Letter from the editors
Authors: Stafford Tom , Chau Patrick Y.K. 
Published: April 2008

Hello, scholars, and welcome to volume 39(2) of Data Base! We have lots of interesting perspectives on the world of IT in these pages, and plenty of interesting developments to share with you.

In this issue we feature the work of a number of leading scholars, including an article by Miguel Aguirre-Urreta and George Marakas on evolving conceptual modeling methods in the software development process. This critical examination of the extended entity relationship model as an alternative to more mature conceptual modeling formalisms, such as the UML of the object orientation, provides us with important new perspectives on the evolving practice of software engineering. This sort of work fills a niche that Data Base seeks to serve in the emergent area of software design and testing. You'll see more work of this sort very soon in Data Base, as part of a forthcoming special issue on systems testing later in the year. Also in these pages, we feature Arik Ragowsky and David Gefen, with an important article on ERP and the strategic orientation of firms. Data Base is edited in a town that features a number of high profile ERP implementations, and the topic has been of long standing interest to us from both strategic and operational perspectives. These colleagues give us the useful theoretical lens of the Strategic Grid through which to view ERP implementation projects, and this provides a critical contribution to our understanding of the design and implementation of these complex and mission-critical systems in the firm.

We also have a fascinating study on virtual teams by Rosalie Ocker and Jerry Fjermestad. This emergent organizational form gets a lot of attention in our research and our teaching, as IT development globalizes. But, how well do we really understand the factors that lead to better performance in teams separated by geographical distances? These virtual teams are supported by information systems implementations designed to support work groups, but deep investigation into the use of such systems and the success factors arising from them remains to be conducted, until now. It appears that in using asynchronous communications, high performing teams don't just exchange ideas and information - they argue about things. They debate, and closely examine pros and cons of various suggestions and proposals as part of solving their workgroup problems and completing their assigned tasks. Such systems-supported teams, it seems, spend far less time brainstorming and exploring dimensions of problems than they do making critical commentaries and debating solutions to the problems, often in classic argumentative styles.

In addition to the leading-edge work you find in this issue, you can expect more of the same soon to come in these pages. Your Data Base is engaging innovation and evolution in order to both better serve you as a research outlet and better serve the scientific community of information systems researchers with expanded and innovative venues for scholarly discourse. Watch closely for coming developments; we intend, for example, to begin the practice of actively soliciting measure validation research. It is our view that the reluctance of many information systems journals to welcome and nurture the scale development process, specifically for its own benefits and values, has served to stifle innovation and creativity in the development of new measures for important new constructs in our literature. This, in turn, can only hamper the precision with which we as scholars operationalize these important constructs in our research. Particularly at a time when new measure development techniques and practices are emerging in our literature, it is critical that we welcome and promulgate important work that serves to demonstrate not only the methods for, but also the validated outcomes of, operationalizations of critical information systems constructs. For that purpose, Managing Editor Andy Schwarz soon will be taking an important Senior Editor role specific to the solicitation, review and publication of measure development articles in our pages. As part of that process, we will have a new Managing Editor to introduce to you with the advent of our next issue.

There are additional developments yet ahead, including an issue showcasing the research produced by the Chinese chapter of the AIS, an issue dedicated to HCI research, and much more of interest to the scholarly community. We will be informing you of these developments in more detail as they reach fruition. Meanwhile, continue to send us your best work. We are easily accessible at our global online submission and review portal, located through links at http://the-detabase.org, or directly accessed at Editorial Manager via http://www.editorialmanager.com/sigmisdb/. We look forward to hearing from you!