Editorial

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Volume 28, Issue 5.

It gives us great pleasure to welcome our readers to the fifth issue of the 28th volume of Journal Enterprise Information Management (JEIM), and express our appreciation to all our readers and contributors over the past year.

The fifth issue of volume 28 commences with a viewpoint by Yogesh K. Dwivedi, M.N. Ravishankar and Antonis Simintiras, entitled “Completing a PhD in business and management: A brief guide to doctoral students and universities”. This viewpoint aims to offer some directions on what it takes to successfully complete a doctoral research thesis. This viewpoint is based on the argument that regardless of the ever-increasing number of doctoral students across the world (e.g. only in UK around 1,040 business/management students graduated with a PhD degree in 2012/2013 – HESA), there still remains significant uncertainties in relation to whether students studying in business and management research areas thoroughly understand the process of producing a PhD thesis, defending it and in developing a coherent publication strategy. In many cases the root of the problems lie around the lack of adequate research infrastructure and processes, availability of capable research supervision and research funding and the broader culture of the department/school/university. This viewpoint particularly focuses on discussing on three key issues:

1. choosing a research problem;

2. demonstrating rigour and quality; and

3. developing a publication strategy.

The authors argue that a doctoral student must illustrate rigour in all aspects of research but particularly in undertaking literature review work (background theory), selecting and justifying theories and/or theoretical constructs, critical instance on selecting, justifying and applying research method and analysis techniques, discussing research results, clearly highlighting both theoretical and practical contributions and drawing careful conclusions.

The above viewpoint is followed by a qualitative-based research by Mohana Shanmugam, Yen-Yao Wang, Hatem Bugshan and Nick Hajli, entitled “Understanding customer perceptions of internet banking: the case of the UK”. In this research, the authors report that the spread of the internet unwraps new doors for banks and offers them the ability to respond to heightened customer expectations and improve customer services (Poon, 2008). Due to the interactive nature of the internet, it provides more advantages than other channels for delivering the banking services (Shah and Siddiqui, 2006), which it offer new business models (Hajli, 2014). This study seeks to investigate customer perceptions of internet banking in the UK with the goal of providing a comprehensive understanding of British internet banking system. Specifically, the authors conduct a qualitative study by interviewing 25 participants and examining various supplemental documents to gain the detailed understanding of customer perceptions towards internet banking. As a result, the research question this study attempts to address is:

• What are customer perceptions of internet banking in the UK?

The empirical findings indicate that money transfers and bill payment are the most popular facilities with UK internet banking adopters. More importantly, security is the most important factor affecting the rate of internet banking adoption in the UK. To resolve customers' security concerns about internet banking, some banks have introduced technologies such as card readers to avoid online fraud. In addition, we also found that customers are highly satisfied with internet banking.

Following the above internet banking research paper, we have a research paper by Adam Fadlalla and Farzaneh Amani presenting their research, entitled “A keyword-based organizing framework for ERP intellectual contributions”. In this paper, Adam and Farzaneh develop a novel keyword-based framework for organising ERP intellectual contributions based on the on the papers published in scholarly journals during the period 2000-2013. Using keyword persistence, a time-based measure, and keyword dominance, a frequency-based measure, the authors constructed an empirical framework to classify ERP intellectual contributions. Through this research, the authors identified four major ERP themes using the proposed framework; namely:

1. emerging/phantom;

2. intermittent;

3. trendy; and

4. core.

Further examination of the keywords in each of these themes revealed that whereas the business aspects of ERP systems are discussed in an intermittent manner, its technical aspects are discussed in a trendy fashion. The authors assert that the main contribution of this paper is the development of an objective keyword-based framework that can be used as an organising tool for intellectual contributions. The framework can be used to derive insights in the macro characterisations of the research in a given domain, and is thus valuable to researchers – both academic and practitioner.

Then we have Saira Kharuddin, Soon-Yau Foong and Rosmila Senik presenting their research entitled “Effects of decision rationality on ERP adoption extensiveness and organizational performance”. This research reports that with globalisation and ever-increasing investments of multinational corporations in the developing countries, many local companies in the developing countries, despite lacking the needed capabilities and resources, are pressured to replace their legacy systems with more sophisticated information systems, such as the ERP system (Koh et al., 2006). A key question of interest to both academic researchers and practitioners is:

• Would decision rationality for ERP adoption affect investments in extended ERP applications and the subsequent organisational performance?

The authors further argue that the relationship between decision rationality for ERP system adoption and the subsequent organisational performance is relatively unexplored, particularly in developing countries such as Malaysia. This study, as a result, intends to address this relative void in the literature by extending the earlier studies on technology adoption decision intent (e.g. Teo et al., 2003; Ugrin, 2009) by investigating whether decision rationality for ERP adoption would affect ERP adoption extensiveness and subsequently, the organisational performance. Therefore, the mediating roles of system usage and user satisfaction on the relationship between ERP adoption extensiveness and organisational performance are also examined in this study. The conceptual findings are empirical validated through a questionnaire survey based on the 976 companies listed in the BURSA Malaysia (formerly known as the Kuala Lumpur Stock Exchange) at the end of 2010. The results indicate that the overall perceived economic benefits of ERP systems, but not the overall institutional pressures, significantly affects ERP adoption extensiveness.

