The Information Systems Academic Discipline in Hong Kong

Business intelligence (BI) and data warehousing (DWH) research represent two increasingly popular, but still emerging fields in the information systems (IS) academic discipline. As such, they raise two substantial questions: Firstly, “how rigorous, i.e., fundamental, constituent, and explanatory, is DWH BI research?” and, secondly, “how relevant, i.e., useful and purposeful, is this research to practitioners?” In this article, the authors uphold the position that relevance and rigor are by no means dichotomous, but two sides of the same coin. Naturally, this requires well-defined approaches and guidelines—for scholarship in general and DWH/BI research in particular. Therefore, this paper proposes the competence center (CC) approach—a private-public partnership between academia and practice. The authors illustrate how the CC approach can be applied within the field of DWH/BI and suggest that a close link between research and practice supports both enhancing relevance to practice and strengthening rigor of research.

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Success and Failure in Building Electronic Infrastructures in the Air Cargo Industry

Cases on Global IT Applications and Management ◽

10.4018/978-1-93070-816-7.ch003 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 56-68

Author(s):

Ellen Christiaanse ◽

Jan Damsgaard

Keyword(s):

Hong Kong ◽

Information Systems ◽

Value Chain ◽

Airline Industry ◽

Large Scale ◽

Air Cargo ◽

Design And Implementation ◽

Hong Kong Sar ◽

Global Systems ◽

Community Systems

Reasons behind the failure and success of large-scale information systems projects continue to puzzle everyone involved in the design and implementation of IT. In particular in the airline industry very successful (passenger reservation) systems have been built which have totally changed the competitive arena of the industry. On the cargo side, however, attempts to implement large-scale community systems have largely failed across the globe. Air cargo parties are becoming increasingly aware of the importance of IT and they understand the value that IOS could provide for the total value chain performance. However, whereas in other sectors IOSs have been very successful, there are only fragmented examples of successful global systems in the air cargo community, and the penetration of IOS in the air cargo industry is by no means pervasive. This case describes the genesis and evolution of two IOSs in the air cargo community and identifies plausible explanations that lead one to be a success and one to be a failure. The two examples are drawn from Europe and from Hong Kong SAR. The case clearly demonstrates that it was the complex, institutional and technical choices made by the initiators of the system in terms of their competitive implications that were the main causes for the systems’ fate. The case thus concludes that it was the institutional factors involved in the relationships of the stakeholders that led to the opposite manifestations of the two initiatives, and that such factors should be taken into account when designing and implementing large-scale information systems.

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