Article 2 Critique

Paper Title: Managing critical success factors for IS implementation: A stakeholder engagement and control perspective

 

Authors: Zafor Ahmed ,Uma Kumar,Vinod Kumar

First published: 11 April 2017

Your Summary of Content of Paper:

The research suggests that IT automation can improve the solidity and efficiency of the HR by lowering the routine tasks efforts and releasing the time for strategic activities. This has the effect to allow HR excel in the core activities.

A: Quality of the Research

Item	Your Comments
1. Is the research question or objective clearly stated?	The objective of the research is clearly stated as the opportunity to release the from administrative and time consuming tasks in order to support the functions in the strategy definition and implementation.
2. Is the research question interesting and important?	The research question is very relevant and appears to be a very interesting topic as the released resources are able to drive strategic tasks which are critical for an organization.
3. Is the work original?	The work is original as it focus on HR excellence. In other areas such Supply chain management, in which operations efficiency does create a competitive advantage , (Tatoglu et al, 2016) explain that Information Systems do play a key role in building a competitive advantage.
4. Is the background research clear and relevant?	The background of the research is clearly defined as it centers the usage of HR applications considering multiple organization variables.
5. Are there any ethical problems?	None.

B: The Research Method

Item	Your Comments
Summarise the research method	The method consists in the collection and analysis of primary and secondary data.
Does the research method seem appropriate for the research question?	The method appears to be appropriate and original . The method is not an approach based on the magnitude of the investment: “Investing heavily in IT does not necessarily lead to effective use of systems. “
Are the methods adequately described?	The data collection methods and the analysis methods are well described.
Were the analyses done correctly?	Data was analyzed correctly and exceptions have been considered in order to do not introduce errors: “To avoid an inaccurate assessment of the degree of IT penetration for HR, we also included “does not apply to our organization” in the response scale (coded as a missing value).”
Are the conclusions supported by the data?	Data shows that the correlations may be found by conducting additional studies.

C: Quality of Presentation

Item	Your Comments
Is the work well presented?	The work results are clear and honest. It does clearly states the limitations of the study :” IT is still being used more for administrative ends than for analytical or decision support ends”.
Is the paper well structured?	The work is well structured and provides a clear reference to its limitations: “Other limitations associated with this study are the use of self-report data, the low response rate, and some measurement issues.”
Are symbols, terms, and concepts adequately defined?	The authors refers to the “Bonferroni correction” without explicitly explaining it. (Everett, 2002) states that the Bonferroni correction is “A procedure for guarding against an increase in the probability of a type I error when performing multiple significance tests”.
Would additional tables, figures help to clarify the work?	As the authors state clearly, several factors have influences the low response rate: “Three factors probably contributed to the low response rate.” 1) The lack of time of the HR managers who were asked to complete the survey. 2) The high number of questions (78) may have led the senior roles to ignore the survey. 3) The targeted survey participants were already involved in a previous study. These my have caused a loss of interest. The authors did not provide additional data targeting a different level of HR members nor by reducing the “complexity” of the questionnaires. This additional data would be useful to eventually confirm correlations.

D: Additional Notes

The writer thinks that the authors were correct in stating that the response rate was low. Due to the low number of responses, the writer would have re-formulated the questionnaire and would have identified a different target group.  Very likely the low response late did introduce a sample error (1) which could be relevant for the results. (1) Sampling error as defined by (Everitt, 2002): “The difference between the sample result and the population characteristic being estimated. In practice, the sampling error can rarely be determined because the population characteristic is not usually known. With appropriate sampling procedures, however, it can be kept small and the investigator can determine its probable limits of magnitude.”

References

Ekrem Tatoglu, Erkan Bayraktar, Ismail Golgeci, S.C. Lenny Koh, Mehmet Demirbag & Selim Zaim (2016) How do supply chain management and information systems practices influence operational performance? Evidence from emerging country SMEs, International Journal of Logistics Research and Applications, 19:3, 181-199, DOI: 10.1080/13675567.2015.1065802

Everitt, B. S.. The Cambridge Dictionary of Statistics, Cambridge University Press, 2002. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/salford/detail.action?docID=217871.
Created from salford on 2019-10-08 14:26:43.