Digitalisation and Enterprise Knowledge (net)Working

Social media and emerging mobile technologies have forever changed the landscape of human interaction. Furthermore, they already play a pivotal role also in enterprises as a part of the organisational Knowledge Management System. Almost all large organisations have already implemented at least one Enterprise Social Media tool since they enable collaboration, provide easy access to information, and are available at reasonable costs. The effects of the decoupling of the real and the virtual world (as a result of Social Media use) on the construct knowledge and on knowledge management are still not sufficiently investigated. Against this background, the paper presents an exploratory approach of the development of a specific morphological tableau as an instrument for the analysis of employees’ behavior in context of knowledge management related ESM use. Furthermore, the application of the tableau is exemplary illustrated and further research steps are explained

FACTORS THAT IMPACT THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MARKETING TOOL IN SMALL AND MEDIUM-SIZED ENTERPRISES IN SELANGOR, MALAYSIA

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a vital role in the Malaysian economy. The success of SMEs is critical for Malaysia's total economic progression, both nationally and globally. Conducting business online is one of the opportunities social media has provided entrepreneurs. SMEs often lack the means to conduct in-house marketing operations or hire a skilled marketing consultant. Social media is a massive dialogue that everyone can join. With social media, businesses have the added advantage of following statements and replying instantly. While there is much literature on social media marketing methods, there is not much information on how businesses might utilize social media to enhance profits. There is little academic research into the elements that drive social media use and its impact on SMEs in Malaysia. This research aims to develop an understanding of improving the use of social media as a marketing tool in SMEs and address its relationship to brand awareness, consumers' engagement, word-of-mouth, conversion rate, and effectiveness. For this quantitative study, data was collected using questionnaires conveyed to SMEs engaged in online marketing activities. The survey yielded 177 valid responses. The findings of this study indicate that word-of-mouth and engagement were insignificant. However, brand awareness and conversion rates were significant. This result is significant for SMEs in emerging markets as it allows them to establish their marketing presence and enhance brand equity.  Article visualizations

Essays on enterprise social media: moderation, shop floor integration and information system induced organizational change

The digital transformation increases the pressure on innovation capabilities and challenges organizations to adapt their business models. In order to cope with the increased competitiveness, organizations face two significant internal challenges: Enabling internal digital collaboration and knowledge sharing as well as information system-induced change. This dissertation will investigate seven related research questions divided in two main parts. The first part focuses on how an organization can foster digital knowledge exchanges and collaboration in global organizations. Enterprise social media has attracted the attention of organizations as a technology for social collaboration and knowledge sharing. The dissertation will investigate how organizations can moderate the employee discourse in such platforms from a novel organizational perspective and provide insights on how to increase the encouragement for employees to contribute and assure content quality. The developed framework will provide detailed moderation approaches. In addition, the risk of privacy concerns associated with organizational interference in the new digital collaboration technologies are evaluated. The second part of the dissertation shifts the focus to the shop floor environment, an area that has faced substantial digital advancements. Those advancements change the organizational role of the shop floor to a more knowledge work-oriented environment. Firstly, a state of research regarding technology acceptance and professional diversity is presented to create an enterprise social media job-characteristic framework. Further, a unique and longitudinal shop floor case study is investigated to derive organizational challenges for enterprise social media and potentials for empowerment. To validate the future shop floor environment needs use cases for the shop floor are derived and a user profile is established. The case study is extended by expert interviews to focus on conceptualizing organizational information systems-induced change. In this regard, the role of work practices, organizational and employee mindset and information system change are integrated into a holistic organizational change model that targets employee empowerment. This dissertation provides a comprehensive overview of enterprise social media from an organizational management and shop floor perspective. It contributes to understanding new digital needs at the shop floor and the information systems-induced change journey towards digital employee empowerment

