggregate...

In this chapter, we compare the findings from causal maps derived from semi-structured interviews with that obtained from survey respondents, using a data set originally constructed to characterize object-oriented (OO) software development expertise. To compare the results, we invoke three different...

Revealed causal mapping (RCM) represents one of the best ways to study a phenomenon in a discovery or evocative setting. The RCM method provides rich data that facilitates a deeper understanding of the cognitive facets of a phenomenon not available with other methods. In this chapter I will share...

The cognitive diversity of top management teams has been shown to affect the performance of a firm. In some cases, cognitive diversity has been shown to improve firm performance, in other cases, it has worsened firm performance. Either way, it is useful to understand the cognitive diversity of a top...

This research project gathered data about the use of UML and object-oriented analysis and design as the approach to the development of information systems. The data collection method consisted of interviews with information systems application developers with wide ranging differences in background. The...

Identifying what different stakeholders in a business need from Information Systems development has always been seen as problematic. There are numerous cases of failure as projects run over time, over budget, and, most significantly, do not meet the needs of the user population. Whilst having a...

The formulation and implementation of effective strategy at every level within an organization requires that those involved in the process have not only a good overall understanding of the present situation, but also an understanding of the underlying cause and effect relationships which underpin...

Knowledge management practices in software development and engineering have been focused mainly on knowledge sharing and maintenance whereas less attention has been devoted to knowledge elicitation and codification issues. In this chapter we present a methodology based on causal mapping for the...

Comparing, contrasting, and collectivizing causal maps provides a useful way for extending representations of individual-level cognitions to an organization-level of analysis. Carrying out these processes can be tricky, however, because the terms used to denote nodes within causal maps are often so...

Analysis of the behavior of casual maps is not as well developed as the analysis of their content and structure. In this chapter, we propose a set of approaches to examine the behavior of causal maps. Simulation approaches that invoke computer simulations, influence diagrams and fuzzy causal maps are...

In this chapter we review major developments that have occurred over the past 30 years or so in the philosophical underpinnings, elicitation, analysis, aggregation and comparison of causal maps (also known as cause maps) across a wide range of domains of application in the fields of management and...

The Health Board is one of the largest public health care providers in New Zealand (NZ). In early 1999, a supply chain optimization review recommended an enterprise system (ES) implementation to provide better control and reporting of organizational finances. The focus of this case is the IT platform...

How much end-user computing is too much? Should end users develop systems? This case looks at a study of end user computing within the engineering organizations of an electric utility undergoing deregulation. The case was initiated when management perceived that too much engineering time was spent...

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is a government organization, founded to explore space to better understand our own planet and the universe around us. Over NASA’s history, there have been unprecedented successes: Apollo missions that put people into space and walking on the...

In any cooperative database the participants contribute their data for their own as well as the benefit of the other members, usually with incentives from the database administrators. A South African library network company (LIBNET) provided a networked service to participating libraries. Member...

As e-government plays an increasingly dominant role in modern public administrative management, its pervasive influence on organizations and individuals is apparent. It is, therefore, timely and relevant to examine e-governance—the fundamental mission of e-government. By adopting a stakeholder...

In an organizational setting, national culture is not the only type of culture that influences managerial and work behavior. Rather, behavior is influenced by different levels of culture ranging from the supranational (regional, ethnic, religious, linguistic) level through the national, professional...

Businesses that are involved in offshore software development often operate in a virtual project environment in which peer teams located at customer premise exchange project specifications with the offshore software development facility. To understand the complex issues in such a virtual project...

It seems surprising that small firms engage in offshore outsourcing given that they lack the resources that large firms possess to overcome the difficulties involved. We examine these factors using transaction cost theory’s three stages: contact costs, contract costs, and control costs. Then, using our...

Many companies recently have been choosing information technology (IT) outsourcing in response to complicated information systems and various internal requirements. In order to monitor and maintain a high quality of IT outsourcing vendors’ services, it is necessary to develop a system to evaluate IT...