Journal
of International Technology and Information Management
Abstract
Volume 13,
Number 2, 2004
73. The Ecology Of Interorganizational Information
Sharing
Increasingly,
companies use interorganizational information systems to support business
process partnerships, such as automatic replenishment systems and other supply
chain initiatives, invoicing and payments, and insurance claims processing.
Inter-firm networking in turn can increase the visibility of information generated
and used by business partners. These business partners may experience intended
and unintended impacts from the changes in the partnering relationship, in
effect altering the ecology of the organization. Yet IT researchers rarely study an organization’s ecology,
focusing instead on impacts upon internal processes. Our goal in this paper is
to propose a definition of interorganizational information ecology, to provide
IT researchers with a lens through which interorganizational information
sharing should be studied. We begin by
reviewing principles of ecology from the natural and social sciences and then
discuss the emergence of principles of organizational ecology and information
ecology within the management literature. We then argue that advances in
information technology have been a primary enabler for companies’ focus on
interorganizational business processes and that field research on IT-enabled
business partnerships must include the impacts upon each partner and the
information shared among them. An
example from health care demonstrates the usefulness of the concept, and we
conclude with suggestions for field-based research on the ecology of
interorganizational information sharing.
87. Customer Relationship Management
(CRM): A Comparative Study between U.S.A. and Spain
Jesús García de Madariaga, Universidad Complutense, Madrid. Spain.
This paper surveys the marketing executives of the top companies in Spain with more than 100 million euros on net sales and reports the status of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions in their companies. The results are compared with the U.S.A. status reported by a previous study developed by InformationWeek Research in 2000 with a sample based on Fortune 500. One hundred and thirty-six companies participated in this study. The data provides insights into the strengths and weaknesses of the CRM in Spain in comparison with USA. Some viable actions are recommended to improve the usage of CRM and to reshape the future of these systems.
97. Building Data
Warehouses Using The Enterprise Modeling Framework
Joseph O. Chan, Roosevelt University
This paper proposes an
enterprise modeling framework for the deployment of data warehouses. The
framework provides the information roadmap coordinating source data and
different data warehouses across the business enterprise. The paper introduces
a solution to address data warehousing issues at the enterprise level while
avoiding the pitfalls of creating enterprise data warehouses and universal data
marts. It further proposes a change of paradigm from point solutions focus to a
methodology driven by enterprise requirements to meet the challenges of the new
economy. The proposed framework emphasizes the separation of the conceptual
construct from the physical and operational constructs of an enterprise. It
points out the differences and dependencies of analytic and operational
processes and how data warehouses and operational data stores respectively
support their information requirements. This paper will
demonstrate how the enterprise modeling framework for data warehousing can
produce business benefits.
111. Web-Services – The Next Evolutionary Stage Of E-Business
Santosh S. Venkatraman, Tennessee State University
Web-Services are a set of new technologies that promise to take “service-oriented” distributed computing to a whole new level, and eventually take e-business to the next evolutionary stage. Web-Services, in a nutshell, let organizations bridge communication gaps among their information systems, and build new software applications by “stitching” together existing ones. It is capable of integrating applications written in different programming languages, developed by different vendors, and running on different servers with dissimilar operating systems. Web-Services would enable companies to seamlessly connect their information systems and business processes with those of their partners and customers – thus ushering in a new “service oriented” distributed computing architecture. The purpose of this paper is to explore the nature of Web-Services, explain the essential concepts that enable Web-Services, and understand its major benefits and point out its shortcomings.
123. A Study of the
Relationship Between Internet Diffusion and Culture
Ravi Nath and N.R. Vasudeva Murthy, Creighton University
The unevenness in the diffusion rates of the
Internet across nations is commonly referred to as the “digital divide.” Technological, economic and political
factors are often mentioned as the primary contributing factors to this digital
gap. However, there is sufficient
evidence in support of the proposition that a nation’s culture also plays a
role in how citizens adopt and use technology innovations. This paper examines
the relationship between the cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede and the
Internet adoption rate of nations. Data
from sixty-two countries are used to establish a regression model and the
empirical results show that cultural traits such as “uncertainty avoidance” and
“masculinity” index of a nation are significantly related to the nation’s
Internet diffusion rate. These findings
suggest that policy makers must also consider these national culture traits
along with technological, economical, and political factors in setting national
policies to promote Internet-related innovations.
133. Fee-Based Online Services: Exploring Consumers’ Willingness
To Pay
L. Richard Ye, Yue “Jeff” Zhang, Dat-Dao Nguyen, and James Chiu, California State University, Northridge
Many online service businesses are beginning
to charge fees for services that they used to provide for free. It is unclear
whether consumers are ready to embrace this practice. This study explores
consumer attitudes toward fee-based online services. The results of the study
indicate that consumers’ willingness to pay for online services is likely to be
influenced by their perceived value of convenience these services provide, and
by the extent to which they utilize these services. While consumers appear more
willing to pay for services that are qualitatively better than free services,
there is also indication that the belief remains strong among many that online
services that were free in the past should remain free.