Shopping for data standards and user behavior

by Arun Sen Mays Research Fellow and Professor of Information and Operations Management

The major emphasis of my research has always been to solve problems that benefit industry and help push the intellectual envelope in information systems research. Currently, I am pursuing several separate streams in my research.

Data Warehousing:

There has been a tremendous growth in the push for “data integration” that provides accurate, timely and useful information using data warehousing technology to create and maintain a data warehouse for a company.

One research project I’m currently involved in examines why a company adopts a data warehouse technology and how it diffuses or disseminates this knowledge throughout its organization. A second project deals with standards in creating a data warehouse. As there is no standard method available to build a data warehouse, companies are becoming desperate as they figure out which data warehousing vendors to pick to satisfy their needs. I scrutinize existing data warehousing methods to understand their commonalities and perhaps find a way to standardize the data warehousing process.

Web Analytics:

According to Shop.org, U.S.-based visits to retail web sites exceeded 10 percent of total Internet traffic for the first time ever during holiday shopping in 2004. That makes understanding online retail habits an important avenue in current IT research.

Each shopper’s interactions with a Web site can provide a site manager with a plethora of data known as clickstream data. This data includes visitors’ clicks (including what they looked at, what they selected and how long they spent looking) and a Web server's responses. My research in this area deals with inferring customer behaviors at the Web site from clickstream data. Some research issues I am currently considering include whether different segments of customers have different behavior patterns and whether high-margin buyers have different shopping patterns.

Economics of Open Source:

Open-source software development, responsible for such major products as Linux and MySqL database system, is becoming an increasingly important technique for developing large software products. In this process, software is developed by a community of dedicated software developers and users around the world.

But what motivates people to develop such software — which can be free to users — in the first place and how much does it cost to use open-source software for a typical client site? These are some of the important economic questions that I am currently investigating.

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