Service quality measurement in the internet context: A proposed model

The survival of any organisation in a highly competitive environment depends on its ability to provide the best service quality to its existing customers as the quality of service is a key factor in the success of any organisation. It is well established that the measurement of service quality is an important procedure for the improvement of the success and performance of any organisation. Facts indicate that more attention is needed toward developing an industry-specific scale for measuring customer service quality within the still-developing sector of Internet-based self-service technologies. The main objectives of this research paper are two-fold; firstly, to review comprehensively previous and contemporary literature on service quality measurement and to discuss the key issues on the development of an industry-specific scale for measuring customer service quality in the specific context of Internet-based self-service technologies, secondly, to propose a conceptual model for service quality perceptions of Internet-based self-service technologies through identifying its key antecedents and consequences. The findings of this study will be significant for both scholars and practitioners in this area as it provides a deep understanding of the way customers evaluate services provided via self-service technologies

A characteristics framework for Semantic Information Systems Standards

Semantic Information Systems (IS) Standards play a critical role in the development of the networked economy. While their importance is undoubted by all stakeholders—such as businesses, policy makers, researchers, developers—the current state of research leaves a number of questions unaddressed. Terminological confusion exists around the notions of “business semantics”, “business-to-business interoperability”, and “interoperability standards” amongst others. And, moreover, a comprehensive understanding about the characteristics of Semantic IS Standards is missing. The paper addresses this gap in literature by developing a characteristics framework for Semantic IS Standards. Two case studies are used to check the applicability of the framework in a “real-life” context. The framework lays the foundation for future research in an important field of the IS discipline and supports practitioners in their efforts to analyze, compare, and evaluate Semantic IS Standard

Context-driven progressive enhancement of mobile web applications: a multicriteria decision-making approach

Personal computing has become all about mobile and embedded devices. As a result, the adoption rate of smartphones is rapidly increasing and this trend has set a need for mobile applications to be available at anytime, anywhere and on any device. Despite the obvious advantages of such immersive mobile applications, software developers are increasingly facing the challenges related to device fragmentation. Current application development solutions are insufficiently prepared for handling the enormous variety of software platforms and hardware characteristics covering the mobile eco-system. As a result, maintaining a viable balance between development costs and market coverage has turned out to be a challenging issue when developing mobile applications. This article proposes a context-aware software platform for the development and delivery of self-adaptive mobile applications over the Web. An adaptive application composition approach is introduced, capable of autonomously bypassing context-related fragmentation issues. This goal is achieved by incorporating and validating the concept of fine-grained progressive application enhancements based on a multicriteria decision-making strategy

Web Site Analysis: A Review and Assessment of Previous Research

The emergence of the World Wide Web as a major communication and transaction channel stresses the preeminent importance of a company\u27s Web site for representing the organization, interacting with customers and conducting transactions. In comparison to other channels, the opportunities for targeting specific market segments are somehow limited, due to the Internet\u27s worldwide reach and predominantly anonymous users. Additionally, an ever-increasing number of customers are going online, which prevents the fine tuning of a site for specific user groups. Therefore, it seems essential that organizations possessing Web presence should be well aware of their site\u27s general functionality and how it is perceived by Internet users. For many years the analysis of Web sites has been one of the major topics for both scholars and practitioners, which led to a huge number of different techniques being used for the evaluation of sites. Furthermore, a variety of different theories and models have been developed which include the effects of Web sites as dependent or independent variables. In this paper, I compare different approaches to Web site analysis and present a classification framework. Numerous examples will be given to illustrate the various dimensions of the framework. Furthermore, benefits and drawbacks of the respective methods will be discussed where applicable. The results provide important insights into the current state of the art of Web analysis and will be supportive for anyone planning to conduct a Web analysis as well as for someone who is interested in getting an overview of the research field

A framework for cots software evaluation and selection for COTS mismatches handling and non-functional requirements

The decision to purchase Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software needs systematic guidelines so that the appropriate COTS software can be selected in order to provide a viable and effective solution to the organizations. However, the existing COTS software evaluation and selection frameworks focus more on functional aspects and do not give adequate attention to accommodate the mismatch between user requirements and COTS software specification, and also integration with non functional requirements of COTS software. Studies have identified that these two criteria are important in COTS software evaluation and selection. Therefore, this study aims to develop a new framework of COTS software evaluation and selection that focuses on handling COTS software mismatches and integrating the nonfunctional requirements. The study is conducted using mixed-mode methodology which involves survey and interview. The study is conducted in four main phases: a survey and interview of 63 organizations to identify COTS software evaluation criteria, development of COTS software evaluation and selection framework using Evaluation Theory, development of a new decision making technique by integrating Analytical Hierarchy Process and Gap Analysis to handle COTS software mismatches, and validation of the practicality and reliability of the proposed COTS software Evaluation and Selection Framework (COTS-ESF) using experts’ review, case studies and yardstick validation. This study has developed the COTS-ESF which consists of five categories of evaluation criteria: Quality, Domain, Architecture, Operational Environment and Vendor Reputation. It also provides a decision making technique and a complete process for performing the evaluation and selection of COTS software. The result of this study shows that the evaluated aspects of the framework are feasible and demonstrate their potential and practicality to be applied in the real environment. The contribution of this study straddles both the research and practical perspectives of software evaluation by improving decision making and providing a systematic guidelines for handling issue in purchasing viable COTS software

An introduction to STRIKE : STRuctured Interpretation of the Knowledge Environment

