IT Governance-An Integrated Framework and Roadmap: How to Plan, Deploy and Sustain for Improved Effectiveness

The issues, opportunities and challenges of effectively managing and governing an organization’s Information Technology (IT) demands, investments and resources has become a major concern of the Board and executive management in enterprises on a global basis. A rapidly growing number of organizations have become increasingly dependent on a broad array of technologies to manage and grow their businesses. IT is an integral part of most organizations today and will certainly become more critical in the future. This paper proposes a comprehensive and integrated IT governance framework and roadmap which identifies the appropriate current and emerging best practices methodologies for each of the major IT Governance components that must be addressed in any approach and is critical for companies to achieve more effective alignment and management of IT. The framework can serve as a guideline for any organization to select and customize the appropriate approach applicable to its environment, plans, priorities, capabilities and available resources. The findings and implications are based on extensive primary and secondary research and are grounded in a review of current and emerging industry and government best practices and select case studies of leading global and regional organizations based on the recently published book by the author entitled, “Implementing Effective IT Governance and IT Management,” published by Van Haren Publishers, 2015

The Role of the Mangement Sciences in Research on Personalization

We present a review of research studies that deal with personalization. We synthesize current knowledge about these areas, and identify issues that we envision will be of interest to researchers working in the management sciences. We take an interdisciplinary approach that spans the areas of economics, marketing, information technology, and operations. We present an overarching framework for personalization that allows us to identify key players in the personalization process, as well as, the key stages of personalization. The framework enables us to examine the strategic role of personalization in the interactions between a firm and other key players in the firm's value system. We review extant literature in the strategic behavior of firms, and discuss opportunities for analytical and empirical research in this regard. Next, we examine how a firm can learn a customer's preferences, which is one of the key components of the personalization process. We use a utility-based approach to formalize such preference functions, and to understand how these preference functions could be learnt based on a customer's interactions with a firm. We identify well-established techniques in management sciences that can be gainfully employed in future research on personalization.CRM, Persoanlization, Marketing, e-commerce,

The Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty on E-Marketing: Moderating Effect of Perceived Value

The paper discusses the various components that impacts customer satisfaction, loyalty, e-marketing and perceived value has the moderating effect. Online platforms continues been important because of the reach and the diversity of the customers meaning e-marketing should target the unique market. It includes developing products and services in addition to procedures and processes that reflect the wants of the customers. For example, the studies have shown the design of the website, customer engagement, and skills integrated into the entire processes are important. Factors such as security, ease of navigation, conflict resolution and effective feedback systems are example of frameworks that creates a positive reputation about a form, which increase the satisfaction of the users. Recommendations have also been provided for the ways and strategies that businesses have to operate to create customer loyalty and sustain such loyalty. The Impact of Customer Satisfaction and Loyalty on E-Marketing: Moderating Effect of Perceived Value In marketing regime, customer loyalty is seen as the most important issues that affect way business is conducted and performed. Managers and researchers have used many antecedents for explaining customer loyalty. The literature also provides numerous measures for evaluating loyalty (Jain et al. 2018; Momotaz & Hasan, 2018). The common perspective of loyalty and customer satisfaction is based on repurchase intention and customer commitment (Pandey & Chawla, 2018). Word of mouth and willingness to pay are defined as the direct variables that are consequences of loyalty (Pandey & Chawla, 2016; Jain et al. 2018). Loyal customers provide numerous advantages to an organization including recommendation to others, higher share of wallet, and higher customer retention rates. Customer satisfaction and perceived value are linked to companies’ financial performance, recommend intention, repurchase and retention. Researchers perceives marketing as a framework that embraces the conception of the value notion in that customer ways the benefits received from the firm the offers the products and services and the consumer is ready to acquire the product foregoing other benefits (Ahmad, Rahman & Khan, 2017; Momotaz & Hasan, 2018). The goal of any establishment is customer satisfaction, which creates numerous benefits to an establishment (Pandey & Chawla, 2016; Potdar et al. 2018). Satisfaction with brands, companies, products and services is important influencing post purchase response that is directly tired with consumer outcomes such as retention and loyalty. Companies continuously want to understand the behavior of their customers and have employed numbers measuring metrics. Example of these metrics includes Net Promoter Score and satisfaction (Khadim et al. 2018; Momotaz & Hasan, 2018). The customers through such mechanisms can be satisfied and can persuade others to acquire from a specific brand or company (Ahmad, Rahman & Khan, 2017; Jain et al. 2018). However, when customers value a competitor’s products and services, it means a company could continue loosing (Ting et al., 2016; Potdar et al. 2018). The integral component is the word of mouth communication in that information can be spread from one customer to the next (Fan, Kim & Lee, 2016). Some of the information shared includes services, products, brands and other information specific to a company or a brand. Managers continuously use the word of mouth strategic approach, which contributes to the likelihood of purchase, value ratings and changes in consumer judgments. Perceived value is the merits or worth that a customer ascribes to a service or product. In most instances, the customers are unaware of variables tied to a service or product such as pricing and the solution to the consumers is the emotional appeal of the product or service (Ahmad, Rahman & Khan, 2017; Momotaz & Hasan, 2018). Consumer’s perceived value refers to the price that a consumer is ready to pat for products or services (Pandey & Chawla, 2018; Potdar et al. 2018). Customers focus on the final outcome of the product or project such as the need to meet certain satisfaction is the role of marketers. Perceived utility is also important because it refers to the values and benefits consumer receives from the use of service and product. Consumers demand services and products that offer and are useful to the customer and unsatisfied customer may not have a positive view of the product and service (Khadim et al. 2018; Jain et al. 2018). Perceived value also communicates expectations about the service and products. Therefore, perceived value is the persuasion or consumer behavior to acquire a product or service and is satisfied with the pricing. The expectation of the consumers is fulfilling inherent needs and wants

