Integrating The E In E-Marketing

The domain of e-marketing is much greater than pure play and enterprise level dot-coms. E-marketing concerns the deployment of information technology to render marketing strategy and process more effective and efficient. Technology and the Internet also changed the way marketing is conducted. For example, the fundamental idea of digitizing data has transformed media and software delivery methods as well as created a new transaction channel. Also, the Internet as information equalizer has shifted the balance of power from marketer to consumer. As developed nations enter what Gartner Group calls the slope of enlightenment on the way to dropping the “e” from e-business, successful marketers will grasp the risks and rewards of various levels of information technology commitment. Fortunately, marketers do not have to personally develop the technologies, but they need to know enough to understand technology, select appropriate suppliers, and direct technology professionals in order to harness its power. In this article we define e-marketing, then present a framework for a menu of business models along with best practices. The framework is designed to ease the navigation and integration of technology in marketing strategy to fully capitalize on Internet properties and reap advantages of its role in marketing and business strategy

Enhancing Supply Chain Reliability through Agent-Based Supply Chain Event Management

Supply Chain Event Management (SCEM) is an approach to the monitoring of supply chains. It observes specific events and exceptions in real-time and then alerts managers if problems occur. This paper presents an architecture for an SCEM system based on intelligent software agents, Auto-ID technologies and mobile user interfaces. The motivation for this approach is to enhance existing SCEM solutions by exploiting up-to-date technologies. It delegates the task of automated problem solving when disruptions in supply chains occur to software agents

Fostering Distributed Business Logic in Open Collaborative Networks: an integrated approach based on semantic and swarm coordination

Given the great opportunities provided by Open Collaborative Networks (OCNs), their success depends on the effective integration of composite business logic at all stages. However, a dilemma between cooperation and competition is often found in environments where the access to business knowledge can provide absolute advantages over the competition. Indeed, although it is apparent that business logic should be automated for an effective integration, chain participants at all segments are often highly protective of their own knowledge. In this paper, we propose a solution to this problem by outlining a novel approach with a supporting architectural view. In our approach, business rules are modeled via semantic web and their execution is coordinated by a workflow model. Each company’s rule can be kept as private, and the business rules can be combined together to achieve goals with defined interdependencies and responsibilities in the workflow. The use of a workflow model allows assembling business facts together while protecting data source. We propose a privacy-preserving perturbation technique which is based on digital stigmergy. Stigmergy is a processing schema based on the principle of self-aggregation of marks produced by data. Stigmergy allows protecting data privacy, because only marks are involved in aggregation, in place of actual data values, without explicit data modeling. This paper discusses the proposed approach and examines its characteristics through actual scenarios

KSNet-Approach to Knowledge Fusion from Distributed Sources

The rapidity of the decision making process is an important factor in different branches of the human life (business, healthcare, industry, military applications etc.). Since responsible persons make decisions using available knowledge, it is important for knowledge management systems to deliver necessary and timely information. Knowledge logistics is a new direction in the knowledge management addressing this. Technology of knowledge fusion, based on the synergistic use of knowledge from multiple distributed sources, is a basis for these activities. The paper presents an overview of a Knowledge Source Network configuration approach (KSNet-approach) to knowledge fusion, multi-agent architecture and research prototype of the KSNet knowledge fusion system based on this approach

The Next Wave of Nomadic Computing: A Research Agenda for Information Systems Research

A nomadic information environment is a heterogeneous assemblage of interconnected technological and organizational elements, which enables physical and social mobility of computing and communication services between organizational actors both within and across organizational borders. We analyze such environments based on their prevalent features of mobility, digital convergence, and mass scale. We describe essential features of each in more detail and characterize their mutual interdependencies. We build a framework, which identifies research issues in nomadic information environments at the individual, the team, the organizational, and inter-organizational levels, comprising both service and infrastructure development. We assess the opportunities and challenges for research into each area at the level of design, use and adoption, and impacts. We conclude by discussing challenges posed by nomadic information environments for information systems field to our research skills and methods. These deal with the need to invent novel research methods and shift research focus, the necessity to question the divide between the technical and the social, and the need to better integrate developmental and behavioral (empirical) research modes