The above ERP paper is followed by another research paper by Chen-Ying Lee, Chih-Hsuan Tsao, Wan-Chuan Chang, entitled “The relationship between attitude toward using and customer satisfaction with mobile application services: an empirical study from the life insurance”. In this paper, the authors argue that there is a need to understand life insurers' app services by examining factors that influence users' attitudes and customer satisfaction. This may guide strategic planning and inform decision making by life insurers when introducing or developing app services for customers in different contexts. Thus, this research aims to investigate the effects of attitude towards using life insurers' mobile app services on customer satisfaction. This research uses judgement sampling to collect data using a questionnaire survey. A pilot study with a small sample size of 30 was conducted to clarify the overall structure of the questionnaire. The respondents provided comments on the clarity of some items in the questionnaire. Following the pilot test, the main survey was administered. In total, 600 questionnaires were distributed in the main survey and 538 valid samples were collected after eliminating 62 invalid samples; the valid questionnaires account for an effective response rate of 89.7 per cent. The results indicate that all variables significantly and positively affected usage attitude. The main contributions of this study are the following:

1. this study investigates the effects of perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, perceived playfulness and compatibility on attitude towards using an app service to allow the life insurance industry to improve or strengthen the evaluation of value-added services and functions;

2. this research explores the effect of consumers' attitude towards using an app service on their satisfaction to serve as a reference for CRM and marketing management practices in the life insurance industry; and

3. few studies on app services apply to the insurance industry; this study supplements the gap in the literature on insurance.

The above life insurance-based research paper is followed by Mutaz M. Al-Debei, Enas Al-Lozi and Omar Al-Hujran presenting their research paper, entitled “Critical design and evaluation factors of mobile business models: “road block” eradicators for mobile networks operators”. This research defines critical design and evaluation factors of business models for mobile network operators in general, and more specifically for mobile data services. The authors argue that as the viability of business models is time dependent, they must keep evolving and changing continuously to stay successful. Realising the importance of this phenomenon in the modern ICT business world, a number of researchers (e.g. Pateli and Giaglis, 2006; Voelpel et al., 2004) have delineated the domain of digital business model change. Consequently, they have provided IT-centred companies with evolution techniques, contingency approaches and business model change methodologies. Nevertheless, there is very little known about prerequisites for their success or workability, e.g. little is known as to whether these methods are effective, if a company's technological and organisational architecture is rigid, or the whole work system is closed. As a result, the authors argue that there is a need to understand the types of requirements or critical design factors that need to be considered within technology companies' business models that would facilitate their BM change process to sustain and innovate. This study accordingly follows a qualitative approach. As the paper identifies critical design factors for mobile business models, the authors, as a part of larger research, examine three real-life cases related to mobile data service BM design and engineering, such as:

• Case-1 – Orange Business Services (OBS);

• Case-2 – Apple's iPhone services and applications; and

• Case-3 – NTT DoCoMo's i-Mode service.

As this research provides a framework for designing and developing market-aligned, cohesive, dynamic, explicit and unique business models with Fitting Network-Mode, the authors assert that, if this framework is adopted by mobile network operators, it would ensure their long term success by improving the sustainability and innovation capabilities of their business models.

Finally, we have another ERP research by Parag Uma Kosalge and Elizabeth Ritz, entitled “Finding the tipping point for a CEO to say yes to an ERP: a case study”. Through this research, the authors identify what motivates the top management to consider a transition from an existing system to an ERP especially as such a transition can be painful, expensive and involve considerable business risk. As a result, the research postulates a decision model that top management may use to aid their decision-making process. This paper uses a case study to examine an SME's transition to an ERP system. The authors argue that a case study may not only surface some of the important motivators but also help understand the underlying phenomenon. The paper offers helpful guidelines to SMEs for selecting appropriate business information systems. Understanding the motivators can also help technology providers to shape their offerings. The research concludes that it is usually a change in scale of operations that drives the transition. The motivators are abstracted as:

• scalability – increased hierarchical controls and systems scalability driven by increasing number of employees;

• complexity – more business functions need systems support to address increased operational complexity; and

• integration systems and process integration for seamless operations.

The research also provides valuable directions to academicians to further explore this important research question that has few empirical studies.

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

Hajli, N. (2014), “The role of social support on relationship quality and social commerce”, Technological Forecasting and Social Change, Vol. 87, pp. 17-27

Koh, S.C., Simpson, M. amd Padmore, J. (2006), “An exploratory study of enterprise resource planning adoption in Greek companies”, Industrial Management & Data Systems, Vol. 106 No. 7, pp. 1033-1059

Pateli, A.G. and Giaglis, G.M. (2006), “Technology innovation-induced BM change: a contingency approach”, Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 18 No. 2, pp. 167-183

Poon, W.-C. (2008), “Users' adoption of e-banking services: the Malaysian perspective”, Journal of Business & Industrial Marketing, Vol. 23 No. 1, pp. 59-69

Shah, M.H. and Siddiqui, F.A. (2006), “Organisational critical success factors in adoption of e-banking at the Woolwich Bank”, International Journal of Information Management, Vol. 26 No. 6, pp. 442-456

Teo, H., Wei, K. and Benbasat, I. (2003), “Predicting intention to adopt interorganizational linkages: an institutional perspectives”, MIS Quarterly, Vol. 27 No. 1, pp. 19-49

Ugrin, J.C. (2009), “The effect of system characteristics, stage of adoption, and experience on institutional explanations for ERP system choice”, Accounting Horizons, Vol. 23 No. 4, pp. 365-389

Voelpel, S.C., Leibold, M. and Tekie, E.B. (2004), “The wheel of business model reinvention: how to reshape your business model to leapfrog competitors”, Journal of Change Management, Vol. 4 No. 3, pp. 259-276