BUILDING TRUST FOR SERVICE ASSESSMENT IN INTERNET-ENABLED COLLABORATIVE PRODUCT DESIGN & REALIZATION ENVIRONMENTS

Reducing costs, increasing speed and leveraging the intelligence of partners involved during product design processes are important benefits of Internet-enabled collaborative product design and realization environments. The options for cost-effective product design, re-design or improvement are at their peak during the early stages of the design process and designers can collaborate with suppliers, manufacturers and other relevant contributors to acquire a better understanding of associated costs and product viability. Collaboration is by no means a new paradigm. However, companies have found distrust of collaborative partners to be the most intractable obstacle to collaborative commerce and Internet-enabled business especially in intellectual property environments, which handle propriety data on a constant basis. This problem is also reinforced in collaborative environments that are distributed in nature. Thus trust is the main driver or enabler of successful collaborative efforts or transactions in Internet-enabled product design environments. Focus is on analyzing the problem of ¡®trust for services¡¯ in distributed collaborative service provider assessment and selection, concentrating on characteristics specific to electronic product design (e-Design) environments. Current tools for such collaborative partner/provider assessment are inadequate or non-existent and researching network, user, communication and service trust problems, which hinder the growth and acceptance of true collaboration in product design, can foster new frontiers in manufacturing, business and technology. Trust and its associated issues within the context of a secure Internet-enabled product design & realization platform is a multifaceted and complex problem, which demands a strategic approach crossing disciplinary boundaries. A Design Environment Trust Service (DETS) framework is proposed to incorporate trust for services in product design environments based on client specified (or default) criteria. This involves the analysis of validated network (objective) data and non-network (subjective) data and the use of Multi Criteria Decision Making (MCDM) methodology for the selection of the most efficient service provision alternative through the minimization of distance from a specified ideal point and interpreted as a Dynamic (Design) Trust Index (DTI) or rank. Hence, the service requestor is provided with a quantifiable degree of belief to mitigate information asymmetry and enable knowledgeable decision-making regarding trustworthy service provision in a distributed environment

ROVER: a DNS-based method to detect and prevent IP hijacks

2013 Fall.Includes bibliographical references.The Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is critical to the global internet infrastructure. Unfortunately BGP routing was designed with limited regard for security. As a result, IP route hijacking has been observed for more than 16 years. Well known incidents include a 2008 hijack of YouTube, loss of connectivity for Australia in February 2012, and an event that partially crippled Google in November 2012. Concern has been escalating as critical national infrastructure is reliant on a secure foundation for the Internet. Disruptions to military, banking, utilities, industry, and commerce can be catastrophic. In this dissertation we propose ROVER (Route Origin VERification System), a novel and practical solution for detecting and preventing origin and sub-prefix hijacks. ROVER exploits the reverse DNS for storing route origin data and provides a fail-safe, best effort approach to authentication. This approach can be used with a variety of operational models including fully dynamic in-line BGP filtering, periodically updated authenticated route filters, and real-time notifications for network operators. Our thesis is that ROVER systems can be deployed by a small number of institutions in an incremental fashion and still effectively thwart origin and sub-prefix IP hijacking despite non-participation by the majority of Autonomous System owners. We then present research results supporting this statement. We evaluate the effectiveness of ROVER using simulations on an Internet scale topology as well as with tests on real operational systems. Analyses include a study of IP hijack propagation patterns, effectiveness of various deployment models, critical mass requirements, and an examination of ROVER resilience and scalability

Agent-Based Distributed Learning Applied to Fraud Detection

Inductive learning and classification techniques have been applied in many problems in diverse areas. In this paper we describe an AI-based approach that combines inductive learning algorithms and meta-learning methods as a means to compute accurate classification models for detecting electronic fraud. Inductive learning algorithms are used to compute detectors of anomalous or errant behavior over inherently distributed data sets and meta-learning methods integrate their collective knowledge into higher level classification models or "meta-classifiers". By supporting the exchange of models or "classifier agents" among data sites, our approach facilitates the cooperation between financial organizations and provides unified and cross-institution protection mechanisms against fraudulent transactions. Through experiments performed on actual credit card transaction data supplied by two different financial institutions, we evaluate this approach and we demonstrate its utility

An Analysis of the Design-Build Delivery Method in Air Force Military Construction

The design-build method for construction project delivery continues to grow in both the private and public sector. Several government agencies have observed, through experience with design-build, positive results which give “anecdotal” credibility to design-build methods. The objective of this study is to compare the performance of the design-build delivery method with traditional design-bid-build approaches for Air Force (AF) military construction (MILCON). Data related to 835 (278 design-build, 557 traditional) MILCON projects were gathered from the Automated Civil Engineer System – Project Management Module (ACES-PM) for Fiscal Years 1996-2006. The design-build method had better performance for six of eight metrics with highly significant results for cost growth and number of modifications per million dollars. The traditional method experienced a highly significant advantage for the metrics of construction timeline and total project time. The historical analysis revealed that design-build MILCON has improved significantly for cost growth, modifications per million dollars, construction timeline, and total project time. The traditional method also improved for the cost growth and modifications per million dollars metrics. Finally, the facility type analysis revealed that the design-build method was best suited for seven of the nine facility types. This study provides empirical evidence of where the design-build delivery method provides an advantage to the traditional method for AF MILCON execution