The Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) model, developed in the 1980s, remains the foundational model for strategic decision making regarding the development or acquisition of new information systems (IS). The SDLC model proposes five system development phases—planning, analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance—using a waterfall theory. These early phases of the SDLC require strategic decisions to be made regarding information systems. Strategic decision making is a model of multi-attribute utility theory, which helps promote decisions that maximize utility among multiple alternatives. This case provides students with experience in making reasoned strategic IT decisions by executing the planning and analysis phases in a new system acquisition life cycle. This educational case is structured to be the first of several cases covering the SDLC involving the same small fictitious public corporation, Casey's Collections. Upon completion of the case, students should have a deeper understanding and appreciation for the process of IS strategic decision making. In addition, students should better understand how to identify an information system's needs and prepare system proposals based on the generation and analysis of alternative solutions. This case is suitable for students in an introductory or graduate accounting systems course; it is also appropriate for use in a IS course on systems analysis and design.
This study applies Adaptive Character of Thought-Rational (ACT-R), a theory of cognitive skill acquisition, to identify two techniques theorized to provide learners with a simplified and situation-responsive set of production rules to use in a problemsolving context. The two techniques are abstraction (an optimization technique that produces a generalized rule set) and goal structuring (another optimization technique that produces a differentiated rule set). Accordingly, abstraction and goal structuring explanations were provided to users through a knowledge-based system (KBS). Due to cognitive effort constraints on procedural learning, a subset of volunteer participants was extracted for analysis based on an exhibition of attentive learning behavior. Results of the study found that while intermediary stages of development were not detectable, participants receiving goal-structuring explanations exhibited better problem solving performance, and the joint presentation of abstraction explanations led to further problem solving improvements. Abstraction explanations did not lead to improved problem solving, however, when provided in absence of goal-structuring explanations. These findings extend ACT-R to a new venue, increase understanding of ACT-R theory, and provide developers of KBS with more substantive knowledge on optimization of KBS explanation design when knowledge transfer to less expert users is an objective.
This study provides evidence on how various stakeholder groups perceive faculty time is and should be allocated across teaching, research and service. To ascertain the priorities of various stakeholders, a questionnaire was administered to accounting professionals, accounting students, and taxpayers. Assistant professors were also surveyed to establish a benchmark for comparisons. Overall, the findings indicate a disparity between the perceptions of accounting professors and their stakeholders regarding time allocations. Suggestions on ways to mitigate these differences are offered.
Knowledge-Based Systems (KBS) have been used in industry to free experts from mundane and routine decision making, to produce comparable and consistent decisions, and to retain the expertise of knowledgeable employees who may, for many reasons, leave a company. KBS are also desired to have the capacity to transfer knowledge to less-expert users of such systems. In this paper, Adaptive Character of Thought-Rational (ACT-R) theory is used as a foundation for the design of KBS explanations for the explicit purpose of facilitating knowledge transfer to the user. ACT-R (Anderson 1993) is a theory of cognitive skill acquisition that suggests a learner must first obtain certain facts about a new learning situation (declarative memory pieces) and then convert a series of facts into a set of rules that will produce accurate problem-solving skills (procedural memory pieces). Prior research has examined pieces of the ACT theory in its earlier forms, but no comprehensive tests examining the simultaneous effect of the multiple components have previously been completed. The current study addresses three questions based on ACT-R theory: (1) Can declarative-knowledge-based explanations improve declarative knowledge transfer? (2) Can declarative-knowledge-based explanations improve procedural knowledge transfer? (3) Can procedural-knowledge-based explanations improve procedural knowledge transfer? An experiment employing eight KBS, differing by types of KBS explanation prompts, which were designed to stimulate declarative and/or procedural knowledge transfer, was conducted with 294 accounting information systems students. An analysis of the results provides some support for the use of declarative-based KBS explanations for declarative knowledge transfer, strong support for the use of declarative-based KBS explanations for procedural knowledge transfer, but a lack of support for the use of procedural-based KBS explanations for procedural knowledge transfer. The results suggest that organizations may be able to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of training programs for knowledge workers through the application of KBS that include declarative knowledge-based explanations.
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