DEVELOPING AND VALIDATING A QUALITY ASSESSMENT SCALE FOR WEB PORTALS

The Web portals business model has spread rapidly over the last few years. Despite this, there have been very few scholarly findings about which services and characteristics make a Web site a portal and which dimensions determine the customers’ evaluation of the portal’s quality. Taking the example of financial portals, the authors develop a theoretical framework of the Web portal quality construct by determining the number and nature of corresponding dimensions, which are: security and trust, basic services quality, cross-buying services quality, added values, transaction support and relationship quality. To measure the six portal quality dimensions, multi item measurement scales are developed and validated.Construct Validation, Customer Retention, E-Banking, E- Loyalty, Service Quality, Web Portals

A user perspective of quality of service in m-commerce

This is the post-print version of the Article. The official published version can be accessed from the link below - Copyright @ 2004 Springer VerlagIn an m-commerce setting, the underlying communication system will have to provide a Quality of Service (QoS) in the presence of two competing factors—network bandwidth and, as the pressure to add value to the business-to-consumer (B2C) shopping experience by integrating multimedia applications grows, increasing data sizes. In this paper, developments in the area of QoS-dependent multimedia perceptual quality are reviewed and are integrated with recent work focusing on QoS for e-commerce. Based on previously identified user perceptual tolerance to varying multimedia QoS, we show that enhancing the m-commerce B2C user experience with multimedia, far from being an idealised scenario, is in fact feasible if perceptual considerations are employed

The Impact Of Technology Trust On The Acceptance Of Mobile Banking Technology Within Nigeria

With advancement in the use of information technology seen as a key factor in economic development, developed countries are increasingly reviewing traditional systems, in various sectors such as education, health, transport and finance, and identifying how they may be improved or replaced with automated systems. In this study, the authors examine the role of technology trust in the acceptance of mobile banking in Nigeria as the country attempts to transition into a cashless economy. For Nigeria, like many other countries, its economic growth is linked, at least in part, to its improvement in information technology infrastructure, as well as establishing secure, convenient and reliable payments systems. Utilising the Technology Acceptance Model, this study investigates causal relationships between technology trust and other factors influencing user’s intention to adopt technology; focusing on the impact of seven factors contributing to technology trust. Data from 1725 respondents was analysed using confirmatory factor analysis and the results showed that confidentiality, integrity, authentication, access control, best business practices and non-repudiation significantly influenced technology trust. Technology trust showed a direct significant influence on perceived ease of use and usefulness, a direct influence on intention to use as well as an indirect influence on intention to use through its impact on perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. Furthermore, perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness showed significant influence on consumer’s intention to adopt the technology. With mobile banking being a key driver of Nigeria’s cashless economy goals, this study provides quantitative knowledge regarding technology trust and adoption behaviour in Nigeria as well as significant insight on areas where policy makers and mobile banking vendors can focus strategies engineered to improve trust in mobile banking and increase user adoption of their technology

Human Resource Information Systems for Competitive Advantage: Interviews with Ten Leaders

[Excerpt] Increasingly, today\u27s organizations use computer technology to manage human resources (HR). Surveys confirm this trend (Richards-Carpenter, 1989; Grossman and Magnus, 1988; Human Resource Systems Professionals 1988; KPMGPeat Marwick, 1988). HR professionals and managers routinely have Personnel Computers (PCs) or computer terminals on their desks or in their departments. HR computer applications, once confined to payroll and benefit domains, now encompass incentive compensation, staffing, succession planning, and training. Five years ago, we had but a handful of PC-based software applications for HR management. Today, we find a burgeoning market of products spanning a broad spectrum of price, sophistication, and quality (Personnel Journal, 1990). Top universities now consider computer literacy a basic requirement for students of HR, and many consulting firms and universities offer classes designed to help seasoned HR professionals use computers in their work (Boudreau, 1990). Changes in computer technology offer expanding potential for HR management (Business Week, 1990; Laudon and Laudon, 1988)

Transparency dilemmas, information technology and alliances in agriculture and food industry

alliance, agriculture, food industry

Optimized Remote Network Using Specified Factors As Key Performance Indices

This paper discuss the implementation of an optimized remote network, using latency, bandwidth and packet drop rate as key performance indicator (KPI) to measure network performance and quality of service (QoS). We compared the network performance characteristics derived on the Wide Area Network (WAN) when using Fiber, VSAT and Point-to-Point VPN across the internet respectively as the network infrastructure. Network performance variables are measured across various links (VAST, Fiber and VPN across the internet) and the corresponding statistical data is analyzed and used as base-line for the optimization of a corporate network performance. The qualities of service offered on the network before and after optimization are analyzed and use to determine the level of improvement on the network performance achieved

Thought for Food: the impact of ICT on agribusiness

This report outlines the impact of ICT on the food economy. On the basis of a literature review from four disciplines - knowledge management, management information systems, operations research and logistics, and economics - the demand for new ICT applications, the supply of new applications and the match between demand and supply are identified. Subsequently the impact of new ICT applications on the food economy is discussed. The report relates the development of new technologies to innovation and adoption processes and economic growth, and to concepts of open innovations and living lab

Middleware-based Database Replication: The Gaps between Theory and Practice

The need for high availability and performance in data management systems has been fueling a long running interest in database replication from both academia and industry. However, academic groups often attack replication problems in isolation, overlooking the need for completeness in their solutions, while commercial teams take a holistic approach that often misses opportunities for fundamental innovation. This has created over time a gap between academic research and industrial practice. This paper aims to characterize the gap along three axes: performance, availability, and administration. We build on our own experience developing and deploying replication systems in commercial and academic settings, as well as on a large body of prior related work. We sift through representative examples from the last decade of open-source, academic, and commercial database replication systems and combine this material with case studies from real systems deployed at Fortune 500 customers. We propose two agendas, one for academic research and one for industrial R&D, which we believe can bridge the gap within 5-10 years. This way, we hope to both motivate and help researchers in making the theory and practice of middleware-based database replication more relevant to each other.Comment: 14 pages. Appears in Proc. ACM SIGMOD International Conference on Management of Data, Vancouver, Canada, June 200