E-business industry developments - 2001/02; Audit risk alerts

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_indev/1695/thumbnail.jp

Development of an intelligent e-commerce assurance model to promote trust in online shopping environment

Electronic commerce (e-commerce) markets provide benefits for both buyers and sellers; however, because of cyber security risks consumers are reluctant to transact online. Trust in e-commerce is paramount for adoption. Trust as a subject for research has been a term considered in depth by numerous researchers in various fields of study, including psychology and information technology. Various models have been developed in e-commerce to alleviate consumer fears, thus promoting trust in online environments. Third-party web seals and online scanning tools are some of the existing models used in e-commerce environments, but they have some deficiencies, e.g. failure to incorporate compliance, which need to be addressed. This research proposes an e-commerce assurance model for safe online shopping. The machine learning model is called the Page ranking analytical hierarchy process (PRAHP). PRAHP builds complementary strengths of the analytical hierarchy process (AHP) and Page ranking (PR) techniques to evaluate the trustworthiness of web attributes. The attributes that are assessed are Adaptive legislation, Adaptive International Organisation for Standardisation Standards, Availability, Policy and Advanced Security login. The attributes were selected based on the literature reviewed from accredited journals and some of the reputable e-commerce websites. PRAHP’s paradigms were evaluated extensively through detailed experiments on business-to-business, business-to-consumer, cloud-based and general e-commerce websites. The results of the assessments were validated by customer inputs regarding the website. The reliability and robustness of PRAHP was tested by varying the damping factor and the inbound links. In all the experiments, the results revealed that the model provides reliable results to guide customers in making informed purchasing decisions. The research also reveals hidden e-commerce topics that have not received attention, which generates knowledge and opens research questions for future researchers. These ultimately made significant contributions in e-commerce assurance, in areas such as security and compliance through the fusing of AHP and PR, integrated into a decision table for alleviating trustworthiness anxiety in various e-commerce transacting partners, e-commerce platforms and markets.College of Engineering, Science and TechnologyD. Phil. Information System

Analysis of costs and delivery intervals for multiple-release software

Project managers of large software projects, and particularly those associated with Internet Business-to-Business (B2B) or Business-to-Customer (B2C) applications, are under pressure to capture market share by delivering reliable software with cost and timing constraints. An earlier delivery time may help the E-commerce software capture a larger market share. However, early delivery sometimes means lower quality. In addition, most of the time the scale of the software is so large that incremental multiple releases are warranted. A Multiple-Release methodology has been developed to optimize the most efficient and effective delivery intervals of the various releases of software products, taking into consideration software costs and reliability. The Multiple-Release methodology extends existing software cost and reliability models, meets the needs of large software development firms, and gives a navigation guide to software industrial managers. The main decision factors for the multiple releases include the delivery interval of each release, the market value of the features in the release, and the software costs associated with testing and error penalties. The input of these factors was assessing using Design of Experiments (DOE). The costs included in the research are based on a salary survey of software staff at companies in the New Jersey area and on budgets of software development teams. The Activity Based Cost (ABC) method was used to determine costs on the basis of job functions associated with the development of the software. It is assumed that the error data behavior follows the Non-Homogeneous Poisson Processes (NHPP)

E-business industry developments - 2001/02; Audit risk alerts

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_indev/1695/thumbnail.jp

E-business industry developments - 2000/01; Audit risk alerts

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_indev/1058/thumbnail.jp

E-business industry developments - 2002/03; Audit risk alerts

https://egrove.olemiss.edu/aicpa_indev/1059/thumbnail.jp

Leadership Skills for Success of Home Health Care Agencies

Small business managers often lack the leadership skills necessary to sustain their businesses beyond 5 years. The United States Small Business Administration reported that more than 65% of small business owners, including home health care agency managers, fail within the first 5 years of operation. Guided by Burns and Bass\u27s transformational leadership theory, this multiple case study explored leadership skills that managers in home health care agencies need to sustain their new businesses beyond 5 years. The purposeful sample comprised of 3 managers from 3 different home health care agencies within a 75-mile radius of Baltimore, Maryland, that had demonstrated success in surviving past 5 years. Semistructured interviews, agencies\u27 quality assurance plans and policies were reviewed, and procedural documents related to leadership skills were gathered as data. Yin\u27s 5-step data analysis technique was used to identify key themes. Member checking enhanced the credibility of data interpretation. Themes that emerged from data analysis were business management, knowledge and performance, and transformational leadership. Study findings may contribute to positive social change by providing practical guidance to home health care managers, which may improve their agencies\u27 viability and delivery of patient care. Business implications include the provision of long-term employment to workers and safety assurance to patients\u27 families

