From the Editors

Welcome to the last issue for this year. To paraphrase the old saying, how quickly time flies when one is having fun -- especially in the editorial role for Data Base. We continue to reap the benefits of seeing a number of projects that were already under development upon our arrival come to fruition. This special issue on e-commerce system development practices managed by Bjørn Erik Munkvold and Sandeep Purao is a fine example. The articles as a group provide good examples of how the business context can interact with the system development process. Specifically, we are able to examine both the commonality and differences for an e-commerce software development organization, startup venture for an on-line magazine business, and an on-line computer game developer.As we complete our first year, we continue to work on both operational and substantive issues. Operationally, we are in the process of creating an online tracking system for our editorial board members who now serve the same role as senior editors. Our goal in the future is to expand the system to provide information to other key stakeholders (e.g., authors and reviewers). Substantively, we continue to encourage researchers to provide either comprehensive survey reviews or framework papers covering key areas of IS. Also, in recognition of the merger of SIGCPR, a call for special section on IT personnel research is now underway with guest editors Fred Niederman and Munir Mandviwalla. We hope that our new SIGCPR members will look towards Data Base as a key outlet for their research.Yet, probably one of our most important goals we have embarked on is to emphasize the quality of Data Base articles. To that end, we are committed to publishing only theoretically grounded research (as opposed to purely descriptive works). Moreover, we firmly follow the precept of not sending out any papers for review that we do not feel have a good potential for acceptance. To date, we have increased the rejection rate at the front end to approximately 50 percent of submissions. Another significant percentage is sent back with the opportunity for the authors to improve and resubmit in the future. While the exact percentages will likely change in the future, we believe greater scrutiny at the front end should help improve the quality of published papers.Finally, in our last issue, we announced changes in our editorial board. During that entire process, we inadvertently left Elias Awad from the entire process. We traced the culprit ironically back to an incomplete "database" that we used. Upon contact, Elias has indicated that he was ready to take a much-deserved break. We certainly didn't blame him since he noted that he first joined the editorial board of Data Base back in 1974. Moreover, Elias literally started with ACM and SIGBDP (now SIGMIS) in the fall of 1964 out of the University of Chicago when he was a doctoral student at Northwestern. Now, that's dedication.