There is a controversy over the necessity of information intermediaries in virtual market. This study tried to suggest several reasons why they would still flourish in virtual market. It also tried to find out their roles and to forecast their role changes in the future on the basis of Delphi analysis. Though an exploratory study, this can shed some lights on the future studies related to information intermediaries and virtual market.

While the value of information technology has long been a hot issue, few solid results have been found as of yet. It is partly due to methodological factors and model underspecifcation. This study empirically develops a ITS(information technology structure) taxonomy and investigates the relationships between ITS taxonomy and business performance in the Korean firms. Among factors that impact business performance, organization structure and control system are selected and they are hypothesized to moderate-the relationships between ITS taxonomy and business performance. By surveying 91 manufacturing firms and applying hierarchical cluster analysis, four ITS are identified : centralized, decentralized, centralized cooperative, decentralized cooperative. ANOVA, correlation analysis and crosstable analysis say the presence of moderating effect of organization structure and control system. Cooperative ITS is best in business performance. Centralized ITS is related to functional organizational form. Decentralized ITS is related to product organizational form with decentralized decision making, Centralized cooperative ITS is related to matrix organizational form. Decentralized cooperative ITS is related to matrix organizational form with high integration. These findings have implications for the opportunities and challenges to match information technology with organization structure and control system.

This study examines whether expenditures in information technology (IT) are associated with increases in Tobin's q ratios, a measure of management performance, in the banking industry. The association between IT expenditures and Tobin's q ratios is different, depending upon the banks' size (national vs regional) and strategic orientation (wholesale vs retail), in the Korean commercial banks for the period studied 1990-1996, For national commercial banks which have more clients and electronic banking systems than regional banks, IT expenditures appear to increase Tobin's q ratios. This may indicate that IT is linked to the ability to achieve economies of scale or network effects when large banks use IT as a strategic tool. The association between IT expenditures and management performance measures is also positive and statistically significant for retail-oriented banks. This research makes two important practical contributions with respect to financial reform. First, the evidence suggested that Korean commercial banks need to apply IT strategy in conjunction with restructuring strategy to be a super-bank and, hence, reap substantial competitive advantage from IT applications. Second, since the government recently encouraged commercial banks to increase credit loans as a means of financial reform, most banks tend to focus on retail banking. IT used in the retail banking sector contributes to improve management performance as the evidence suggested.

Currently, many companies are trying to be more competitive by implementing the most appropriate software package, called ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). ERP can support the company's business process. A repository, which can store and retrieve enterprise-wide information, is a key component of such software package. This paper implements an enterprise repository for the ERP. A well-known repository standard, IRDS (Information Resource Dictionary System), is employed for the repository architecture. The proposed metadata schema can help develop database, business applications, models, and workflow. To illustrate the practical usefulness, a real-life ERP prototype is built within the framework of the proposed repository.

The purpose of this paper is to determine success factors important to electronic payment system and also to review its environments in order to present development direction of electronic commerce in Korea. A field survey including interviews and questionnaire surveys is made in 12 experts who were identified as having research experiences and/or development experiences of electronic payment systems, 35 merchants who are doing business over the Internet, and 96 netizens who were identified as a consumer group. In this study, we reviewed four dimensions affecting the acceptance of electronic payment systems such as safety, security, convenience, and efficiency. Finally, we suggested a total of 32 factors important to electronic payment systems and classified all factors into four dimensions.

Studies of information technology assimilation have been limited primarily to information technology implementation issues that arise after purchasing and/or developing information technology and applications. Thus there is a need to step back and investigate what motives a manager to implement a information technology for his organization use. The purpose of this paper is to examine decision maker's attitudes and internal beliefs, especially the construct of alienation. This study findings indicate that decision-maker computer knowledge, computer experience, and education level are closely associated with alienated beliefs and attitudes toward information technology. Assuming technologies can provide advantages, these findings point to the need for change agents to minimize alienating beliefs and attitudes.

Legacy applications are valuable assets that should be integrated into next generation business systems. To gain this advantage, progressive companies can reverse engineer the legacy business operations. This paper presents a form-driven object-oriented reverse engineering(FORE) methodology by the use of business forms to recover semantics of legacy applications. They retain the user-oriented contents of business and thus are easily understandable. Our form driven object-oriented reverse engineering methodology consists of five phases: form and usage analysis, form object slicing, object structure modeling, scenario design, and model integration. Knowledge about form structure and user interaction with legacy applications is used to capture the design semantics. An object model, which consists of an object structure model and scenario results from such form knowledge. The resulting object model is more likely to help reverse engineers understand and reuse legacy systems.

This study investigates the effect of group size on group performance, here the quality of group decision, Four effects are proposed and tested in a field experimental setting : (1) the relationship between the group size and the distribution of individual's problem-solving ability ; (2) the change of the group decision quality as group size increases ; (3) the relationship between the group decision quality and the quality of the best/worst member as group size increases ; (4) the relationship between the group decision quality and the average quality of individuals in the group as group size increases. Data showed that contrary to the exiting results, group decision quality was not improved with the group size. Rather, it showed a little tendency that group decision quality was worsened with the group size. Data also showed that consensus-oriented group decision making process produced the compromised output. Thus, group decision quality was not better than the average group members'. The opinion of the best member was not accepted. The implications of the findings are discussed for the development of a Korean GSS.

The telecommunications of previous years have been utilized for internal usages, but those in current years have widely extended even to usages for Interorganizational Information System(IOIS) beyond its internal uses. Electronic Data Interchange(EDI), a subsidiary form of IOIS which permits interorganizational electronical exchanges of transaction documents through the telecommunications networks between and among computers, is expected to bring forth various innovative results with improved efficiency and productivity through the improvement and simplification of transaction processes, And it became needed and significant to review studies with practical values and necessity. This study is implemented on the basis of a judgement that Korea businesses can improve some of their structural problems of high costs by successfully adopting and implementing EDI system in their organizations. And it's also realized that more studies on the related subjects will benefit and be valuable for various applications. The major objectives of this research is to identify factors influencing in the implementation of EDI system by Korean business entities. Business which already implementation EDI system in their organizations were subjected to the survey. Also, this study intended to identify variables influencing in the implementation of EDI system and further provide directions needed in establishing or managing EDI system.

Developing Information Systems is a process of decomposing the entire systems into sub systems and identifying a hierarchical structure among the sub systems. Diagrammatic representation of hierarchy is an essential part of systems development since the identified hierarchical structures are usually presented in diagrams. The main goal of this research is to identify the most effective ways of representing system structures using diagrams. In order to achieve the main goal, this study performed three phases of research. In the first step, a theoretical model was constructed to conceptually explain users' comprehension on diagrams. Then visual factors of diagrammatic representations were identified based on the diagrams used in systems development. Finally, three consecutive experiments were conducted to identify the impacts of visual factors on the level of users' comprehension. The results indicate that familiarity and affordance of diagrams affect the degree of comprehension about the diagrams, which is in turn influenced by the complexity of tasks and the types of hierarchies. This paper concludes with the limitations of the study results and implications in the development of information systems.