A cognitive approach for agent-based personalized recommendation

There is an increasing need for various e-service, e-commerce and e-business sites to provide personalized recommendations to on-line customers. This paper proposes a new type of personalized recommendation agents called fuzzy cognitive agents. Fuzzy cognitive agents are designed to give personalized suggestions based on the user’s current personal preferences, other user’s common preferences, and expert’s domain knowledge. Fuzzy cognitive agents are able to represent knowledge via extended fuzzy cognitive maps, to learn users’ preferences from most recent cases and to help customers make inferences and decisions through numeric computation instead of symbolic and logic deduction. A case study is included to illustrate how personalized recommendations are made by fuzzy cognitive agents in e-commerce sites. The case study demonstrates that the fuzzy cognitive agent is both flexible and effective in supporting e-commerce applications.     

The state of CRM adoption by the financial services in the UK: an empirical investigation

In recent years, organisations have begun to realise the importance of knowing their customers better. Customer relationship management (CRM) is an approach to managing customer related knowledge of increasing strategic significance. The successful adoption of IT-enabled CRM redefines the traditional models of interaction between businesses and their customers, both nationally and globally. It is regarded as a source for competitive advantage because it enables organisations to explore and use knowledge of their customers and to foster profitable and long-lasting one-to-one relationships. This paper discusses the results of an exploratory survey conducted in the UK financial services sector; it discusses CRM practice and expectations, the motives for implementing it, and evaluates post-implementation experiences. It also investigates the CRM tools functionality in the strategic, process, communication, and business-to-customer (B2C) organisational context and reports the extent of their use. The results show that despite the anticipated potential, the benefits from such tools are rather small.     

The e-HUB evolution: From a Custom Software Architecture to a Software-as-a-Service implementation

New technological advances have enabled the creation of distributed collaborative industrial networks giving origin to new collaborative e-business models such as the Virtual Organisation (VO). These industrial networks require new Information and Communication Technologies Infrastructures (ICT-I) playing the intermediary role as the enablers of interoperation among their participant organisations. Furthermore, these networks require coordination and cooperation mechanism among its members which in turn can be supported through specific vertical applications deployed over a common platform. PyME CREATIVA was a project defined with the aim of playing the role of a service provider of an open technological platform named the e-HUB, providing a set of collaborative electronic solutions named the e-services, to support collaborative business processes among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs). Till today, the e-HUB platform has proved to be a complete IT architecture able to satisfy SMEs technological requirements to get involved in collaborative business opportunities, nevertheless with the technology progress new opportunities appear to improve the way these e-services are delivered to the SMEs. This paper provides an insight into the benefits and implications of evolving the e-HUB architecture into new one based-on Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) premises.     

Web Services and Business Transactions

Process oriented workflow systems and e-business applications require transactional support in order to orchestrate loosely coupled services into cohesive units of work and guarantee consistent and reliable execution. In this paper we introduce a multi-level transaction model that provides the necessary independence for the participating resource managers, e.g., local database and workflow servers, of organisations engaging in business transactions that are composed of interacting web services. We also present a taxonomy of e-business transaction features such as unconventional atomicity criteria, the need for support for business conversations and the need for distinguishing between three basic business transaction phases. In addition, we review current research and standard activities and outline the main ingredients of a business transaction framework necessary for building flexible e-business applications.     

On the journey to continuous deployment: Technical and social challenges along the way

