The Use of Hosted Enterprise Applications by SMEs: A User Perspective

This paper seeks to deepen our understanding of the engagement of small to medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in hosted enterprise applications (high complexity e-business applications) in the UK by investigating the relevance of organisational and technical factors through conducting interviews with SME users of hosted applications. The emergence and development of the application service provider (ASP) sector has attracted much interest and highly optimistic forecasts for revenues. Of particular interest in this paper is the emergence of service offerings targeted specifically at SMEs. The paper starts by considering information technology (IT) adoption by SMEs in general before reviewing the provision of hosted enterprise applications in the US and UK. The empirical data collected from SME users of hosted enterprise applications is then analysed in order to produce the key findings and conclusions. From an SME user perspective the key findings to emerge from the study include: i) confirmation that ICT infrastructure was no longer a barrier to adoption, ii) the pragmatic approach taken to security issues, iii) the use of both multiple information systems (hosted and resident) and service providers, iv) the attractiveness of the rental cost model and v) the intention to continue or extend their use of hosted applications within the enterprise. The early promise of the ASP sector appears not to have been generally realised for SMEs in the UK. This study explores the experience of early adopters of this new IT related innovation and identifies some significant business gains experienced by SME users. It also highlights the opportunity for gaining competitive advantage by using hosted enterprise applications to reduce costs. There are very few empirical studies of hosted applications which take a deliberately SME user perspective and this paper make an important contribution in this emerging field

Constructing the cultural repertoire in a natural disaster: The role of social media in the Thailand flood of 2011

In 2011, Thailand witnessed its worst flooding catastrophe in half a century. In this study, we explored social media as a new and promising weapon to address the physical and morale challenges caused by the natural disaster. A case study was conducted in the context of crisis response, whichinvestigated the use of social media to contribute to the collective cultural repertoire during the natural disaster. By investigating two paths toward the cultural repertoire construction considering different social groups, this study also identified the roles of social media as an information market and an information threshold in the crisis response

Thai E-Tourism Business Progression Classification

This research aims to investigate the progression of e-business adoption in Thai tourism enterprises in order to define the progression levels. The levels of E-tourism business progression are determined in four stages: online presence, interactive online presence, electronic transactions, and enterprise integration. The survey results reveal that e-business progression of most Thai tourism enterprises remain in online presence stage. Most Thai tourism enterprises which adopted e-business have not progressed further to stage 2, 3, and 4. There are more hotels which have reached higher stages than travel agents for almost every web features. This can be implied that the tourism enterprises have not paid careful attention to details of their websites, nor do they perceive usefulness and importance of informative websites. We conclude that the lack of perceived usefulness and an importance of ebusiness could impede the progression to further stages

ICT-Enabled Community Empowerment in Crisis Response: Social Media in Thailand Flooding 2011

In this paper, we examine the emerging use of ICT in social phenomena such as natural disasters. Researchers have acknowledged that a community possesses the capacity to manage the challenges in crisis response on its own. However, extant IS studies focus predominantly on IS use from the crisis response agency’s perspective, which undermines communities’ role. By adopting an empowerment perspective, we focus on understanding how social media empowers communities during crisis response. As such, we present a qualitative case study of the 2011 Thailand flooding. Using an interpretive approach, we show how social media can empower the community from three dimensions of empowerment process (structural, psychological, and resource empowerment) to achieve collective participation, shared identification, and collaborative control in the community. We make two contributions: 1) we explore an emerging social consequence of ICT by illustrating the roles of social media in empowering communities when responding to crises, and 2) we address the literature gap in empowerment by elucidating the actualization process of empowerment that social media as a mediating structure enables

Adoption and evaluation of e-business in Thai SMEs: a process perspective

IS adoption and evaluation remains a problematic area in theory and practice, and this is particularly the case for SMEs. The prior literature on IT/ IS adoption and evaluation has largely considered this area in terms of the factors influencing the decision to adopt. This paper takes the point of view that IT/ IS adoption may be better understood as a process, frequently cyclical, rather than a decision-type event. The research thus set out to explore the linkage between IT/ IS adoption and evaluation from a process perspective. An in-depth case study was conducted with a Thai medium-sized tourism enterprise which adopts e-business technologies to reach and serve its customers as well as to facilitate its back-end processes. Based on the contextualism theory (Pettigrew, 1987) and the appreciative system (Vickers, 1965), an interpretive framework is developed to help capture the dynamic changes occurred throughout the adoption and evaluation cycle. The case reinforces the prior literature that adoption and evaluation are framed by certain contexts. Overall, the research attempts to probe into the on-going process of IT/ IS adoption and evaluation occurring in SMEs and adds into the literature on IS evaluation in SMEs particularly with respect to the process aspect