TRIPBAM: Leveraging Digital Data Streams to Unleash Savings

TRIPBAM pioneered automated clustered rate monitoring in the hotel industry. After capturing a traveler’s reservation, TRIPBAM software scrutinized the digital data stream of changing room rates and notified users of any potential savings. While TRIPBAM could successfully discover savings for its many customers, its executives focused on the challenge of turning TRIPBAM into a resilient, viable business going forward. Many questions awaited a clear answer. Was the consumer space the one that had the greatest potential or should the firm focus exclusively on the corporate market? How could TRIPBAM protect its early advantage from its inevitable imitators? Both the consumer and business opportunities looked wide open even though each side presented distinct challenges to growth. To achieve profitability, TRIPBAM needed to not just grow the user base but also seek a unique position in the market to defend against the increasing number of startups entering their space. The case provides substantial data and information for students to step in the shoes of TRIPBAM’s executives and provide some answers to the above questions

Adoption of Real-Time Digital Data Streams: Insights from Four Representative Case Studies

This paper combines Innovation Diffusion theory (IDT) and Managerial Fashion Theory to identify the emerging factors affecting real-time digital data streams adoption. Based on four representative case studies from innovative companies, the analysis reveals how a high propensity to risk is intertwined in studied organizational cultures. More specifically, these organizations are unconcerned by failure and limitedly affected by innovation complexity and incompatibility. Moreover, they firmly believed that they would rather be trend-setters than following a leader. In this setting, established adoption models show their limits in explaining and predicting adoption. Therefore, we extend the applicability of IDT and managerial fashion theory advancing an integrative model comprising the emerging dimensions from the field study. Results are finally discussed in the light of current literature

Affordance Theory in the IS Discipline: a Review and Synthesis of the Literature

International audienc

Zoorate: Certifying Online Consumer Reviews to Create Value

Zoorate emerged from its cofounders’ ambition to develop a Web portal for aggregating product reviews. The company’s core product, Feedaty, had evolved from a platform that matched reviewers by affinity into a full-fledged platform for aggregating and certifying consumer feedback. Specifically targeting online sellers and merchants, Zoorate continually increased its client based and signed up more than 1,000 customers by 2017. Supported by the strategic partnership and synergies with its shareholder 7Pixel Srl, the firm appeared to have finally set sail for success. However, several challenges lay ahead. The main competitors continued to grow in strength internationally and increasingly challenged Feedaty’s value proposition. How should Zoorate efficiently grow Feedaty? How should it deal with strong international competition that had begun to gain traction in Italy? Should the company continue to consolidate its Italian presence or expand abroad? The answer to these difficult questions would ultimately determine Zoorate’s future

NETWORKS OF SMES: THE ECOLEAD APPROACH TO SUPPORT COLLABORATION AMONG SMES

Faced to the globalization of the markets, SMEs develop new forms of relationships aimed at reinforcing their productivity. One of them is based on the development of networks of SMEs. Even if this concept is not new (see Italian Industrial Districts in the 19th century), it is now growing at a dynamic pace. The concept of Virtual Organizations Breeding Environment (VBE) is one expression of this phenomenon deeply developed in the Ecolead\u27s project. This paper proposes to deliver insighst on this promising concept, associated ICT tools and also a presentation of an in- progress case study

LEARNING ABOUT AMBIGUOUS TECHNOLOGIES: CONCEPTUALIZATION AND RESEARCH AGENDA

Information Technologies (IT) have gradually transformed into complex digital artefacts with blurred and constantly changing functional boundaries. While this shift offers promising venues that unfold in front of our eyes every day, it also challenges the deeply entrenched knowledge structures on which ordinary users rely to learn about unfamiliar technologies. We propose to take a step back in order to theorize the ambiguous nature of modern IT and to speculate on how users learn to use them. This paper revisits a wide array of management (BYOD, Gamification) and IS design trends (generativity, everyday computing, incompleteness) through the lens of the categorization framework. Our review of the literature on ambiguous products suggests that users exposed to ambiguous technologies may experience a categorization difficulty that disrupts the process of learning how to use them. This difficulty stems from a user’s belief that there are multiple or inconsistent interpretations of why and how to use an IT, as well as a perception that a given IT has some attributes in common with one or several seemingly unrelated ITs. We build on this theorization to propose a research agenda and discuss the expected practical implications of this path of research

Exploring the Role of Inter-Organizational Information Systems within SMEs Aggregations

Interorganizational Information Systems (IOIS) will play a relevant role in shaping competition in the next years. Even though companies have become extremely efficient in managing information and logistics inside their boundaries, communication and coordination among partners is still far from effective. Both obsolete technologies and very scarce ICT supported interorganizational process are found in practice. In a global market where the entire supply chain is involved in company success, the proper design and implementation of an IOS is becoming mandatory. SMEs, and in particular those inside industrial aggregations, could greatly benefit from IOIS implementation, however a widely accepted IOS adoption theory is still lacking. Focusing on the description of an industrial aggregation this paper proposes a framework, its implementation and a field test on 70 companies belonging to an industrial district, to understand the relationships among aggregation’s main players. The analysis of the results proved that this approach offers useful insight for the comprehension of the aggregation and suggest its use as a pre-design IOIS tool.6-8 June 200

LEVERAGING DIGITAL INNOVATION IN HEALTHCARE: HARNESSING BIG DATA, CLOUD AND MOBILE COMPUTING FOR BETTER HEALTH

Harnessing digital innovations for healthcare delivery has raised high expectations as well as major concerns. Several countries across the globe have made progress in achieving three common goals of lower costs, higher quality, and increased patient access to healthcare services through investments in digital infrastructures. New technologies are leveraged to achieve widespread 24x7 disease management, patients’ wellbeing, home-based healthcare and other patient-centric service innovations. Yet, digital innovations in healthcare face barriers in terms of standardization, data privacy and security concerns, fragmented markets, and misaligned incentives across stakeholders. The panel will focus on this apparent paradox and highlight the potential of big data, cloud and mobile computing for achieving better health. The panel co-chairs will introduce differences in healthcare delivery landscapes in selected countries. Then panelists with expertise in digital data streams, cloud, and mobile computing will present concrete examples of healthcare service innovations that have the potential to address one or more of the global goals. ECIS attendees are invited to join a debate about the facilitators and barriers of widespread implementation of these types of digital innovations, and the opportunities for significant IS research contributions