ContextContinuous Deployment (CD) is an emerging software development process with organisations such as Facebook, Microsoft, and IBM successfully implementing and using the process. The CD process aims to immediately deploy software to customers as soon as new code is developed, and can result in a number of benefits for organisations, such as: new business opportunities, reduced risk for each release, and prevent development of wasted software. There is little academic literature on the challenges organisations face when adopting the CD process, however there are many anecdotal challenges that organisations have voiced on their online blogs.ObjectiveThe aim of this research is to examine the challenges faced by organisations when adopting CD as well as the strategies to mitigate these challenges.MethodAn explorative case study technique that involves in-depth interviews with software practitioners in an organisation that has adopted CD was conducted to identify these challenges.ResultsThis study found a total of 20 technical and social adoption challenges that organisations may face when adopting the CD process. The results are discussed to gain a deeper understanding of the strategies employed by organisations to mitigate the impacts of these challenges.ConclusionWhile a number of individual technical and social adoption challenges were uncovered by the case study in this research, most challenges were not faced in isolation. The severity of these challenges were reduced by a number of mitigation strategies employed by the case study organisation. It is concluded that organisations need to be well prepared to handle technical and social adoption challenges with their existing expertise, processes and tools before adopting the CD process. For practitioners, knowing how to address the challenges an organisation may face when adopting the CD process provides a level of awareness that they previously may not have had.     

System on chip design service e-business value maximization through a novel MCDM framework

As the IC (integrated circuit) industry migrates to the System-on-Chip (SOC) era, the SOC design service industry is emerging. Meanwhile, in the past decade, the emergence of Internet has changed the high technology marketing approaches while e-commerce has already become one of the most efficient marketing channels. Thus, most leading SOC design service firms tried to leverage novel e-commerce business models to provide better services including online silicon intellectual property (SIP) sourcing, transactions, integration, etc. to assist customers in enhancing their innovation competences to shorten their time to market and thus, time to money. However, defining appropriate e-business models for commercializing new SIPs or SOC design services is not easy for both aspects of technology as well as business development. On one hand, from the aspect of technology, the technical site R&D or production managers are familiar with SOC technologies while do not really understand the needs of customers’ over the Internet. On the other hand, from the aspect of business development, the sales or marketing managers may be familiar with online customers’ needs, wants as well as demands while are unfamiliar to SOC technology developments. To overcome the above mentioned problems, an appropriate e-business model definition framework can overcome this cognitive gap and maximize the value-added of online SOC design services. In this paper, a novel analytic framework based on the concept of design service customers’ competence set expansions by leveraging high technology service firms’ capabilities and resources as well as novel multiple criteria decision making (MCDM) techniques, will be proposed. The framework being proposed can be leveraged by the design service firms to define an appropriate e-business model for possible SIP or design service businesses. Based on the proposed MCDM framework, an empirical study of an SIP commercialization e-business model definition inside an SIP Mall, an SIP e-commerce mechanism being operated by a SOC design service firm, will be provided for verifying the effectiveness of this novel analytic framework. The feasibility of the proposed framework in the real world can be verified by the empirical study. In the future, the novel MCDM framework can be applied to novel e-business model definitions in the SOC design service or other high technology industries.     

Impacts of employee participation and trust on e-business readiness, benefits, and satisfaction

An increasing number of firms have invested large sums in implementing electronic business (e-business). Nowadays, while the e-businesses are fostering rapid industrial growth, employees are the one who factually engage with information exchange, communication and support e-business processes. However, prior literature has paid scant attention in determining e-business value and its drivers from employee perspective. Thus, the present study attempts to investigate how user participation and trust drives e-business value in terms of e-business readiness, e-business benefits, and e-business satisfaction. For this sake, data collected from 143 employees at Taiwanese IT related firms and analyzed with partial least square (PLS) structural equation approach reveal that trust and user participation were significant precursors of employee e-business satisfaction. The results strongly support the contention that trust directly affects e-business satisfaction, and indirectly affects it through e-business readiness and e-business benefits. The research model and findings will help managers implement e-business successfully and offer valuable references for researchers interested in developing related theories.     

Information channel diagrams: an approach for modelling information flows

In this article, the ‘information channel diagram’ (ICD) approach is introduced as a diagrammatical tool for modelling information flow during the delivery phase of organisations in which goods are deployed or delivered to customers. An initial review and evaluation of current tools for modelling information flow will be conducted based on the characteristics of information flow during the delivery phases in organisations. Diagrammatic primitives and a prescribed modelling methodology for developing an ICD will be presented, and a case scenario of the delivery phase of an organisation within the health care sector will be applied to demonstrate the use of the ICD. The article concludes by discussing some applications, generalisation potential and limitations of the ICD approach.     

