Faculty Members

Giorgos CHELIOTIS, Visiting Assistant Professor
Nan HU, Assistant Professor
MA Dan, Assistant Professor
Steven MILLER, Practice Professor
Arcot Desai NARASIMHALU, Practice Professor
Narayan RAMASUBBU, Assistant Professor
WONG Yue Kee, Practice Associate Professor
C. Jason WOODARD, Assistant Professor

Research Staff and Students

CHEN Bin, Research Fellow
HUANG Jianhui, Research Fellow
KOH Noi Sian, PhD Student
SANTANI Darshan, Research Engineer

Research Projects

1. Business Value of IT
2. Software Engineering Economics
3. Business Models for Grid Computing
4. Economic Analysis of Online Reputation Systems
5. Economic Analysis of Certificate Revocation List
6. Pricing Competition in the Software Market
7. Innovation and Innovation Management
8. Architectural Strategy and Design Evolution
9. Viral Culture

Business Value of IT

Description:

Researchers concerned with the business value of IT seek to resolve the so-called IT productivity paradox by shedding light on how and when IT investments deliver business value. While initial research in this area was primarily concerned with the link between IT spending and firm profitability, current research increasingly explores the diverse roles of specific capabilities enhanced by modern information systems such as business agility, customer satisfaction, and forecasting ability. The challenging questions that drive our research include: What are the mediating and moderating mechanisms that affect the relationship between IT and firm performance? How does the investment community interpret a firm's IT spending? How do mangers make decisions on investments in IT? Are IT professionals a source of sustained competitive advantage?

Selected Publications:

[1] Mark Anderson, Rajiv Banker, and Nan Hu, “Returns on Investment in Information Technology”, Information Systems Section of American Accounting Association (AAA-IS) 2004 Annual Meeting, Orlando, Florida, August 2004.

[2] Paul Pavlou, Rajiv Banker, and Nan Hu, “IT Orientation, CIO reporting structure and Firm Performance: To Whom Should the CIO Report?”, the Workshop on Information Systems and Economics (WISE 2004), The University of Maryland, College Park Campus, USA, December 2004.

[3] Sunil Mithas, Narayan Ramasubbu, M.S. Krishnan and V. Sambamurthy, “Information technology management and firm performance: An Empirical analysis of mediating influences”, Proceedings of the Eighth INFORMS Conference on Information Systems and Technology (CIST 2003), Goizueta Business School, Emory University, Atlanta, October 2003, (Revised paper under review in Management Science).

Software Engineering Economics

Description:

The software engineering economics literature focuses on project management, product management and process management for improved software project performance. Recent efforts to leverage global resources in the software industry have led to the widespread adoption of distributed software development and global delivery business models. One stream of this research project investigates the issues related to this trend in the software industry. We examine resource allocation strategies for globally distributed software development; system architectural design to facilitate global distribution of labor, knowledge management and learning in distributed teams; and process management for enhancing the performance of dispersed tasks.

Another stream of our research looks at tackling complexity in large scale software product development: How does complexity impact product development decisions? What are the mechanisms a product development team can employ to mitigate the effects of complexity?

Selected Publications:

[1] Narayan Ramasubbu, Prasad Kompalli, M.S. Krishnan, “Leveraging Global Resources: A Distributed Process Maturity Framework for Software Product Development”, IEEE Software, May/June 2005, pp 80-86. (Longer version presented at AMCIS 2005, Omaha .)

[2] Narayan Ramasubbu, Sunil Mithas, M. S. Krishnan and Chris F. Kemerer, “Effect of Quality Management Practices in Distributed Offshore Software Development: An Empirical Analysis”, Academy of Management 2004 Annual Meeting, New Orleans , August 2004.

[3] Sendil Ethiraj, Narayan Ramasubbu, M.S. Krishnan, “Does Complexity Affect Innovation: An Empirical Analysis of Communications Software Product Development”, Academy of Management 2005 Annual Meeting , Hawaii , August 2005.

