Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Volume 29, Issue 2.

It gives us great pleasure to welcome our readers to the second issue of the 29th volume of Journal Enterprise Information Management (JEIM), and express our appreciation to all our readers and contributors over the past year.

The second issue of volume 29 commences with a viewpoint by Zahir Irani and Amir M. Sharif, entitled “Sustainable food security futures: perspectives on food waste and information across the food supply chain”. This viewpoint seeks to signpost the concerns around food security and related factors, e.g. organisations, enterprises, policy makers and interested stakeholders can seek to explore and understand this vital societal issue. The authors assert that the challenges that food security poses are eclectic in nature and cut through country, society, organisation and individual boundaries. Only through identifying these factors – hence identifying underlying factors of food waste and usage of information within food supply chains to untangle them – can we adopt enterprise interventions in order to initiate and mitigate food security risk. Global political and social concerns about society’s relationship with food are hence increasingly feeding into debates about how to maintain a stable and secure supply of food and in turn, raise concerns around food waste. Whilst there is much need to rethink our relationship with food consumption and waste, this is only going to possible when all the constituent components that impact food security are better understood, modelled and analysed. Given human capital is more mobile, aspirational and in search for higher living standards, traditional norms of stability are now challenged and in search of scalable solutions. Although there is a worldwide growth in population, much of this is around metropolitan and urban areas in developing countries – wherein food demand and supply is also increasing. This is as opposed to rural farming areas that have traditionally serviced community needs locally. Thus, seeking an understanding of these key factors, and how the usage of information can expand the perspective on this topic so that organisations and enterprises involved in the supply of food can manage and maintain food demand in a sustainable fashion.

The above viewpoint is followed by a research paper by Vinit Parida, Pejvak Oghazi and Stefan Cedergren, entitled “A study of how ICT capabilities can influence dynamic capabilities”. In this paper, the authors argues that if small firms possess high levels of ICT capabilities, they can utilise their limited internal resources to influence the development of high-order organisational capabilities, such as dynamic capabilities. In order to provide in-depth understanding to the latter concepts, this research draws from resources-based view (e.g. Barney, 1991; Wang and Ahmed, 2007), and information systems literature (Wade and Hulland, 2004; Tan et al., 2010), to explore the link between ICT capabilities and dynamic capabilities. More specifically, the purpose of this study is to empirically examine the influence of ICT capabilities on the dynamic capabilities of small firms. By doing so, this research makes two theoretical contributions:

• first, this research builds on the knowledge related to understanding the complex relationship between ICT capabilities and performance; and

• second, this research attempts to improve in understanding the mechanisms of how ICT capabilities can influence dynamic capabilities by investigating this relationship at the level of ICT components.

To test the proposed hypotheses, the authors focused on collecting data through a survey from small firms, working within the high-technology sector in Sweden. Based on our empirical analysis of 291 small, high-technology firms in Sweden, this research found several interesting results discussed under the following three themes:

1. ICT capabilities influence on performance;

2. ICT capabilities components influence on dynamic capabilities; and

3. the moderating influence of firm size.

Shu-Mei Tseng presents her research entitled “Knowledge management capability, customer relationship management, and service quality”. Shu-Mei argues that given the importance of service quality in retaining customers, it is critical for firms to understand what factors contribute to service quality. Moreover, firms have to perform better in their knowledge processing to acquire the knowledge needed to offer subsequent services that can best satisfy customers (Bull, 2010). While a vast amount of service quality literature exists, little empirical work has been done to explore knowledge management capability (KMC) and customer relationship management (CRM) in firms. To fill this gap, Shu-Mei investigates the impact of KMC and CRM on service quality. Comprehending the essentials for enhancing service quality can provide useful management insights into developing effective strategies that allow enterprises to retain customers. To test the proposed hypotheses, purposive sampling was used to ensure that respondents had high willingness to participate in the research. The questionnaire was anonymous, mainly distributed on-site and online through e-mails. Middle-top managers were asked to fill out the questionnaire since they tend to play key roles in organisational activities. Empirical findings indicate that KMC and CRM are the major factor for enhancing service quality. Enterprises can rely on the basis of high KMC and utilise CRM to better understand customer needs, to supply personalised information, and to increase the interaction between the enterprises and their customers.

