3,493 research outputs found

    Innovation for zero-deforestation sustainable supply chain management services: a performance measurement and management approach

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    Food sector supply chains have significant negative environmental impacts, including the expansion of global food commodity production, which is driving tropical deforestation – a major climate and biodiversity problem. Innovative supply chain monitoring services promise to address such impacts. Legislation also designates “forest-risk commodities”, demanding supply chain due diligence of their provenance. But such data alone does not produce change. This study investigates how theory in performance measurement and management (PMM) can combine with sustainable supply chain management (SSCM) and decision theory (DT) via case study research that addresses paradoxes of simplicity and complexity

    A Survey on Forensics and Compliance Auditing for Critical Infrastructure Protection

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    The broadening dependency and reliance that modern societies have on essential services provided by Critical Infrastructures is increasing the relevance of their trustworthiness. However, Critical Infrastructures are attractive targets for cyberattacks, due to the potential for considerable impact, not just at the economic level but also in terms of physical damage and even loss of human life. Complementing traditional security mechanisms, forensics and compliance audit processes play an important role in ensuring Critical Infrastructure trustworthiness. Compliance auditing contributes to checking if security measures are in place and compliant with standards and internal policies. Forensics assist the investigation of past security incidents. Since these two areas significantly overlap, in terms of data sources, tools and techniques, they can be merged into unified Forensics and Compliance Auditing (FCA) frameworks. In this paper, we survey the latest developments, methodologies, challenges, and solutions addressing forensics and compliance auditing in the scope of Critical Infrastructure Protection. This survey focuses on relevant contributions, capable of tackling the requirements imposed by massively distributed and complex Industrial Automation and Control Systems, in terms of handling large volumes of heterogeneous data (that can be noisy, ambiguous, and redundant) for analytic purposes, with adequate performance and reliability. The achieved results produced a taxonomy in the field of FCA whose key categories denote the relevant topics in the literature. Also, the collected knowledge resulted in the establishment of a reference FCA architecture, proposed as a generic template for a converged platform. These results are intended to guide future research on forensics and compliance auditing for Critical Infrastructure Protection.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    How social media brand community development impacts consumer engagement and value formation; perspectives from the cosmetics industry

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    Social media and social media brand communities (SMBCs) are powerful tools for long-term consumer-brand relationship building. As a result, SMBCs are becoming significant marketing channels. Despite the wide use and adoption of SMBCs, further research is called for, as both practitioners and academics lack an understanding of the processes taking place within SMBCs. This study aims to contribute to knowledge of: (1) consumer engagement, (2) value formation in SMBCs, and (3) establishing the relationship between consumer engagement and value formation within the SMBC environment. This thesis adopts netnography, a method commonly employed to explore online communities in the social media environment. Three cosmetics brands were selected for this study. The selection was driven by geographical location, posting frequency and user activity. Data were retrospectively collected from Facebook SMBCs between 1st December 2019 and 31st January 2020. The data analysis employed thematic analysis techniques and was further guided by netnographic procedural steps, encompassing 25 distinct data operations. In total, 87 conversation threads were examined, which included 6,401 consumer comments. The findings present a typology of brand posts consisting of five overarching themes: presentation of offerings, belongingness building, engagement building, value-led, and educational. The research also identified a consumer comment typology consisting of four overarching themes brand-centred communication, cognitive-centred communication, conversation-centred communication, and personal experience-centred communication. Additionally, the thesis explores value formation processes within SMBCs, and the value types formed through consumer-to-consumer value formation interaction, brand-to-consumer value formation interaction, consumer-to-brand value formation interaction, as well as individual value formation processes, i.e., customer independent value formation and brand independent value facilitation. Through the findings, thesis broadens knowledge of the implication of SMBC development on consumer engagement. Additionally, this study extends the scope of value formation beyond service marketing, providing valuable insights into how value is created and perceived in the context of SMBCs. This research is also of significance for practice as it offers guidance and insight into how different brand posts can facilitate SMBC development, and, in turn, consumer engagement and value formation. The research provides a link between SMBC development and consumer engagement, highlighting the importance of SMBCs in the successful facilitation of consumer engagement. In particular, it provides evidence that the development of an SMBC has a significant impact on consumer engagement. The typology of brand posts that this study generates highlights the link between the types of posts published by the brand and SMBC development. In addition, the typology of consumer posts also suggests that there is a link between the types of comments published by consumers and the degree of SMBC development. As a result, the findings indicate significant growth in the variety of topics discussed within more developed SMBCs alongside a shift within the topics discussed. The study also investigates value formation within SMBCs, thereby enhancing the understanding of how SMBCs can facilitate value formation. By doing so, this research successfully extends the value formation lens predominantly applied in service marketing. In particular, the findings highlight the role of different actors in enabling the formation of different value types. Furthermore, the research emphasises the value of SMBCs as knowledge repositories as important virtual spaces for both brands and consumers. The findings facilitate understanding of the importance of SMBCs in value formation processes, contributing to advancing knowledge of the role of SMBCs in the development of consumer engagement and value formation. The thesis presents a contextualised conceptual framework of value formation within SMBCs, that captures different interactions taking place in the SMBC environment but also draws attention to the different value types generated through interaction between different actors. Finally, the thesis offers a conceptual framework of SMBCs, consumer engagement and value formation, which captures the correlation between the three researched concepts

    Conducting Online Focus Groups - Practical Advice for Information Systems Researchers

