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CCS No. 217, Sloan No. 4244-02
Peer to Peer File Sharing Systems: What Matters to the End Users?
April 2002
Peer-to-peer systems have been received much attention recently. However, few studies have examined what makes them successful from the user point of view. For example, how important is the interface for the success of a peer-to-peer system? How serious is the free-loading problem for the end user? This article reports a study examining end user perception of the features in peer-to-peer file sharing systems. First, it discusses the motivation for the study. Section 2 then describes the details of the study including the data collection and the analysis methods used. In particular, it identifies twenty-six features of peer-to-peer file sharing systems and examines how these features are perceived by the end user in similarity and in importance. Section 3 presents the results, interpretations, and an overall picture relating the system features to the traditional software requirement categories. The final section explores potential implications
Naoki Hayashi and George Herman
May 2002
This paper describes a new systematic method for exploring and evaluating alternatives
of a product design process for differentiated products - those that share some
elements but also have differentiating features. Based on coordination theory,
the method clarifies the opportunities and risks of process alternatives. The
method consists of three steps:
1) finding applicable differentiation approaches, 2) finding applicable patterns
of process coordination, and 3) evaluating total costs of the process alternatives.
We categorized the differentiation approaches as a taxonomy of design processes;
the taxonomy includes approaches of adding or removing differentiating elements
or sorting results. We also categorize how these are limited by type of interim
resource in a design process. We outline three patterns of process coordination
and how this interacts with the choice of product differentiation approaches.
We show how the process alternatives vary in the success rate of the coordination
and how this probability affects total cost of executing a design process. It
raises an awareness of the importance of managing dependencies between activities,
which many process analyses don’t focus on.
CCS No. 219,
Sloan No. 4251-02
Information Technology Fashions: Building on the Theory of Management Fashions
June 2002
Recent studies of management fashions have used discourse data that contributed
to our understanding of the forces underlying the rise and fall in popularity
of new management techniques. Like management fashions, there are many IT (information
technology) fashions. Testing the extent to which the theory of management fashions
apply to IT fashions help us better understand not only IT fashions but also
what is generic to the fashion phenomenon and what is unique to particular fashions
like IT or management fashions. This study makes a step toward that goal by
postulating and testing three hypotheses concerning the similarity and difference
between IT and management fashion lifecycles: that IT fashions depend more heavily
- relative to management fashions - on exogenous factors. As a result, the duration
of its ascent period is (1) shortening over time, (2) shortening at a rate faster
than that for management fashions, (3) but yet longer in absolute magnitude
than that for management fashions. A bibliometric study yields partial confirmation,
illustrating the usefulness of the theoretical framework provided by the theory
of management fashion in the study of IT fashions while revealing unique characteristics
of IT fashions that deserve further investigations.
CCS No. 220, Sloan No. 4323-02
Robert Laubacher and Thomas W. Malone
December 2002
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