Letter from the editors

Greetings from Memphis; from the Editor's suite, we have lots of new developments. There are new initiatives, new ideas, new directions and new staff members. Welcome Colleen Schwarz as Managing Editor, as of this issue. Colleen takes the ME role as Andy transitions to an important special Senior Editor role related to another important initiative.

We're actively seeking measure validation papers at Data Base. In view of the relative paucity of scale and index validation studies in the major IS journals, we've decided this is an important service we can provide the colleagues in the discipline - both in terms of providing a well-regarded and internationally-recognized publication outlet for your best measurement research, but also, to provide the colleagues with an important new source of freshly validated measures for their own research. Send us your scales! Provide us with your indices. We are a measurement-friendly journal, appreciating measurement for measurement's sake.

In the pipeline, there are several interesting issues. At the top of the list is the Chinese AIS issue, representing leading edge IT thinking from the other side of the world. A side of the world that is increasingly important to us in business and technology. Also, we have leading edge HCI research coming soon as part of a focus issue.

In this issue we have some interesting work from well-known colleagues. Henri Barki provides us with a long-awaited treatise on the conceptualization and development of constructs. As our empirical work hinges upon the quality of our operationalization, we consider this topic vital. And, as Henri aptly notes, award winning papers at the top journals inevitably demonstrate top-rate construct development. Here is a research classic in the making with Henri's guide to construct conceptualization. Cite it widely and freely; you'll be glad you did.

Fadel, Brown and Tanniru make a critical point with their article: we understand process reengineering well, and we understand knowledge transfer well, but have we integrated our understanding across the two areas? This is an interesting point, in as much as it is information technology that so often necessitates business process reengineering, yet it is information technology that provides the solution to the inevitable training difficulties that arise when works must learn new processes in the midst of BPR initiatives.

Pleszkoch, Linger and Hevner bring us an excellent technical perspective on the software testing process. Software testing is a topic of interest here at Data Base, and these colleagues introduce an important idea for testing from an engineering perspective: function extraction. The critical point is that conventional testing methodologies often cannot adequately represent the full range of potential "behaviors" a software development is capable of. What an application or a system "does" is the focus of testing; we wish to determine that the system does what it is supposed to do correctly. Yet highly complex systems and applications are hard to evaluate on all possible system actions and behaviors. This article represents an emerging view on how to overcome this problem in a testing environment that is at once highly complex and highly dynamic.

Cao, Crews, Lin, Burgoon and Nunamaker have provided a fascinating view of modern technology-enabled learning. As we quickly evolve into the ear of distance education, it is important that we understand how our information systems support and enhance the learning process, aside from the expected focal point of how we can deliver courses via IT channels. This study begins the process of bridging the gap between studies that represent rich media presentations of "lecture TV" with emergent interactive approaches that more closely represent the interactive give and take of a live in-person learning environment.

As we go to press this summer for the present issue, we hope you are enjoying a productive and enjoyable inter-semester time. Some of us continue to teach, some of us take time off from the classroom to focus on research, and some of us get our journal summer issue into production. We hope this particular issue of Data Base contributes to whichever summer task you have assigned yourself, even it is just to catch up on your reading in a comfortable vacation environment.