Achieving Competitive Sustainable Advantages (CSAs) by Applying a Heuristic-Collaborative Risk Model

This research received no external funding. Publisher Copyright: © 2022 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.Increasing disruption and turmoil continuously challenges organizations regarding the achievement of short-and long-term objectives. Such a hostile environment results from both the natural evolution of the business landscape complexity and the emergence of unpredictable disruptive evets such as the COVID-19 pandemic. More than ever, organizations should continuously develop business strategies that help them to become more agile, adaptative, sustainable, and effectively respond to the countless business risks (threats and opportunities). Innovation, such as the development and implementation of new technology, new ways of thinking and executing work, are just some of the major factors that can help organizations to increase their likelihood of success. In this work, is proposed the incorporation of a heuristic risk model into a typical organizational business intelligence architecture, to identify collaborative critical success factors across the different phases of a project life cycle which can be used to guide, monitor, and increase the success outcome likelihood of ongoing and upcoming projects. Some benefits of the incorporation include: a higher speed regarding the collection and treatment process of project collaborative data, the output of more accurate results with residual bias associated, a timely and efficient 360◦ view regarding the identification of project collaborative risks, and the impact (positive or/and negative) of these on a project’s outputs and outcomes. Finally, the model capabilities of performing descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analysis, enables the generation of unique and actionable project’s lessons learned which can be used to make more data-informed decisions, and thus enhances the achievement of sustainable competitive advantages. The development and implementation of the proposed incorporation is illustrated with a with a real case study.publishersversionpublishe

Email and Website-Based Phishing Attack: Examining Online Users Security Behavior in Cyberspace Environment

Despite Emails and websites being widely used for communication, collaboration, and day-to-day activity, not all online users have the same knowledge and skills when determining the credibility of visited websites and email content. As a result, phishing, an identity theft cyber-attack that targets humans rather than computers, was born to harvest internet users' confidential information by taking advantage of human behavior and hurting an organization's continuity, reputation, and credibility. Because the success of phishing attacks depends on human behavior, using the Health-Belief Model, the study's objective is to examine significant factors that influence online users' security behavior in the context of Email and website-based phishing attacks. The model included eight predictor variables and was validated using quantitative data from 138 academic staff. The study findings exhibit that 4 out of 8 predictor variables, namely Perceived-Barriers, Perceived-Susceptibility, Self-efficacy, and Security-Awareness, are statistically significant in determining users' security behavior. The study's outcome is to assist in the appropriate design of both online and offline content for cyber security awareness programs, focusing on Email and website-based phishing attacks

Open Government Data Licensing Framework: An Informal Ontology for Supporting Mashup

Objectives of the thesis are –1) to identify the legal problems coming from mashups of Open Government Data (OGD) and 2) to purpose an informal ontology to help technical reusers of Public Sector Information to utilize datasets according to their intended purpose and in compliance with the legal obligations that govern the rights to reuse the data. A survey of national OGD portals found that the majority of OGD are released under inappropriate licenses, not fully complying with the legal rules that apply to the reuse of the data. Open Government Data can be released and covered by multiple licensing regimes, up to 33 in a single country. We have analysed the European Union (EU) legal framework of reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI), the EU Database Directive and copyright framework and other legal sources (e.g., licenses, legal notices, and terms of use) that can apply to open government Datasets. From this deep analysis we have modelled several major concepts in an Informal Ontology of Open Government Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model (iOGDL4M). The iOGDL4M will be used for qualifying datasets in order to improve the accuracy of their legal annotation. The iOGDL4M also aims to connect each applicable legal rule to official legal texts in order to direct legal experts and reusers to primary sources

Open Government Data Licensing Framework: An Informal Ontology for Supporting Mashup

Objectives of the thesis are –1) to identify the legal problems coming from mashups of Open Govern-ment Data (OGD) and 2) to purpose an informal ontology to help technical reusers of Public Sector Informa-tion to utilize datasets according to their intended purpose and in compliance with the legal obligations that govern the rights to reuse the data. A survey of national OGD portals found that the majority of OGD are released under inappropriate li-censes, not fully complying with the legal rules that apply to the reuse of the data. Open Government Data can be released and covered by multiple licensing regimes, up to 33 in a single country. We have analysed the European Union (EU) legal framework of reuse of Public Sector Information (PSI), the EU Database Directive and copyright framework and other legal sources (e.g., licenses, legal notices, and terms of use) that can apply to open government Datasets. From this deep analysis we have modelled several major concepts in an Informal Ontology of Open Government Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model (iOGDL4M). The iOGDL4M will be used for qualifying datasets in order to improve the accuracy of their legal anno-tation. The iOGDL4M also aims to connect each applicable legal rule to official legal texts in order to direct legal experts and reusers to primary sources. This research aims to present 1) a legal analysis of OGD regulation in the European Union and its mem-ber states; 2) the Survey of National Open Government Data Portals and analysis of the most commonly applied licenses and legal notices and their compatibility; and 3) the Informal Ontology of Open Govern-ment Data Licenses Framework for a Mash-up Model. This thesis is comprised of 4 publications. It consists of presentation of the research, the publications, and annexes that support the research

MLED_BI: A Novel Business Intelligence Design Approach to Support Multilingualism

