Business Method Patents Data

Over the past few months I've been working with two very useful (and free) data sources for US patents that give some insight into firm-level patent data.

• COMETS [USPTO Patent Data from 1976-2010] (Zucker & Darby, 2011)
• NBER Patent Data Project [USPTO Patent Data from 1976-2006]

The chart below visualizes the lag time between application & award for USPTO Business Method (class 705) patents awarded through 2010 (Zucker & Darby, 2011). I'll post more firm-level data in the coming weeks.

Lynne G. Zucker and Michael R. Darby, COMETS Data Description, release 1.0, Los Angeles, CA: UCLA Center for International Science, Technology, and Cultural Policy, July 1, 2011.

Information Systems Research Update Tumblr

As a New Year's resolution I decided I need to be more proactive in staying updated on the lastest research in information systems. I haven't been able to find a single source that provides updates on the top IS Journals, so I created a Tumblr where I hope to post the updated articles citations and abstracts for the top six IS journals as identified by the AIS Senior Scholars (EJIS, ISJ, ISR, JAIS, JMIS, MISQ).

See the Information Systems Research Update tumblr here.

Is the CIO the highest ranking IT executive in a company?

InformationWeek generates an annual list of 500 of the "nation's most innovative IT organizations, providing a unique opportunity to understand and examine the business practices of these firms across core areas of operations, including, technology deployment, IT budgets, business-technology infrastructure, and IT strategies" (IW500 FAQs). Although the IW500 collects a great deal of benchmark data I only took the publicly available (i.e. free) demographic information from the 2010 list and put the data in a spreadsheet.

Although the basic methodology for determining the IW500 may have weaknesses, the data still provides a useful snapshot of the current state of IT governance across industries. The variables include the organization name, industry, name of the 'highest IT executive' in the company as well as the title of the highest IT executive. I did a simple text analysis of the titles to determine how many companies identified their highest IT executive as someone holding the title of Chief Information Officer. Of the 500 companies on the list, 386 (77.2%) included CIO as one of the titles of the highest ranking IT executive. Some organizations listed other C-level executives or joint-titles including CTO, CFO, VP for Information Technology, and even CEO. See the chart I created that breaks down the number companies on the list by industry. For the 114 companies that included someone other than a CIO as the highest ranking IT executive, it remains unclear whether or not those organizations have a CIO at a lower level in the company. View or download the Google Spreadsheet I created for additional data [1=Yes; 0=No].

A Call for an Open Data Source to Promote IT Research- Bridging the Research Data Divide

Information Systems researchers, past, present, or future, may be interested in my ramblings on the possibility of developing a structure for regular collection of data to help contribute to the problem of data scarcity in the field of IS. Obviously, there are many questions to be ask and decisions to be made to move this idea forward.

{It's only my initial thoughts- a work in progress}