The Snake and Ladder Game: Generating Metaphor and Meaning in the Information Systems Classroom

The proposed research aims to understand the practice of metaphoric thinking in the IS classroom through interviewing IS faculty, developing and analyzing a corpus of usage of metaphors in IS textbooks, and documenting related best practice

Will the Information Security Industry Die? Applying Social Network Analysis to Sturdy Industry Convergence

In this paper, we first analyze the trends in mergers and acquisitions (M&As) activities among information security firms and other information technology (IT) firms in the US over the period 1996 to 2008. We then use social network analysis to investigate the characteristics and underlying dynamics of these M&As activities. Our results reveal an increase in cohesiveness of 200% in the network linking the information security firms and the IT firms considered in our analysis. This, in turn, implies a move towards industry convergence. In particular, we show that acquisitions of identity and access management (IAM) firms have become more central to M&As by IT firms in the US since 2004, reflecting an increasing trend among IT firms to integrate IAM technologies within their products

Has Decreasing Innovation Hurt the Stock Price of Information Security Firms? A Time Series Analysis

Prior research has shown that information security breaches are beneficial to the stock price of information security firms, around the time that these security breaches are announced. We, however, show that the overall trend in the market value of information security firms has actually been stagnating, despite an increasing number of security threats that exploit vulnerabilities in information systems. We attribute this decrease in the stock price of information security firms, after controlling for overall market conditions, to insufficient innovation on the part of information security firms. We apply time series regression methods to analyze the relationship between R&D intensity and the stock price of information security firms. This empirical work provides a plausible explanation for the decrease in the stock price of information security firms, despite high demand for their products and services

Web Accessibility as a Barrier to Successful Digital Governance: A Case Study of the Arabian Gulf Region

Conformance to web accessibility standards is crucial to successful digital governance. Examining the state of Web accessibility compliance in the state of Qatar, a fast growing digital economy with the world\u27s highest per capita GDP has many lessons for emerging economies. Our audit of a selected sample of websites across government and other sectors suggests the need to raise awareness among executives and other key stakeholders regarding Web accessibility and to develop best practices and an improved policy framework. To better understand the barriers to adoption of Web accessibility standards in the country, we interviewed 30 CIOs and senior information technology managers. The results suggest a need for stronger regulations, since organizations will not otherwise comply due to concerns that enforcement of accessibility standards results in increased website development time and costs and undermines usable website design and management, particularly with multilingual websites

Human Error and Privacy Breaches in Healthcare Organizations: Causes and Management Strategies

We apply Reason’s GEMS typology to study privacy breach incidents in healthcare organizations. An interpretive analysis of transcripts of interviews with privacy officers of healthcare organizations in the U.S. Midwest helps discern the underlying causes of human error and develop a framework for error management. The study finds that organizational factors causing human error constitute a greater impediment to HIPAA Privacy Rule compliance than do human factors

Applying the Cox Model to Study Online Gambling Behavior

Although a key objective of Internet gambling service providers is player retention, there is a concomitant need to reduce the social costs of gambling. Our study shows how habit and prospect theories help build an integrative framework for decision support in regulated Internet gambling environments. To illustrate the practical implication of this framework, we applied the Cox model with time-dependent covariates on real gambling data collected from 4,222 users of a gambling website. The results help establish the positive association of key indicators such as the prior outcomes on the activity lifespan of an Internet gambler and the moderating effect of gambling frequency on the positive association between prior outcomes and gambling lifespan. This research is expected to contribute to the literatures on IT adoption and diffusion in general, and IT-based addictive behavior in particular

Scaffolding Case Analysis Writing: A Collaboration between Information Systems and Writing Faculty

In this paper, we present a collaboration between writing professors and an information systems (IS) professor to scaffold case analysis writing at an American English-medium branch campus in the Middle East. We describe our process for revising the professor’s writing assignment to make his expectations more explicit and for creating scaffolding materials that we delivered in classroom workshops to assist students’ pre-writing. We provide insights about the positive impact of the writing workshops on students’ writing from an end-of-semester interview with the professor and from interviews with students about their perceptions of the workshops and the personalized feedback they received

Captagon: Use and Trade in the Middle East

This is the peer-reviewed version of the following article: ‘Captagon: Use and Trade in the Middle East’, which has been published in final form at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/hup.2548/abstract . This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.Fenetheylline, a psychostimulant drug, often branded as Captagon, is a combination of amphetamine and theophylline. Since the cessation of its legal production in 1986, counterfeited products have been produced illicitly in south-east Europe and far-east Asia. Its profitable trade has been linked to terrorist organizations, including Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. This study aims to reach up-to-date data, concerning the Captagon e-commerce and use in the Middle East.Peer reviewe

Concern for information privacy:a cross-nation study of the United Kingdom and South Africa

Individuals have differing levels of information privacy concern, formed by their expectations and the confidence they have that organisations meet this in practice. Variance in privacy laws and national factors may also play a role. This study analyses individuals’ information privacy expectation and confidence across two nations, the United Kingdom and South Africa, through a survey of 1463 respondents. The findings indicate that the expectation for privacy in both countries are very high. However, numerous significant differences exist between expectations and confidence when examining privacy principles. The overall results for both countries show that there is a gap in terms of the privacy expectations of respondents compared to the confidence they have in whether organisations are meeting their expectations. Governments, regulators, and organisations with an online presence need to consider individuals’ expectations and ensure that controls that meet regulatory requirements, as well as expectations, are in place