With emerging markets and expanding international cooperation, there is a requirement to support Business Intelligence (BI) applications in multiple languages, a process which we refer to as Multilingualism (ML). ML in BI is understood in this research as the ability to store descriptive content (such as descriptions of attributes in BI reports) in more than one language at Data Warehousing (DWH) level and to use this information at presentation level to provide reports, queries or dashboards in more than one language. Design strategies for data warehouses are typically based on the assumption of a single language environment. The motivations for this research are the design and performance challenges encountered when implementing ML in a BI data warehouse environment. These include design issues, slow response times, delays in updating reports and changing languages between reports, the complexity of amending existing reports and the performance overhead. The literature review identified that the underlying cause of these problems is that existing approaches used to enable ML in BI are primarily ad-hoc workarounds which introduce dependency between elements and lead to excessive redundancy. From the literature review, it was concluded that a satisfactory solution to the challenge of ML in BI requires a design approach based on data independence the concept of immunity from changes and that such a solution does not currently exist. This thesis presents MLED_BI (Multilingual Enabled Design for Business Intelligence). MLED_BI is a novel design approach which supports data independence and immunity from changes in the design of ML data warehouses and BI systems. MLED_BI extends existing data warehouse design approaches by revising the role of the star schema and introducing a ML design layer to support the separation of language elements. This also facilitates ML at presentation level by enabling the use of a ML content management system. Compared to existing workarounds for ML, the MLED_BI design approach has a theoretical underpinning which allows languages to be added, amended and deleted without requiring a redesign of the star schema; provides support for the manipulation of ML content; improves performance and streamlines data warehouse operations such as ETL (Extract, Transform, Load). Minor contributions include the development of a novel BI framework to address the limitations of existing BI frameworks and the development of a tool to evaluate changes to BI reporting solutions. The MLED_BI design approach was developed based on the literature review and a mixed methods approach was used for validation. Technical elements were validated experimentally using performance metrics while end user acceptance was validated qualitatively with end users and technical users from a number of countries, reflecting the ML basis of the research. MLED_BI requires more resources at design and initial implementation stage than existing ML workarounds but this is outweighed by improved performance and by the much greater flexibility in ML made possible by the data independence approach of MLED_BI. The MLED_BI design approach enhances existing BI design approaches for use in ML environments

Security Risk Tolerance in Mobile Payment: A Trade-off Framework

Security is identified as a major barrier for consumers in adopting mobile payment. Although existing literature has incorporated security into the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), the Unified Theory of Acceptance, and the Use of Technology (UTAUT) and it has investigated the way in which security affects consumers’ acceptance of mobile payment, security is a factor only in diverse research models. Studies of mobile payment that focus on security are not available. Additionally, previous studies of mobile payment are based on Direct Carrier Billing- (DCB)-based mobile payment or Near Field Communication- (NFC)-based mobile payment. The results regarding security might not be applicable to Quick Response (QR) code-based mobile payment, the format that has become prevalent in recent years. As such, this study focuses on security of using mobile payment and develops a benefit-cost appraisal and a trade-off framework by integrating the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA), the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB), the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT), and the Rational Choice Theory (RCT). Particularly, this study introduces security risk tolerance into mobile payment study and sets it as the dependent variable. This study proposes that consumers’ security risk tolerance is shaped by their benefit-cost appraisal and their tradeoff process, regarding the use of mobile payment. Based on an online survey that collected data from 324 respondents in China, this study empirically tests and validates the research model. The findings suggest that consumers’ perceived benefit in using mobile payment is positively related to their security risk tolerance, whereas their perceived cost of using mobile payment is negatively related to their security risk tolerance. Convenience, safety, and savings positively affect consumers’ perceived benefit. The security threat positively affects consumers’ perceived cost. Payment tradition moderates consumers’ benefit-cost appraisal and trade-off process, but normative beliefs do not have a significant moderating effect. Self-efficacy only moderates the relationship between consumers’ perceived cost and their security risk tolerance. This study finds that males and females complete their benefit-cost appraisal and their trade-off process regarding security of using mobile payment very similarly. Gender differences only exist in the relationship between savings and consumers’ perceived benefit of using mobile payment

Investigating business process elements: a journey from the field of Business Process Management to ontological analysis, and back

Business process modelling languages (BPMLs) typically enable the representation of business processes via the creation of process models, which are constructed using the elements and graphical symbols of the BPML itself. Despite the wide literature on business process modelling languages, on the comparison between graphical components of different languages, on the development and enrichment of new and existing notations, and the numerous definitions of what a business process is, the BPM community still lacks a robust (ontological) characterisation of the elements involved in business process models and, even more importantly, of the very notion of business process. While some efforts have been done towards this direction, the majority of works in this area focuses on the analysis of the behavioural (control flow) aspects of process models only, thus neglecting other central modelling elements, such as those denoting process participants (e.g., data objects, actors), relationships among activities, goals, values, and so on. The overall purpose of this PhD thesis is to provide a systematic study of the elements that constitute a business process, based on ontological analysis, and to apply these results back to the Business Process Management field. The major contributions that were achieved in pursuing our overall purpose are: (i) a first comprehensive and systematic investigation of what constitutes a business process meta-model in literature, and a definition of what we call a literature-based business process meta-model starting from the different business process meta-models proposed in the literature; (ii) the ontological analysis of four business process elements (event, participant, relationship among activities, and goal), which were identified as missing or problematic in the literature and in the literature-based meta-model; (iii) the revision of the literature-based business process meta-model that incorporates the analysis of the four investigated business process elements - event, participant, relationship among activities and goal; and (iv) the definition and evaluation of a notation that enriches the relationships between activities by including the notions of occurrence dependences and rationales

Queensland University of Technology: Annual Report 2010

Our annual report provides an evaluation of our performance and achievements during the previous year, measured against our goals and strategic plans. It documents our performance in the three key areas of: teaching and learning research community service. The report includes a summary of financial performance and a copy of our audited accounts