Examination of Corporate Investments in Privacy: An Event Study

The primary objective of any corporate entity is generating as much wealth as possible. Investing financially in technology domains has historically been a successful strategy for generating increased corporate and shareholder wealth. However, investments in Information Technology (IT), Information Systems (IS) and Information Security (InfoSec) to specifically generate increased wealth must be implemented carefully. Shareholders reacting to corporate investments perceive financial value from individual investments. The investment’s perceived value is then reflected in the corporation’s updated stock market value. IS, IT, and InfoSec investments perceived to possess positive financial value, indicating strong potential for increased wealth, are rewarded by shareholders through increased stock market value; conversely, investments perceived to possess negative financial value, likely to decrease corporate wealth, are punished by shareholders through decreased stock market value. Previous research utilizing Event Study Methodology (ESM) determined financial impact that investments had on corporate stock market value after press release announcements identifying the investment. Based on early success across various domains, additional Event Study Research (ESR) was further conducted within IS, IT, and InfoSec. Most studies aligned into one of three categories: 1) Investments in IT, 2) Information Security Breaches, and 3) IT Outsourcing, and similarly measured changes in market value from corporate investments in related IS, IT, and InfoSec products and services. Examination of the extant body of literature identified a gap within the Privacy domain; minimal ESR examining privacy and the financial impact from corporate investments in privacy. While financial loss associated with a breach incident is identified as the motivating force driving increased corporate investments in defensive measures, “privacy” is identified as a singular construct with little concern for the associated invasion of privacy. As such, little is known about privacy, potential financial risks associated with a privacy breach, nor an understanding of why corporations are not investing in privacy. This research extends the body of literature and makes an academic contribution by: 1) using ESM to identify the financial and overall stock market implications from corporate investments in privacy, 2) identifying the economic incentives motivating corporate investments in privacy, and 3) gaining a better overall understating of corporate investments in privacy, and why corporations are not investing in privacy

Supporting Location Privacy Management through Feedback and Control

Participation in modern, socially-focused digital systems involves a large degree of privacy management, i.e. controlling who may access what information under what circumstances. Effective privacy management (control) requires that mobile systems’ users be able to make informed privacy decisions as their experience and knowledge of a system progresses. By informed, we mean users be aware of the actual information flow. Moreover, privacy preferences vary across the context and it is hard to define privacy policy that reflects the dynamic nature of our lives. This research explores the problem of supporting awareness of information flow and designing usable interfaces for maintaining privacy policies ad-hoc. We borrow from the world of Computer Supported Collaborative Work (CSCW) and propose to incorporate social translucence, a design approach that “supports coherent behaviour by making participants and their activities visible to one another”. We use the characteristics of social translucence, namely visibility, awareness and accountability in order to introduce social norms in spatially dispersed systems. Our research is driven by two questions: (1) how can artifacts from real world social interaction, such as responsibility, be embedded into mobile interaction; and (2) can systems be designed in which both privacy violations and the burden of privacy management is minimized. The contributions of our work are: (1) an implementation of Buddy Tracker, privacy-aware location-sharing application based on the social translucence; (2) the design and evaluation of the concept of real-time feedback as a means of incorporating social translucence in location-sharing scenarios; and finally (3) a novel interface for ad-hoc privacy management called Privacy-Shake. We explore the role of real-time feedback for privacy management in the context of Buddy Tracker. Informed by focus group discussions, interviews, surveys and two field trials of Buddy Tracker we found that when using a system that provided real-time feedback, people were more accountable for their actions and reduced the number of unreasonable location requests. From our observations we develop concrete design guidelines for incorporating real-time feedback into information sharing applications in a manner that ensures social acceptance of the technology

The analysis of foreign market entry strategies on the basis of different cultural backgrounds and environments : a qualitative study characterising the differences and similarities of brazilian and european firms