Knowledge forms a critical part of the income generation of the system and the complex environment in which actors participate in the creation of knowledge assets merits robust, eclectic consideration. STRIKE - STRuctured Interpretation of the Knowledge Environment affords an unobtrusive and systematic framework to observe, record, evaluate and articulate concrete and abstract elements of a setting, across internal and external dimensions. Inter-relationships between actor and environment are preserved. STRIKE is supported by underlying techniques to enrich data and enhance the authenticity of its representation. Adoption of photography and videography tools provides illustrative and interpretive benefits and facilitates researcher reflexivity. This structured approach to data analysis and evaluation mitigates criticisms of methodological rigour in observational research and affords standardisation potential, germane for application in a verification or longitudinal capacity. Advancing exploratory validation studies, the method is employed to evaluate the knowledge environments of two enterprises in the UK creative sector. These occupy a critical role in fostering entrepreneurial innovation alongside participant self-efficacy. Access Space in Sheffield and the Bristol Hackspace are committed to open software, open knowledge and open participation; sharing peer learning, creativity and socio-technical aims to address broadly similar community needs. Drawing on Wittgenstein’s Picture Theory of Meaning, the knowledge management perspective is abstracted from the STRIKE assessment. It is argued that the tiered analytical approach which considers a breadth of dimensions enhances representation and interpretation of the knowledge environment and presents a diagnostic and prescriptive capability to actualise change. The paper concludes by evaluating framework effectiveness, findings application and future direction

A Value-Driven Framework for Software Architecture

Software that is not aligned with the business values of the organization for which it was developed does not entirely fulfill its raison d’etre. Business values represent what is important in a company, or organization, and should influence the overall software system behavior, contributing to the overall success of the organization. However, approaches to derive a software architecture considering the business values exchanged between an organization and its market players are lacking. Our quest is to address this problem and investigate how to derive value-centered architectural models systematically. We used the Technology Research method to address this PhD research question. This methodological approach proposes three steps: problem analysis, innovation, and validation. The problem analysis was performed using systematic studies of the literature to obtain full coverage on the main themes of this work, particularly, business value modeling, software architecture methods, and software architecture derivation methods. Next, the innovation step was accomplished by creating a framework for the derivation of a software reference architecture model considering an organization’s business values. The resulting framework is composed of three core modules: Business Value Modeling, Agile Reference Architecture Modeling, and Goal-Driven SOA Architecture Modeling. While the Business value modeling module focuses on building a stakeholder-centric business specification, the Agile Reference Architecture Modeling and the Goal-Driven SOA Architecture Modeling modules concentrate on generating a software reference architecture aligned with the business value specification. Finally, the validation part of our framework is achieved through proof-of-concept prototypes for three new domain specific languages, case studies, and quasi-experiments, including a family of controlled experiments. The findings from our research show that the complexity and lack of rigor in the existing approaches to represent business values can be addressed by an early requirements specification method that represents the value exchanges of a business. Also, by using sophisticated model-driven engineering techniques (e.g., metamodels, model transformations, and model transformation languages), it was possible to obtain source generators to derive a software architecture model based on early requirements value models, while assuring traceability throughout the architectural derivation process. In conclusion, despite using sophisticated techniques, the derivation process of a software reference architecture is helped by simple to use methods supported by black box transformations and guidelines that facilitate the activities for the less experienced software architects. The experimental validation process used confirmed that our framework is feasible and perceived as easy to use and useful, also indicating that the participants of the experiments intend to use it in the future

What to Fix? Distinguishing between design and non-design rules in automated tools

Technical debt---design shortcuts taken to optimize for delivery speed---is a critical part of long-term software costs. Consequently, automatically detecting technical debt is a high priority for software practitioners. Software quality tool vendors have responded to this need by positioning their tools to detect and manage technical debt. While these tools bundle a number of rules, it is hard for users to understand which rules identify design issues, as opposed to syntactic quality. This is important, since previous studies have revealed the most significant technical debt is related to design issues. Other research has focused on comparing these tools on open source projects, but these comparisons have not looked at whether the rules were relevant to design. We conducted an empirical study using a structured categorization approach, and manually classify 466 software quality rules from three industry tools---CAST, SonarQube, and NDepend. We found that most of these rules were easily labeled as either not design (55%) or design (19%). The remainder (26%) resulted in disagreements among the labelers. Our results are a first step in formalizing a definition of a design rule, in order to support automatic detection.Comment: Long version of accepted short paper at International Conference on Software Architecture 2017 (Gothenburg, SE

Realising benefits in primary healthcare infrastructures

Purpose: This paper focuses upon the requirements to manage change, tangible and intangible benefits in a joint approach to deliver outputs on time, to quality and cost without failing to realise the benefits of the change. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate the need for benefits driven programme/project management as well as the importance of identifying the stakeholders’ level of involvement and contribution throughout the process, and manage their expectations. Design/methodology/approach: The methodology used is based on an action research approach, combining findings from a literature review and case studies within UK’s primary healthcare sector. Findings: Findings demonstrate development of a Benefits Realisation (BeReal) approach in healthcare through looking at case studies taking place within UK’s primary and acute healthcare sector Research limitations/implications: The framework development is based upon theoretical evidence and further research is needed to test and validate its robustness. Originality/value: The application of Benefits Realisation and Management in developing and delivering primary healthcare facilities. Keywords: Benefits management, Benefits realisation, healthcare infrastructures, process and LIF