Then we have Sujeet Kumar Sharma, Rajan Yadav and Ali Tarhini presenting their research entitled “A multi-analytical approach to understand and predict the mobile commerce adoption”. Based on the literature findings, the authors argue that though the developing countries have tremendous potential in mobile commerce domain, still the actual usage is quite low (e.g. as also reported by Chong, 2013). Thus, to boost mobile commerce in the developing regions, it is imperative to understand the factors that prevent mobile phone users to adopt this technology when conducting various mobile commerce activities. An understanding of such factors would help policy makers and practitioners to develop a strategic framework to utilise the inherent benefits of mobile commerce. This research study therefore offers a unified approach to understand m-commerce adoption from consumer behaviour perspective by extending the scope of existing theories. The study is based on the proposition that scope of m-commerce is not merely limited to financial transactions based exchange. The aims of this study are threefold:

• first, it intends to explore factors that motivate/inhibit consumers to adopt m-commerce;

• second, the study integrates appropriate constructs from three important works of Technology Acceptance Model, Theory of Planned Behaviour and Innovation Diffusion Theory, widely used in forecasting the adoption intent of innovative technologies; and

• third, the paper intends to integrate empirical modelling methods for prediction purposes using explanatory and predictive modelling methods (Shmueli and Koppius, 2010).

This study proposes to develop and test a hybrid model with better predictive ability to understand mobile commerce adoption. To test the hypotheses, the survey-based primary data are collected from Delhi Technological University (India) and Delhi University (India). This study captures causal relationship among the factors that predict the intention to adopt m-commerce by using a linear and nonlinear approach. Overall, the findings provide useful insight to m-commerce companies, telecommunication service providers and others to develop appropriate business strategies to improve the adoption intention of mobile commerce.

Following the above mobile commerce adoption research, we have Satyendra Sharma and Srikanta Routroy presenting their research, entitled “Modeling information risk in supply chain using Bayesian networks”. This paper attempts to provide a modelling approach for information risk in the supply chain, which are caused by various interrelated internal and external factors. The authors report that information risk could also propagate and escalate through various causal links of risk factors and can lead to other types of risks in the supply chain. Thus, to understand the causal links between various supply chain information risk factors, a Bayesian Network (BN) is developed so that each risk factor or variable is presented as a node with the directed links forming arcs between them that show causal relationships. The authors argue that probabilistic presentation of the interactions among risk factors is one of the key points of BNs and it allows the estimation of risks and uncertainties better than other models that only account for expected values. To validate the proposed risk assessment research model for supply chain information risk using BN, this research made use of data sample that consists of five major automobile manufacturers in India. These five companies were OEMs in automotive sector operating in India. The selected OEMs are large with turnover more than 5,000 cores and employee size is greater than 2,000. Analysis of the empirical data demonstrates result obtained for a case study and the changes observed in the values of probabilities when certain data sets are known with full certainty.

Arash Joorabchi, Michael English and Abdulhussain E. Mahdi present their research, entitled “Text mining stackoverflow: an insight into challenges and subject-related difficulties faced by computer science learners”. This paper proposes a novel text-mining approach to investigate the potential and benefits of StackOverflow (SO) to higher education instructors and teachers. The work presented in this paper aims to address the following two research questions:

RQ1. How can text mining of CQA, and SO in particular, be utilised to provide an in-depth perception and understanding of subject-related difficulties faced by learners?

RQ2. Can instructors, teachers and educators in higher education learn from such an insight to support their students and enhance their learning experience?

