Migrating supply chain management process online: A study in Malaysian companies

There has been an increasing trend for companies to migrate their Supply Chain Management (SCM) online.In Malaysia however, many companies have not or are reluctant to invest in IT to improve their SCM.In order for companies to successfully migrate their SCM online, companies need to solve both technical and business issues that are involved during and after the migration.One example for solving the technical issues is that of the Rosettanet Standards.Rosettanet promised to solve the integration issues of online SCM in particular by allowing companies to communicate in the same e-business standards.However, there are few taker for this and there is a need to study the problems of migrating SCM online.. A framework is needed for Malaysian companies to successfully migrate their SCM online and using the Rosettanet standards.This paper presents an on-going study supported by Infineon Technologies Malacca

What Do We Mean by E-Procurement? – A Private Hospital Perspective in Australia

This paper is based on an exploratory case study of four individual hospitals within a large Australian Private Health Group. Five e-procurement issues were investigated from a business perspective. Findings highlight that hospitals perceived that they had an e-procurement system but that the system merely generated a fax purchase order and faxed this directly to the supplier’s facsimile machine, i.e. it was not transmitted electronically via the Internet. Findings for price reduction and practice for Direct Vs Indirect goods contradict previous research findings. Nevertheless, reducing wastage, lowering inventory and administration costs were evidently realised. Inadequate user training was a major issue during the implementation process but was later overcome by building a training centre. This paper prompts a challenge for IS/IT academics and practitioners to educate organisations on the definition and adoption of an eprocurement system to enhance benefits across the organisations

The Cloud Adoption Toolkit: Addressing the Challenges of Cloud Adoption in Enterprise

Cloud computing promises a radical shift in the provisioning of computing resource within the enterprise. This paper: i) describes the challenges that decision makers face when attempting to determine the feasibility of the adoption of cloud computing in their organisations; ii) illustrates a lack of existing work to address the feasibility challenges of cloud adoption in the enterprise; iii) introduces the Cloud Adoption Toolkit that provides a framework to support decision makers in identifying their concerns, and matching these concerns to appropriate tools/techniques that can be used to address them. The paper adopts a position paper methodology such that case study evidence is provided, where available, to support claims. We conclude that the Cloud Adoption Toolkit, whilst still under development, shows signs that it is a useful tool for decision makers as it helps address the feasibility challenges of cloud adoption in the enterprise

Broadband Technologies on Residential Acces

The diffusion of broadband technologies is a hot topic for developed and many developing countries. Although the provision of service has many similar aspects, the overall and specific penetration of broadband technologies varies significantly in these countries. This study aims to examine the place of users' perceptions in the broadband issue by studying the development of the selected technologies and national policies in the light of the general information technology diffusion aspects.Diffusion of Technology, Broadband Technologies, Development of National Policies and Pricing Issues

Cloud Index Tracking: Enabling Predictable Costs in Cloud Spot Markets

Cloud spot markets rent VMs for a variable price that is typically much lower than the price of on-demand VMs, which makes them attractive for a wide range of large-scale applications. However, applications that run on spot VMs suffer from cost uncertainty, since spot prices fluctuate, in part, based on supply, demand, or both. The difficulty in predicting spot prices affects users and applications: the former cannot effectively plan their IT expenditures, while the latter cannot infer the availability and performance of spot VMs, which are a function of their variable price. To address the problem, we use properties of cloud infrastructure and workloads to show that prices become more stable and predictable as they are aggregated together. We leverage this observation to define an aggregate index price for spot VMs that serves as a reference for what users should expect to pay. We show that, even when the spot prices for individual VMs are volatile, the index price remains stable and predictable. We then introduce cloud index tracking: a migration policy that tracks the index price to ensure applications running on spot VMs incur a predictable cost by migrating to a new spot VM if the current VM's price significantly deviates from the index price.Comment: ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing 201

Internationalization and business model decisions: A business case in mobile telecommunication industry

In a world characterized by hyper-competition (Gunther and D'Aveni 1994) and globalization (Knight 2000), the business model concept is becoming more and more popular. From the literature review arises a lack of a generally accepted definition of what it is, despite the growing importance of this concept. The paper is structured in five main sections. In the first one we present a review of the business model literature. The literature on business models is not exhaustive and moreover many authors often mixed up the business model with other concepts such as strategy and finance. Two main streams of literature are identifiable: the first one emerged in the mid Nineties and generally focused on e-business contexts; the second one emerged at the beginning of this decade and is not exclusively ascribable to high-tech companies. In the second paragraph we underline how relevant the decisions are about location; since in the literature on international entrepreneurship does not emerge a business model perspective of the matter the analysis is a lacking. In the third paragraph we focus our attention on Onetti and Zucchella’s business model (2008). The authors proposed a business model framework characterized by two main aspects: the clear separation among the business model, strategy and finance, and the emphasis on the relevance of location decisions. The outputs of the business model are the focus, locus and modus of companies activities. In the fourth section we try to apply this business model to Fi.Mo.Tec.’s business case, trying to explain the company’s past and to devise a way to manage the future. The conclusions complete the paper.Business model - International Entrepreneurship

ENROLLING ACTORS IN THE CO-EVOLUTON OF INTER-ORGANISATIONAL INFORMATION SYSTEMS

This paper describes interpretive case-study research into the development on some e-commerce inter-organisational information systems (EIOS) implemented in Australia. The research was undertaken in two phases, firstly a thematic analysis in ten organisations, and secondly an in-depth case study of one of these organisations using co-evolutionary theory. A framework of EIOS evolution is developed and offered as a tool for practitioners working as initiators of EIOS