Moving into a new and foreign market can be challenging, especially when such market has a different culture and working environment in comparison to the home market. Thus, it is of utter importance to adjust a company’s strategy to the new market conditions. Currently, there are no concrete guidelines of what aspects are most important when moving from a developing market such as Brazil into a more sophisticated market like Europe, or vice versa. The present study will examine two companies from the same industry, but with different cultural backgrounds and its strategic similarities and differences for operating in multiple international markets. The data was collected via semi-structured interviews with the Chief Executive Officers (CEOs’) from both companies, using an interview guideline that is based on three different theoretical frameworks. The aim is to give recommendations to these two industries of how to efficiently use existing theoretical frameworks and which aspects are most significant when moving into a new market while keeping in mind a company’s size and background

Heuristics for Improved Enterprise Intrusion Detection

One of the greatest challenges facing network operators today is the identification of malicious activity on their networks. The current approach is to deploy a set of intrusion detection sensors (IDSs) in various locations throughout the network and on strategic hosts. Unfortunately, the available intrusion detection technologies generate an overwhelming volume of false alarms, making the task of identifying genuine attacks nearly impossible. This problem is very difficult to solve even in networks of nominal size. The task of uncovering attacks in enterprise class networks quickly becomes unmanageable. Research on improving intrusion detection sensors is ongoing, but given the nature of the problem to be solved, progress is slow. Research simultaneously continues in the field of mining the set of alarms produced by IDS sensors. Varying techniques have been proposed to aggregate, correlate, and classify the alarms in ways that make the end result more concise and digestible for human analysis. To date, the majority of these techniques have been successful only in networks of modest size. As a means of extending this research to real world, enterprise scale networks, we propose 5 heuristics supporting a three-pronged approach to the systematic evaluation of large intrusion detection logs. Primarily, we provide a set of algorithms to assist operations personnel in the daunting task of ensuring that no true attack goes unnoticed. Secondly, we provide information that can be used to tune the sensors which are deployed on the network, reducing the overall alarm volume, thus mitigating the monitoring costs both in terms of hardware and labor, and improving overall accuracy. Third, we provide a means of discovering stages of attacks that were overlooked by the analyst, based on logs of known security incidents. Our techniques work by applying a combination of graph algorithms and Markovian stochastic processes to perform probabilistic analysis as to whether an alarm is a true or false positive. Using these techniques it is possible to significantly reduce the total number of alarms and hosts which must be examined manually, while simultaneously discovering attacks that had previously gone unnoticed. The proposed algorithms are also successful at the discovery of new profiles for multi-stage attacks, and can be used in the automatic generation of meta-alarms, or rules to assist the monitoring infrastructure in performing automated analysis. We demonstrate that it is possible to successfully rank hosts which comprise the vertices of an Alarm Graph in a manner such that those hosts which are of highest risk for being involved in attack are immediately highlighted for examination or inclusion on hot lists. We close with an evaluation of 3 sensor profiling algorithms, and show that the order in which alarms are generated is tightly coupled with whether or not they are false positives. We show that by using time based Markovian analysis of the alarms, we are able to identify alarms which have a high probability of being attacks, and suppress more than 90% of false positives

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022

This open access book presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 29th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2022 conference, which will be held on January 11–14, 2022. The book provides an extensive overview of how information and communication technologies can be used to develop tourism and hospitality. It covers the latest research on various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics, and recommendation systems. The readers will gain insights and ideas on how information and communication technologies can be used in tourism and hospitality. Academics working in the eTourism field, as well as students and practitioners, will find up-to-date information on the status of research

Information and Communication Technologies in Tourism 2022

This open access book presents the proceedings of the International Federation for IT and Travel & Tourism (IFITT)’s 29th Annual International eTourism Conference, which assembles the latest research presented at the ENTER2022 conference, which will be held on January 11–14, 2022. The book provides an extensive overview of how information and communication technologies can be used to develop tourism and hospitality. It covers the latest research on various topics within the field, including augmented and virtual reality, website development, social media use, e-learning, big data, analytics, and recommendation systems. The readers will gain insights and ideas on how information and communication technologies can be used in tourism and hospitality. Academics working in the eTourism field, as well as students and practitioners, will find up-to-date information on the status of research