This research adopted a heuristic research approach combined with a new text-mining approach, which utilises Wikipedia as a knowledge base, as a research methodology to answer the above mentioned research questions. The heuristic approach is an exploratory approach to research that is quite different from other approaches in that it is not concerned with finding theories or testing hypotheses by following some pre-established formula, but is concerned directly with discovery of knowledge or some desired result by exploration, experimental work, intelligent analysis and logic reasoning (Moustakas, 1990). Whereas, the text-mining approach has been adopted as an alternative to a labour-intensive manual approach such as content analysis (Krippendorff, 2012) due to the size of the data set being analysed which limits the extent to which a manual analysis approach could be adopted. The proposed text-mining approach has the potential for informing instructors and teachers in higher education of the important and challenging subjects in the courses they deliver, so that they could focus more on these topics/subjects in the coverage, delivery and teaching/training approaches of their course material.

Finally, we have Stephen Burgess and Rafael Paguio with their research paper, entitled “Examining ICT application adoption in Australian home-based businesses: an innovation-decision process approach”. This study aims to examine the adoption and use of particular ICT applications by Home-based Businesses (HBB) through the lens of Rogers’ (2005) innovation-decision process. In particular, the research questions examined are:

RQ3. To what extent are ICT applications being used in HBB?

RQ4. How are they being used?

RQ5. Is there an intention to keep using them?

RQ6. What are the reasons for non-adoption of ICT applications?

RQ7. Where awareness exists of an ICT application, but a decision to adopt or not to adopt has not been made, what are the reasons for this?

RQ8. Is awareness of the ICT application still lacking?

RQ9. Are there any factors specific to HBB that affect the use of ICTs across the stages of Rogers’ innovation-decision process?

In order to investigate the abovementioned research questions, semi-structured interviews were conducted with a purposive sample of 30 HBB. This is because semi-structured interviews provide the opportunity to investigate beliefs, motivations and reasons for actions (Leedy and Ormrod, 2013), in this instance, the adoption and use of ICT applications. The authors assert that this study is unique in that it is the first to examine the adoption of ICT applications in HBB using Rogers’ innovation-decision stages as a theoretical lens. The analysis of interviews of HBB and results presented confirms that the experience of adoption of ICT applications across all stages of adoption was not consistent in the participating organisations.

We would very much like to thank our contributors for their excellent high-quality contributions to this regular issue and hope JEIM readers will find the papers stimulating, original and valuable.

Zahir Irani and Muhammad Kamal

References

Barney, J. (1991), “Firm resources and sustained competitive advantage”, Journal of Management, Vol. 17 No. 2, pp. 99-120

Bull, C. (2010), “Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems, intermediation and disintermediation: the case of INSG”, International Journal of Information Management, Vol. 30 No. 1, pp. 94-97

Chong, A.Y.L. (2013), “A two-staged SEM-neural network approach for understanding and predicting the determinants of m-commerce adoption”, Expert Systems with Applications, Vol. 40 No. 4, pp. 1240-1247

Krippendorff, K. (2012), Content Analysis: An Introduction to Its Methodology, Sage Publications, CA

Leedy, P.D. and Ormrod, J.E. (2013), Practical Research: Planning and Design, 10th ed., Pearson

Moustakas, C. (1990), Heuristic Research: Design, Methodology, and Applications, Sage Publications, Newbury Park, London

Rogers, E.M. (2005), Diffusion of Innovations, 5th ed., Free Press, New York, NY

Tan, K.S., Chong, S.C., Lin, B. and Eze, U.C. (2010), “Internet-based ICT adoption among SMEs: demographic versus benefits, barriers, and adoption intention”, Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 27-55

Shmueli, G. and Koppius, O.R. (2010), “Predictive analytics in information systems research”, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 553-572

Wade, M. and Hulland, J. (2004), “The resource-based view and information systems research: review, extension, and suggestions for future research”, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 28 No. 1, pp. 107-142

Wang, C.L. and Ahmed, P.K. (2007), “Dynamic capabilities: a review and research agenda”, International Journal of Management Reviews, Vol. 9 No. 1, pp. 31-51