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    Video-based online focus groups (OFGs) present an emerging opportunity for Information Systems (IS) researchers to circumvent spatial and temporal constraints in collecting rich data. They enable researchers to overcome interpersonal and operational challenges arising from face-to-face (F2F) focus groups (FGs) by allowing participants, who are located anywhere in the world, to share their personal experiences from behind their screens. However, the realization of the full potential of OFGs for IS research is currently hampered by challenges and uncertainty over best practices when conducting such FGs. Consequently, we offer a detailed account of our own experiences with seven OFGs in the context of digital platforms. In supplementing our own experiences with those of others reported in extant literature on (online) FGs in and beyond the IS discipline, we (a) arrive at hurdles inherent to the OFG method, (b) derive lessons learned from our own experience with OFGs, and (c) prescribe actionable advice to researchers who are interested in conducting OFGs in the future

    “So what if ChatGPT wrote it?” Multidisciplinary perspectives on opportunities, challenges and implications of generative conversational AI for research, practice and policy

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    Transformative artificially intelligent tools, such as ChatGPT, designed to generate sophisticated text indistinguishable from that produced by a human, are applicable across a wide range of contexts. The technology presents opportunities as well as, often ethical and legal, challenges, and has the potential for both positive and negative impacts for organisations, society, and individuals. Offering multi-disciplinary insight into some of these, this article brings together 43 contributions from experts in fields such as computer science, marketing, information systems, education, policy, hospitality and tourism, management, publishing, and nursing. The contributors acknowledge ChatGPT’s capabilities to enhance productivity and suggest that it is likely to offer significant gains in the banking, hospitality and tourism, and information technology industries, and enhance business activities, such as management and marketing. Nevertheless, they also consider its limitations, disruptions to practices, threats to privacy and security, and consequences of biases, misuse, and misinformation. However, opinion is split on whether ChatGPT’s use should be restricted or legislated. Drawing on these contributions, the article identifies questions requiring further research across three thematic areas: knowledge, transparency, and ethics; digital transformation of organisations and societies; and teaching, learning, and scholarly research. The avenues for further research include: identifying skills, resources, and capabilities needed to handle generative AI; examining biases of generative AI attributable to training datasets and processes; exploring business and societal contexts best suited for generative AI implementation; determining optimal combinations of human and generative AI for various tasks; identifying ways to assess accuracy of text produced by generative AI; and uncovering the ethical and legal issues in using generative AI across different contexts

    Business Functions Capabilities and Small and Medium Enterprises’ Internationalization

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    Ineffective global expansion can adversely affect small and medium enterprises (SMEs) business outcomes. Business leaders are concerned with developing effective global expansion strategies to penetrate potential international markets, thus enhancing sustainability. Grounded in the business management systems theory, the purpose of this qualitative multi-case study was to explore strategies that leaders of Sub-Saharan Africa manufacturing SMEs use for global expansion. The participants were five manufacturing value-adding SME leaders participating in export markets. Using Yin’s five steps data analysis process, six themes emerged: (a) enterprise characterization, (b) understanding the enterprise’s product, (c) intra-enterprise factor-based strategies for export participation, (d) the enterprise’s external factor-based strategies for successful export venture, (e) global expansion strategies, and (f) serendipitous findings. A key recommendation for SME leaders is to analyze the critical components of their products and prepare to adjust them to the demand dimensions of the target market. The implications for positive social change include the potential to increase the enterprise’s wealth, increase employment, reduce poverty for all value chain participants, and growth in gross domestic product

    Attributes in Cloud Service Descriptions : A comprehensive Content Analysis

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    The exponential growth of cloud services can make it challenging for customers to find the best available service. This problem is further aggregated by not comprehensive and non-standardized service descriptions on cloud providers’ websites. This issue has not yet been adequately researched. In response to this gap and following the call (Lehner & Floerecke, 2023) to analyse IT service catalogues directed toward external customers, the purpose of this work is to examine the attribute usage in customer-facing service descriptions available on providers’ websites. A literature review thereby identified 76 different attributes used for cloud service description. Although there are a vast number of attributes used for cloud service descriptions, a core of attributes that were named in most papers, could be detected. In a following step, a content analysis of 100 service descriptions available on cloud providers’ websites was performed to understand, how frequently each attribute was used in the cloud service description from Cloud providers in general and also differentiated by size, cloud service model (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), and geographical location of the provider. The majority of attributes of the literature review could thereby be found in the content analysis as well. 15 more attributes have been added to the initial list as they could not be matched to any of the attributes from the literature. In addition, it could be verified that criteria such as size, service model, and geographical location have a significant impact on the attribute usage for service descriptions. Finally, expert interviews were conducted to get additional insights. The consent of the expert is that the main purpose of cloud service descriptions available on cloud providers’ websites is not necessarily to inform customers, but to attract and convince them. The insights of this work can provide valuable information to customers as well as cloud providers to understand, which attributes are currently used or not used for cloud service descriptions on provider’s websites. This research provides valuable information for both customers and cloud providers by identifying which attributes are currently used or not used for cloud service descriptions and can serve as a foundation for further research

    A comparative analysis of good enterprise data management practices:insights from literature and artificial intelligence perspectives for business efficiency and effectiveness

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    Abstract. This thesis presents a comparative analysis of enterprise data management practices based on literature and artificial intelligence (AI) perspectives, focusing on their impact on data quality, business efficiency, and effectiveness. It employs a systematic research methodology comprising of a literature review, an AI-based examination of current practices using ChatGPT, and a comparative analysis of findings. The study highlights the importance of robust data governance, high data quality, data integration, and security, alongside the transformative potential of AI. The limitations revolve around the primarily qualitative nature of the study and potential restrictions in the generalizability of the findings. However, the thesis offers valuable insights and recommendations for enterprises to optimize their data management strategies, underscoring the enhancement potential of AI in traditional practices. The research contributes to scientific discourse in information systems, data science, and business management
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