Pitfalls of Electronic Commerce in Large Corporations

To enable businesses to maximise value and achieve benefits from electronic commerce, it is imperative to identify, analyse and overcome challenges that lie ahead those engaging in conducting the business electronically. The research presented in this paper reports on the pitfalls – challenges of electronic commerce encountered among the top 500 Australian publicly listed companies. The results showed that the most encountered challenges among large corporations include a lack of e-commerce knowledge, technology cost, acquiring IT skilled people, a lack of e-commerce infrastructure, security, as well as making the business known to users, customer service, budgetary constraints, etc. It has also been established that participating companies from the industries with the highest response rate to the questionnaire have encountered similar challenges in their paths of implementation of electronic commerce. However, despite the fact that the encountered challenges among participating companies were similar, the analysis have shown that different industries have experienced different impacts from the challenges they met

Understanding South Australian GP Attitudes Towards Health Informatics Systems

This paper reports on the attitudes of 20 practitioners in South Australian General Practice towards adopting Health Informatics (HI) systems. HI systems are aimed at improving the overall quality and management of healthcare, but adoption of the technology may require a change in the General Practitioner’s (GP) approach to the way they perform their healthcare delivery role. This qualitative study found HI adoption was primarily influenced by the perceived potential for change in the professional’s value and role. While GPs were generally reluctant to consider technological innovation that was not perceived to demonstrate potential for improvement in patient health outcomes, increased exposure to HI systems positively influenced perceptions of both the importance and the certainty of potential implementation outcomes. It was concluded that GP attitudes could be characterised by four different perspectives of HI systems use in general practice medicine delivery

Towards Understanding Apparent South Australian GP Resistance to Adopting Health Informatics Systems

This paper reports on a qualitative study of the attitudes of 23 South Australian practitioners in General Practice (GP) towards adopting an unspecified data amalgamating Health Informatics (HI) system. Findings suggest key areas of concern are associated with the potential for diminution of control over change and adoption was primarily influenced by a perceived need to protect the role and value of GPs. If change was seen as involuntary, uncertain or without demonstrable benefit to relevant patient outcomes, the prospect of change tended to manifest as passive or active GP resistance. Findings suggest increased exposure to use of HI systems influences GP perception of both the importance and certainty of potential implementation outcomes. It was concluded that discrete attitudes towards the use of HIS technology could be identified. Determined by contextual GP perceptions of competing managerial, technological and political factors, they are not mutually exclusive and more appropriately seen as a series of developmental and co-existing perspectives

Value Creation from Application Service Provisioning: Lessons from Four Vendor Firms

This paper embraces the electronic business model concept as the unit of analysis for investigating application service providers (ASPs). It develops three constructs fundamental to the ASP business model: strategic positioning, product/service portfolio, and customer value proposition. Four short case study examples of different ASP business models are discussed. The findings suggest that, despite firm efforts to strategically differentiate their ASP business model from their rivals, each failed to provide the customer with an attractive value proposition to achieve a sustainable competitive position

Management Objectives and Design Principles for the Cost Allocation of Business Intelligence

Today business intelligence (BI) systems, which provide management with decision-supportive information, are considered to be a prerequisite for organizational success. In contrast to the operation of BI, BI system management is still an emerging topic in information systems (IS) research. Even though the cost management of BI systems is highly relevant for practice, the field is widely unexplored. Cost allocations for BI systems are supposed to enhance transparency, create cost awareness and support the management of resources of the BI system. In our research we have conducted two focus group studies to examine the basis for BI cost allocations. First, we derive management goals and design principles for a BI cost allocation from an exploratory focus group. In a second step, we evaluate the goals and the design principles in a confirmatory focus group. Our research provides valuable insights on the application of BI cost allocations from our focus groups and contributes a basis for the design of BI cost allocation methods

Barriers to Open Source ERP Adoption in South Africa

Organizations in South Africa (SA) and other economically developing countries are not maximizing the use of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems. While the costs associated with an ERP system implementation have always been a major factor to many organizations, Open Source Software (OSS) ERP systems are available offering the benefits of an ERP system at a reduced cost to organizations. This paper investigates the adoption factors of Open Source Software Enterprise Resource Planning Systems in economically developing countries by focusing on South African organizations. Using online surveys and a focus group discussion, this empirical study found that knowledge barriers, the lack of sizable providers (or vendors), and ironically low costs, are the adoption barriers that apply to OSS ERP systems for South African organizations. The research further suggests that many of the adoption barriers traditionally associated with OSS might be inherent to all software. The possibility of low costs being a barrier is a novel idea that was identified in this research, and further research to explore this idea is suggested. Understanding the dynamics of the market requirements is crucial for OSS ERP vendors to be able to develop effective strategies. OSS ERP vendors and OSS vendors in general can use this study as a starting point to question some traditionally held notions regarding the OSS business model

Floors Concept For Studying e-commerce Development: Pertinence With Reference To Tunisian Context

E-commerce development is described in literature with reference to divergent points of views having many insufficiencies. In order to palliate these limits, this paper proposes a new construct, namely floors, corresponding to growing development levels. This construct permits e-commerce development influencing factors analysis. This paper proposes a model specifying factors influencing e-commerce development in Tunisian hospitality sector. A technology-organization-environment model was adopted to model the variables shaping development. Variables maintained in the model are affected to development floors

Exploring the Factors of Innovation Rejection

Computer systems cannot improve organisational performance if they aren’t adopted. There has been much research into why and how systems are adopted by organisations and individuals, however the area is still unable to explain the adoption phenomenon completely. At the same time, innovation rejection, as a topic, has been largely ignored in the research literature. This paper aims to develop a list of factors which affect innovation rejection and documents an initial attempt to develop a research model that describes technology rejection. This section of the study explores the research literature for factors that affect rejection. The results show rejection factors at the environment, the organisation, the workgroup and the system levels. However, there is very little evidence of factors at the adoption process level. This could be an interesting area for further research

Focus Groups for Artifact Refinement and Evaluation in Design Research

Focus groups to investigate new ideas are widely used in many research fields. The use of focus groups in design research poses interesting opportunities and challenges. Traditional focus group methods must be adapted to meet two specific goals of design research. For the refinement of an artifact design, exploratory focus groups (EFGs) study the artifact to propose improvements in the design. The cycle of build and evaluate using EFGs continues until the artifact is released for field test in the application environment. Then, the field test of the design artifact may employ confirmatory focus groups (CFGs) to establish the utility of the artifact in field use. Rigorous investigation of the artifact requires multiple CFGs to be run with opportunities for quantitative and qualitative data collection and analyses across the multiple CFGs. In this paper, we discuss the adaptation of focus groups to design research projects. We demonstrate the use of both EFGs and CFGs in a design research project in the health care field