Online education in its various modes has been growing steadily worldwide due to the confluence of new technologies, global adoption of the Internet, and intensifying demand for a workforce trained periodically for the everevolving digital economy. Online education is on track to become mainstream by 2025. This editorial documents country-level factors that impact quantity and quality of online education. Such factors include industry (business); governments at local, state, and federal levels; country laws; ICT capacity; Internet/mobile technology diffusion; and income and digital divide. We provide implications for country and world organizations concerning online education.

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Although there are many articles in the NIS literature which address small-business computing, in effect the organizations represented in these studies are, in many ways, similar to medium-and large-sized organizations. In this article, we focus on businesses that are truly small: they have very few employees and there is no formal NIS department. In this environment, the small business owner/manager is the principal user and has to perform most of the IT functions. For such an environment, an IT satisfaction construct and measurement instrument are presented. A survey, using the measurement instrument, of a representative sample of small businesses was conducted to identify user satisfaction patterns. Key areas of IT dissatisfactions are: training and education (the most important), software maintenance, documentation, and vendor support. These deficiency areas can be appropriately addressed by software vendors and consultants. Finally, a contingency analysis of IT satisfaction based on business-related factors and owner characteristics was performed. A general observation was that the owner attributes have a greater impact on IT satisfaction than any of the business factors. The ones that stood out the most were the gender and the age of the owner. Article: 1. IntroductionWhile the use of information technology (IT) is steadily on the rise in small businesses, it still pales in comparison with IT applications in large-and medium-sized organizations. Estimates of small business use of computers over the years have ranged from below 30% to about 80 percent, depending on the location, size, and nature of the business [1,13,24]. A contextual model of small-business user IT satisfactionRelevant small-business computing literature, as cited earlier, was reviewed in order to identify factors that might be related to IT satisfaction. Particularly, some articles provided specific factors for inclusion [6,7,9,15,18,21]. An exploratory model 2 of factors contributing to IT satisfaction is shown in Fig. 1. The dependent variable in the model is the 'IT satisfaction'. We consider two categories of variables that may be related to satisfaction: business-related factors and owner characteristics. The first category has four variables and the second five, making for a total of nine variables. 3.

The key focus of this article is to provide an understanding about the complexities involved in global IT outsourcing and the management initiatives needed for the successful implementation of a global IT outsourcing partnership. Technological advances combined with increased globalization and competitive pressures have forced many firms to consider alternatives that will reduce organizational cost, and at the same time create and/or maintain their competitive advantage in the global market. Increasingly, the phenomenon of global outsourcing is being considered by many firms as a solution to their IT needs and problems. With increasing recognition and confidence in the programming competencies of IT workers in India and other countries, offshore outsourcing has gained increasing acceptance among U.S firms across all industries.Even though there has been a plethora of studies on domestic outsourcing of information systems, the research on outsourcing outside national borders (global outsourcing) has been scarce. One of the areas which lacks depth in the literature is in how to manage a global outsourcing partnership. Anecdotal evidence points to the fact that even the best outsourcing deals can go sour if not managed properly. In the context of global IT outsourcing, the management of the outsourcing relationship becomes even more complex because of the geographical distance and the difference in the national and organizational cultures of the client and vendor firms. This article identifies the key elements that should be considered while managing an outsourcing relationship with a foreign' vendor and the role the manager should play in a global outsourcing context. Article:

Information systems (IS) offshoring has become a widespread practice and a strategic sourcing choice for many firms. While much has been written by researchers about the factors that lead to successful offshoring arrangements from the client's viewpoint, the vendor's perspective has been largely scarce. The vendor perspective is equally important as offshore IS vendors need to make important decisions in terms of delivering operational and strategic performance and aligning their resources and processes in order to meet or exceed targeted outcomes. In this article, we propose and test a three-level capability-quality-performance (CQP) theoretical framework to understand vendor outcomes and their antecedents. The first level of the framework represents three vendor capabilities: relationship management, contract management, and information technology management. The second level has three mediating variables representing process quality: partnership, service, and deliverable quality. The third level has three dependent variables representing vendor outcomes: operational performance, strategic performance, and satisfaction. The model was tested with 188 vendor firms from India and China, the two most popular destinations for IS offshoring. Results support the CQP framework; vendor capabilities are significant predictors of intermediate quality † Corresponding author. 231 232 CQP of Offshore IS Vendors measures, which in turn affect vendor outcomes. Implications of the study findings to both theory development and IS offshore vendor strategic decision making are discussed.