Understanding the determinants of e-commerce uptake, e-service quality and e-commerce success, in the UK on-line retail sector

The primary aim of this study is to gain important new insights into e-commerce success, by empirically exploring how approaches to e-service quality, when coupled with levels of e-commerce adoption, might affect the overall success of retailers’ on-line operations. This study is governed by positivist epistemological perspective, and therefore, it was undertaken using a quantitative research methodology, based upon questionnaires. The primary data collection generated a total of 225 useable questionnaires, completed by senior managers, working within the UK’s on-line retail sector. Factor analysis and multiple regression analysis were then used to thoroughly explore the relationships between the various constructs, which comprised the research model. The results of the statistical analysis demonstrate that internal factors (e.g. as management strategy and resources) - are a stronger determinant, than external factors, of both. Perhaps more importantly, it has been shown that the perceived success of a retailer’s e-commerce operations is also strongly associated with the management approaches to e-service quality and the level of e-commerce adoption. Finally, a mediation analysis provides interesting new insights into the relationship between adoption levels, e-service quality and success: the management approaches to e-service quality significantly mediates the relationship between the level of e-commerce adoption and the perceived e-commerce success. Given the central role that e-service quality plays in this study, a customer focused study of e-service quality was also conducted, to provide a more complete and holistic view of this complex phenomenon. This supplementary study sought to explore how customers’ perceptions of e-service quality, particularly in terms of identifying those elements of service quality that influence their use of the retailers’ on-line services. An on-line questionnaire survey was designed and pre-tested before targeting it at 800 students, of whom over 25% responded. An ‘importance-performance’ analysis of this data was conducted to explore whether there were significant differences in customers’ perception of the importance against the performance of retailers’ ability to manage e-service quality. By and large, the results of this analysis should provide some reassurance to the on-line retailers, as the customers generally believed that the retailers were performing well in the areas that were most important to them. However, when the results of the customer and retailer studies were compared, some interesting imbalances were revealed. For example, the retailers perceived the provision of privacy policies to be extremely important, whilst generally; the customers weren’t too concerned with this aspect of e-service quality. The thesis concludes by highlighting its contribution to the body of current knowledge, reviewing the limitations of the research and exploring the implications for practice of the many interesting new insights generated through this empirical study

Impact of e-Commerce on Corporate Governance and Ethics

It is always prudent that the business environment adopts technological platforms such as ecommerce, but there is a need to ascertain the risks involved to optimize the benefits. The current paper examines the impact of e-commerce on corporate governance and ethics in the retail sector. The research involved gathering the opinions of suppliers, customers, employees, government workers, traders, and as well as investors. The study employed both quantitative and qualitative approach. Quantitative data were gathered using a questionnaire administered on a corporate retail organization from different levels of workers, while indepth interviews were used for the qualitative data. Results from the questionnaire indicated meager customer relationship management on e-commerce platforms, stringent excess control rather than regulatory requirements and inadequate monitoring of the behavior activities of clients on e-commerce platforms. Also, the investors felt that e-commerce impact on shareholder activity was not satisfactory especially with regards to meetings, but they indicated agreement on the enhancement of resources with regards to the generation of organizational profits. The results show that overall satisfaction as a proxy for good corporate governance is dependent on investors and the government. However, issues such as difficulty in describing physical goods, elimination of unethical practices and untrustworthiness of intermediaries require inter-organizational compliance between different organizations and their stakeholders to manage risk on e-commerce platforms. It is therefore pertinent upon the organization and their stakeholder board to reduce the adverse impact on e-commerce through coordinated training on ethics and risk management to enhance mutual benefit for the entities involve