Designing Incentives Enabled Decentralized User Data Sharing Framework

Data sharing practices are much needed to strike a balance between user privacy, user experience, and profit. Different parties collect user data, for example, companies offering apps, social networking sites, and others, whose primary motive is an enhanced business model while giving optimal services to the end-users. However, the collection of user data is associated with serious privacy and security issues. The sharing platform also needs an effective incentive mechanism to realize transparent access to the user data while distributing fair incentives. The emerging literature on the topic includes decentralized data sharing approaches. However, there has been no universal method to track who shared what, to whom, when, for what purpose and under what condition in a verifiable manner until recently, when the distributed ledger technologies emerged to become the most effective means for designing a decentralized peer-to-peer network. This Ph.D. research includes an engineering approach for specifying the operations for designing incentives and user-controlled data-sharing platforms. The thesis presents a series of empirical studies and proposes novel blockchains- and smart contracts-based DUDS (Decentralized User Data Sharing) framework conceptualizing user-controlled data sharing practices. The DUDS framework supports immutability, authenticity, enhanced security, trusted records and is a promising means to share user data in various domains, including among researchers, customer data in e-commerce, tourism applications, etc. The DUDS framework is evaluated via performance analyses and user studies. The extended Technology Acceptance Model and a Trust-Privacy-Security Model are used to evaluate the usability of the DUDS framework. The evaluation allows uncovering the role of different factors affecting user intention to adopt data-sharing platforms. The results of the evaluation point to guidelines and methods for embedding privacy, user transparency, control, and incentives from the start in the design of a data-sharing framework to provide a platform that users can trust to protect their data while allowing them to control it and share it in the ways they want

Can Humanizing Voice Assistants Unleash the Potential of Voice Commerce?

Voice commerce allows customers to carry out sales dialogues with voice assistants (VAs) through natural spoken language. However, its adoption remains limited. To help determine how to overcome existing barriers to adoption, we conducted a series of three empirical pre-studies and a laboratory experiment (N = 323) investigating the role of VAs’ humanness in interactions with customers; research has reached no consensus on this matter. Our results reveal that humanizing VAs increases customers’ perceptions of social presence and parasocial interaction, thereby enhancing perceived relationship quality and ultimately leading to increased intentions to shop using the VA. Although, we also find a negative direct effect of humanization on parasocial interaction, it is offset by the larger positive indirect effect via social presence. This may provide one explanation for the inconsistencies in the literature. For practitioners, our findings highlight the importance of careful design in humanizing VAs to increase voice commerce adoption

The role of regional institutional entrepreneurs in the emergence of clusters in nanotechnologies

In the case of new technologies like nanotechnology, institutional entrepreneurs appear who have to act at different levels (organizational, regional, national) at the same time. We reconstruct, in some detail, the history of two cases, in Grenoble and in Twente/Netherlands. An intriguing finding is that institutional entrepreneurs build their environment before changing their institution. They first mobilize European support to convince local and national levels before actual cluster building occurs. Only later will there be reactions against any de-institutionalisation caused at the base location. The Dutch case shows another notable finding: when mobilizing support the entrepreneur will have to agree to further conditions, and then ends up in a different situation (a broad national consortium) than originally envisaged (the final cluster involved a collaboration of Twente with two other centres). In general, an institutional entrepreneur attempts to create momentum, and when this is achieved, he has to follow rather than lead it.INSTITUTIONAL ENTREPRENEUR; DEINSTITUTIONALISATION; CLUSTER; LOCATION; EMERGING TECHNOLOGIES; PROMISE; NANOTECHNOLOGY

Specifics of Collaboration in Virtual Reality: How Immersion Drives the Intention to Collaborate

Collaborative virtual reality (VR) is increasingly receiving attention, but the effects of context- specific variables and the interplay of telepresence, interactivity, and immersion as VR’s distinctive characteristics in such settings are little understood. Besides these three VR characteristics, we investigate in a quantitative study with 102 participants the influence of social presence, i.e. the sense of community; media naturalness, or the similarity of communication to face-to-face-interaction; and trust between users. Based on partial least squares structural equation modeling, we confirm the importance of interactivity and immersion, but not of telepresence. Moreover, we find that trust is essential for collaborative VR experiences, but social presence and media naturalness seem negligible. Finally, we show that immersion is a main driver of users’ intention to collaborate. Besides providing practitioners with insights for creating VR experiences, our study highlights that findings from research on individual VR use are not readily transferable to collaborative contexts

The Social Embeddedness of Industrial Networks in the Age of the Internet: A Tale of Two Regions In China

In this article we examine the extent to which theoretical views of social embeddedness of economic development that were developed from the study of regional industrial networks continue to be relevant in cases of entrepreneurial networks that are formed in developing countries through the use of internet-based platforms and business services. We frame our research against the background of current libertarian discourse regarding the internet as an enabler of social networking which changes the institutional bearings of production and economic activity of modernity. We draw data from two cases of industrial networks of micro-entrepreneurs in China. Our research shows that although important relationships of the industrial network are virtual, conducted through the electronic tools and services, the networks are strongly socially embedded, sustained through close relationships with the corporation that provides the internet platform as well as the governmen