[4] Narayan Ramasubbu and Rajesh Krishna Balan, "Globally Distributed Software Development Project Performance: An Empirical Analysis”, Proceedings of the ESEC-FSE'07, Cavtat , Croatia , September 3–7, 2007.

Business Models for Grid Computing

Description:

Shared services computing, in the form of grids or clusters, is emerging as an effective method of providing unified access to computational resources (e.g., CPUs, storage systems, data sources, and people) irrespective of physical location. Grid technology research groups typically collect usage and performance information for the grids they operate, but few work with management science groups to analyse grid resource allocation methods using the data collected. Similarly, management science groups build grid resource allocation models but seldom work with grid technology groups to get actual usage data that can be used to test their models. In this project, we aim to synthesise the efforts of these two groups by bringing together an empirical data set of grid usage information (computing resources, network, storage, etc.) and a test bed based on the HP Labs' Tycoon system. We investigate the economic performance of the Tycoon resource allocation method by running simulations against the empirical data set for various market scenarios. Based on the results, we aim to recommend improvements to Tycoon and provide insightful recommendations for the design and operation of a Grid Market Hub in Singapore .

External sponsor: The Singapore Infocomm Development Authority through the Adaptive Enterprise @ Singapore initiative with HP.

Selected Publications:

[1] Danny Oh, Steven Miller and Nan Hu, “Experimental and Empirical Perspectives on Grid Resource Allocation for the Singapore Market”, In Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Grid Economics and Business Models, May 2006, pp. 13-23.

Economic Analysis of Online Reputation Systems

Description:

As the digital version of the word-of-mouth phenomenon online reviews have become an important and easily accessible source of information for consumers. While a majority of current research studies focus on the impact of online product reviews on eventual sales numbers, several important questions remains un-examined: Can online product reviews be a reliable source for the true quality of the product? How do consumers use both quantitative and qualitative aspects of online review to make purchase decision? To answer these questions we are investigating online product reviews collected from several real world e-business websites. Our goal is to understand whether online review market behaviors similar to stock market and the underlying statistical distribution of online reviews and build economic models to explain the impact of online product reviews.

Selected Publications:

[1] Nan Hu, Ling Liu, and Jennifer Zhang, “Analyst Forecast Revision and Market Sales Discovery of Online Word of Mouth”, Proceedings of the 40th Hawaii International Conference on System Science , HAWAII , Jan, 2007

[2] Nan Hu and Ling He, “A Time-Series Analysis of Prices and Ratings in Online Reviews”, the 38 th Annual Meeting of the Decision Sciences Institute, Phoenix , 2007.

[3] Nan Hu and Jennifer Zhang, “Online reviews and Product's Quality?” Forthcoming Proceedings of the Seventh ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'06) , Ann Arbor , Michigan , 2006

Economic Analysis of Certificate Revocation List

Description:

Public key infrastructure has been proposed as a promising foundation for verifying the authenticity of communicating parties and transferring trust over the internet. One of the key issues in public key infrastructure is how to manage certificate revocations. Various technical solutions dealing with key revocation have been proposed. However, to out best knowledge, no rigorous efforts have been made to understand the behavior of certificate revocation requests based on empirical data. Further, there is no study on the managerial aspect of CRL release.

Selected Publications:

[1] Li YingJiu, Nan Hu, and ChengYu Ma, “ On the Release of CRLs in Public Key Infrastructure ”, the USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 2006) ( Vancouver , Canada ) , Jul 31-Aug 4, 2006.

Pricing Competition in the Software Market

Description:

In the recent years, new format of software has appeared in the market and composed severe competition threat to the existing software providers. In this research, we study two types of new software, namely, on-demand software and open-sourced software, and study how the traditional software competes with them respectively. The focus is the software pricing strategy.

Our analysis shows that in the competition with on-demand software, the traditional software provider is forced to reduce prices only if the on-demand software applications can provide good integration ability, while in the competition with open-sourced software, such downward pricing pressure always exists. Meanwhile, the competition is likely to benefit all software users.

