Organisational Cyber Resilience: research opportunities

Online reviews have become ubiquitous in modern day business environment. They shape consumer perception regarding a product or service, and thereby affect sales and profits of a business. Extant work on online review influence has investigated mechanisms by which a review may affect consumers’ decisions. The studies, however, have ignored the possibility of a change in the impact of drivers of influence over time, as more reviews are posted. This study attempts to bridge the gap. Drawing from elaboration likelihood model (ELM) and Simon’s theory of bounded rationality, hypotheses regarding temporal changes in the impact of drivers of influence have been proposed. The hypotheses have been tested based on online review data from Yelp.com. Additionally, in this study, it has been recognized that the gap or difference between review content being created and that needed by consumers to support decisions is more important than an understanding of the latter alone. Therefore, a set of hypotheses have been proposed regarding changes in review content characteristics over time, tested over the same dataset, and compared with the findings on temporal changes in the impact of drivers of review influence. The insights from this study have important implications for both theory and practice and have been discussed

Epistemologies in Use in Information Systems Research: Divergence or Change?

Researchers have referred to the dangers of widely diverse approaches for the future of Information Systems (IS) research and argued for ‘controlled diversity’, where some degree of consensus exists. The aim of this study was to test the degree of epistemological diversity found in a national IS research community and through this, to provide a verification and update of the results of a similar analysis in a North American context. The paper reports on an empirical study of the epistemology of Australian academic mainstream IS papers published in ten outlets between 1980 and 1996. Although increasing epistemological diversity was found it started from a homogeneous base and there were indications that it was controlled. The study tracked part of a longitudinal change process that may lead to consensus

Towards an abbreviated COBIT framework for use in an Australian State Public Sector

This paper details research undertaken to evaluate the potential to use the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technologies (COBIT) framework as the basis for Information Technology (IT) audits in a state public sector audit office from Australia. The research outlined here used a survey methodology to determine the high level control objectives from COBIT considered to be the most important to a selection of public sector organisations from within that state and provides a comparison with studies by Guldentops, van Grembergen and de Haes (2002), Liu and Ridley (2005) and results from the European Organisation of Supreme Audit Institutions (EUROSAI) IT working group COBIT self-assessment. Seventeen high level control objectives were identified as being important to Tasmanian public service organisations. As eight of these were also identified by the other studies it appears possible to derive an abbreviated instrument from COBIT that would be both enduring and relevant across geographical and organisational contexts

IT Control in the Australian Public Sector: An International Comparison

Despite widespread adoption of IT control frameworks, little academic empirical research has been undertaken to investigate their use. This paper reports upon research to benchmark the maturity levels of 15 key IT control processes from the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) in public sector organisations across Australia. It also makes a comparison against a similar benchmark for a mixed sector group from a range of nations, a mixed sector group from Asian-Oceanic nations, and for public sector organisations for all geographic areas. The Australian data were collected in a mail survey of the 387 non-financial public sector organisations identified as having more than 50 employees, which returned a 27% response rate. Patterns seen in the original international survey undertaken by the IS Audit and Control Association in 2002 were also seen in the Australian data. However, the Australian public sector performed better than sectors in all the international benchmarks for the 15 most important IT processes

Accounting For Time in IS Research Design: An Empirical Analysis, 1980-1996

This study investigated how Information Systems researchers accounted for time in the research design of their studies, as an indication of changing trends in the rigor of IS research. The time period of studies was determined from an analysis of papers published in ten outlets between 1980 and 1996. Of 336 papers found, the 173 empirical papers were classified using a scheme derived from a study by Orlikowski and Baroudi (1991). The papers were classified as ‘one-shot’, ‘multiple snapshot’, ‘longitudinal’ or ‘process trace’, where one- shot papers were regarded as being of low rigor. There were indications that the rigor of the research had generally improved between 1980 and 1996. However, more than a third of empirical papers published between 1992 and 1996 did not account for time in their research design

Computational Modeling of Single-Cell Migration::The Leading Role of Extracellular Matrix Fibers

Cell migration is vitally important in a wide variety of biological contexts ranging from embryonic development and wound healing to malignant diseases such as cancer. It is a very complex process that is controlled by intracellular signaling pathways as well as the cell's microenvironment. Due to its importance and complexity, it has been studied for many years in the biomedical sciences, and in the last 30 years it also received an increasing amount of interest from theoretical scientists and mathematical modelers. Here we propose a force-based, individual-based modeling framework that links single-cell migration with matrix fibers and cell-matrix interactions through contact guidance and matrix remodelling. With this approach, we can highlight the effect of the cell's environment on its migration. We investigate the influence of matrix stiffness, matrix architecture, and cell speed on migration using quantitative measures that allow us to compare the results to experiments