According to W. Edwards Deming, American companies require nothing less than a transformation of management style and of governmental relations with industry. In Out of the Crisis, originally published in 1982, Deming offers a theory of management based on his famous 14 Points for Management. Management's failure to plan for the future, he claims, brings about loss of market, which brings about loss of jobs. Management must be judged not only by the quarterly dividend, but by innovative plans to stay in business, protect investment, ensure future dividends, and provide more jobs through improved product and service. In simple, direct language, he explains the principles of management transformation and how to apply them.

Out of the Crisis

Many interventions found to be effective in health services research studies fail to translate into meaningful patient care outcomes across multiple contexts. Health services researchers recognize the need to evaluate not only summative outcomes but also formative outcomes to assess the extent to which implementation is effective in a specific setting, prolongs sustainability, and promotes dissemination into other settings. Many implementation theories have been published to help promote effective implementation. However, they overlap considerably in the constructs included in individual theories, and a comparison of theories reveals that each is missing important constructs included in other theories. In addition, terminology and definitions are not consistent across theories. We describe the Consolidated Framework For Implementation Research (CFIR) that offers an overarching typology to promote implementation theory development and verification about what works where and why across multiple contexts. We used a snowball sampling approach to identify published theories that were evaluated to identify constructs based on strength of conceptual or empirical support for influence on implementation, consistency in definitions, alignment with our own findings, and potential for measurement. We combined constructs across published theories that had different labels but were redundant or overlapping in definition, and we parsed apart constructs that conflated underlying concepts. The CFIR is composed of five major domains: intervention characteristics, outer setting, inner setting, characteristics of the individuals involved, and the process of implementation. Eight constructs were identified related to the intervention (e.g., evidence strength and quality), four constructs were identified related to outer setting (e.g., patient needs and resources), 12 constructs were identified related to inner setting (e.g., culture, leadership engagement), five constructs were identified related to individual characteristics, and eight constructs were identified related to process (e.g., plan, evaluate, and reflect). We present explicit definitions for each construct. The CFIR provides a pragmatic structure for approaching complex, interacting, multi-level, and transient states of constructs in the real world by embracing, consolidating, and unifying key constructs from published implementation theories. It can be used to guide formative evaluations and build the implementation knowledge base across multiple studies and settings.

/pdf/fostering-implementation-of-health-services-research-4xghpqk7rh.pdf

Fostering implementation of health services research findings into practice: a consolidated framework for advancing implementation science

The Personal Interview

What makes organizations so similar? We contend that the engine of rationalization and bureaucratization has moved from the competitive marketplace to the state and the professions. Once a set of organizations emerges as a field, a paradox arises: rational actors make their organizations increasingly similar as they try to change them. We describe three isomorphic processes-coercive, mimetic, and normative—leading to this outcome. We then specify hypotheses about the impact of resource centralization and dependency, goal ambiguity and technical uncertainty, and professionalization and structuration on isomorphic change. Finally, we suggest implications for theories of organizations and social change.

The iron cage revisited: Institutional isomorphism and collective rationality in organizational fields (Chinese Translation)

/pdf/social-capital-a-theory-of-social-structure-and-action-4m7poq6byy.pdf

Social capital: a theory of social structure and action

This article describes and demonstrates a two-step approach for transforming non-normally distributed continuous variables to become normally distributed. Step 1 involves transforming the variable into a percentile rank, which will result in uniformly distributed probabilities. Step 2 applies the inverse-normal transformation to the results of the first step to form a variable consisting of normally distributed z-scores. The approach is little-known outside the statistics literature, has been scarcely used in the social sciences, and has not been used in any IS study. The article illustrates how to implement the approach in Excel, SPSS, and SAS and explains implications and recommendations for IS research.

/pdf/a-two-step-approach-for-transforming-continuous-variables-to-kxm6cm4ftm.pdf

A Two-Step Approach for Transforming Continuous Variables to Normal: Implications and Recommendations for IS Research

This paper presents a comprehensive methodology for developing constructs in MIS research. It is applicable to both individual and organizational levels of analysis, depending on the nature of the concept under study. The methodology is presented as a research guide progressing through three stages: (1) domain definition, (2) instrument construction, and (3) evaluation of measurement properties. The methodology addresses six key measurement properties (content validity, factorial validity, reliability, convergent validity, discriminant validity, nomological validity), which are discussed in detail. An assessment of the proposed methodology indicates that its adoption in MIS research would greatly improve the rigor of construct development projects. This is evidenced by the wide range of quality publications that have used its techniques and its performance when compared to a number of prominent standards for assessing construct development research.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1057%2Fpalgrave.ejis.3000552.pdf

A methodology for construct development in MIS research

The concept of organizational learning (OL) is receiving an increasing amount of attention in the research and practice of management information systems (MIS) due to its potential for affecting organizational outcomes, including control and intelligence, competitive advantage, and the exploitation of knowledge and technology.As such, further development of the salient issues related to OL is warranted, especially measurement of the construct. Based on a domain definition grounded in the literature, this research represents the initial work in developing an empirically reliable and valid measure of organizational learning. The rigorous method utilized in the derivation of this measure, which integrates two methodological frameworks for instrument development, is the main strength of this work. The result is an eightfactor, 28-item instrument for assessing OL, derived from a sample of 119 knowledge-based firms. The empirically derived factors are awareness, communication, performance assessment, intellectual cultivation, environmental adaptability, social learning, intellectual capital management, and organizational grafting. MIS function managers can use these factors to gauge organizational or subunit success in the creation and diffusion of new applications of information technology.

Development of a Measure for the Organizational Learning Construct

In this study we investigated the measurement validity of the findings in the IS journal quality stream over the past ten years. Our evaluation applied a series of validation tests to the metrics presented in these studies using data from multiple sources. The results of our tests for content, convergent, and discriminant validity, as well as those for parallel-form, test-retest, and item-tototal reliability, were highly supportive. From these findings, we conclude that recent studies in the IS journal quality stream are credible. As such, these IS journal quality measures provide appropriate indicators of relative journal quality. This conclusion is important for both academic administrators and scientometric researchers, the latter of whom depend on journal quality measures in the evaluation of published IS research.

/pdf/a-scientometric-investigation-into-the-validity-of-is-43ekh6f4q9.pdf

A Scientometric Investigation into the Validity of IS Journal Quality Measures

One of the most challenging problems confronting the IT community is responding to the threat of spyware. Recent research, legislative actions, and policy changes have been hastened to counter spyware's threat to the privacy and productivity of both individuals and organizations [2, 10--12].

Gary F. Templeton

Papers

A Two-Step Approach for Transforming Continuous Variables to Normal: Implications and Recommendations for IS Research

A methodology for construct development in MIS research

Development of a Measure for the Organizational Learning Construct

A Scientometric Investigation into the Validity of IS Journal Quality Measures

A framework for spyware assessment