Selected Publications:

[1] Dan Ma, “ The Business Model of Software-As-A-Service ”, Proceeding of 2007 IEEE SCC (Service Computing), Salt Lake City , Utah , July 9 -12, 2007.

[2] Dan Ma, Hila Etzion, “ Price and Quality Competition with Free Open-Sourced Software ”, Working paper , June 2007.

Innovation and Innovation Management

Description:

This research consists of two sets of projects that address interrelated issues in innovation and innovation management. The first project involves the development of a framework, called the Innovation Cube, that captures key drivers that make innovations commercially successful.  This is the basis for developing the next part of the innovation framework called the Innovation Engine. The Innovation Engine defines a mechanism for generating and identifying candidates for new innovations. The final part is a mechanism for prioritising the candidates for innovations with respect to a firm's goals and competencies.

The second collection of projects is related to innovation management. The first study in this set proposes a conceptual framework for innovation management. The second study proposes a model for technology and innovation transfer.  The third study explores the intellectual property issues related to globalise innovation.

Selected Publications:

[1] Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, “Management of Innovation within Firms - Some Key Challenges”, Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, Waikoloa, Hawaii, January 2006.

[2] Arcot Desai Narasimhalu, “Innovation Cube: Triggers, Drivers and Enablers for Successful Innovations”, Annual Conference of the International Society for Professional Innovation Management, Porto, Portugal, June 2005.

Architectural Strategy and Design Evolution

Description:

Complex engineered systems like the Internet are typically designed by many different individuals and organisations, none of which controls the entire design and whose incentives are not necessarily aligned. Our work on architectural strategy seeks to understand how economically motivated designers interact in such systems, and how these interactions give rise to value migration among architectural layers. We are exploring the rise of new platforms such as Java, the commoditisation of product categories like databases and operating systems, and the tension between open standards and proprietary control in emerging technological fields like web services.

Selected Publications:

[1] C. Jason Woodard, "Modeling Architectural Strategy Using Design Structure Networks", 2nd International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems and Technology (DESRIST 2007) , Pasadena , May 2007.

[2] C. Jason Woodard, “Architectural Control and Value Migration in Platform Industries”, Academy of Management 2006 Annual Meeting, Atlanta, August 2006.

[3] Carliss Y. Baldwin, Kim B. Clark, and C. Jason Woodard, “The Pricing and Profitability of Modular Clusters”, Academy of Management 2004 Annual Meeting, New Orleans, August 2004.

Additional working papers are available online .

Viral Culture

Description:

Peer-to-peer networking, open-source software, re-mixing, mash-ups, podcasting, Wikipedia, blogs, the Creative Commons, grid computing, the Internet Archive and Web 2.0 are all different manifestations of the same trend toward user empowerment and a blurring of the traditional division between producers and consumers of digital content. The Viral Culture project aims to make this a lasting, sustainable change by creating economic incentives and supporting technology to allow the best creative ideas and content to emerge uninhibited from the multitude of online user communities and spread like a virus through our digital culture. We use data analysis, analytical modeling, simulation and prototyping to investigate innovative mechanisms for the efficient and incentive-compatible production and distribution of digital content, with a special emphasis on digital media, user-generated content and creative re-use. Our work builds on past research in the economics of networks and distributed systems, as well as a growing body of literature on open source, user innovation, malleable media, cyber-law and digital rights management.

[1] G. Cheliotis, A. Guglani and G. Tayi, "Measuring the Commons", 3rd Symposium on Statistical Challenges in E-Commerce Research, May 15-17 2007, University of Connecticut .

[2] G. Cheliotis, W. Chik, A. Guglani and G. Tayi, "Taking Stock of the Creative Commons Experiment: Monitoring the Use of Creative Commons Licenses and Evaluating Its Implications for the Future of Creative Commons and for Copyright Law", 35th Research Conference on Communication, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC) , September 28-30, National Center for Technology & Law, George Mason University School of Law.