Data Mining: A Key Contribution to E-business

Data mining consists of extracting knowledge from huge volumes of data, allowing better business decisions to be taken. In this paper, we show how data mining is integrated in the knowledge discovery process. We highlight its potential applications and the techniques that are often used to perform it. Association rule mining is presented as a case study. Furthermore, we show through an integrated architecture how data mining can contribute to e-business via the new technologies. Finally, we present some commercially-available architectures.     

Modeling the benefit of e-recruiting process integration

While e-recruiting has been widely adopted as one of the most successful e-business applications, it constitutes an under-researched area in e-business research. This study reviews the integration issues in e-recruiting and presents an e-recruiting integration decision model. The benefits of the investment in e-recruiting process integration are discussed in comparison to separate e-recruiting investments. We show that the optimal investment in the e-recruiting process integration results in a lower total cost than the separate e-recruiting investments. In addition, in light of the widely practiced resource constrained investments, we present the method of Lagrange multipliers which is used to find the optimal investment under a budget constraint.     

An Overview of Standards and Related Technology in Web Services

The Internet is revolutionizing business by providing an affordable and efficient way to link companies with their partners as well as customers. Nevertheless, there are problems that degrade the profitability of the Internet: closed markets that cannot use each other's services; incompatible applications and frameworks that cannot interoperate or built upon each other; difficulties in exchanging business data. Web Services is a new paradigm for e-business that is expected to change the way business applications are developed and interoperate. A Web Service is a self-describing, self-contained, modular application accessible over the web. It exposes an XML interface, it is registered and can be located through a Web Service registry. Finally, it communicates with other services using XML messages over standard Web protocols. This paper presents the Web Service model and gives an overview of existing standards. It then sketches the Web Service life-cycle, discusses related technical challenges and how they are addressed by current standards, commercial products and research efforts. Finally it gives some concluding remarks regarding the state of the art of Web Services.     

Analysing factors impacting BPMS performance: a case of a challenged technology adoption

Business Process Management Suites (BPMSs) have been adopted in organisations to model, improve and automate business processes as they aim to increase the quality, efficiency and agility of their business processes. Yet, many organisations struggle to achieve the benefits they expected from a BPMS. This interpretive case study in a large South African financial services organisation explains factors found to negatively impact successful BPMS adoption. The paper describes how an IT team struggled to increase process agility with a BPMS in a large legacy application landscape. The dominant factors causing the struggle were the difficulty of integrating with other applications and a lack of governance around BPM. Interesting findings on the difficulties in resourcing BPM IT teams are presented. The impact of BPM strategy, culture and governance on BPM methods, resourcing, data and technology is explained. The BPM literature lacks empirical qualitative case studies and theoretical models. This paper aimed to contribute to both needs. The theoretical contribution of this paper is two models. The first inductively derived explanatory contextual model should be useful for practitioners wanting to adopt a BPMS. Using this study’s findings and models from the literature, a second, more generic explanatory model of information system performance is derived for a BPMS.

     

Measures for e-business value assessment

Companies are investing heavily to leverage the Internet and transform their traditional businesses into e-businesses. Senior managers are increasingly under pressure to justify e-business costs. Do these investments pay off? And if so, how can a company make sure they keep paying off? Managers in successful companies struggle to articulate where benefits come from, and those without success strive to find a way to turn things around and cash in on e-business initiatives. We previously discussed results from an extensive survey about how eight key drivers affect a company's e-business success. Researchers from the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the McCombs School of Business, the University of Texas at Austin, conducted the survey to assess e-business value in small, medium, and large companies across the US and Europe. The study identified critical links between e-business drivers, operational excellence measures, and financial success measures. We describe these links in detail, showing that e-business initiatives improve operational excellence, which in turn improves financial performance     

Analysis of pricing strategies for e-business companies providing information goods and services

In this paper, we introduce a mathematical model to analyze pricing and service quality strategies for e-business companies providing information services to customers. The basic strategy considered in this paper is that a monopolistic e-business company provides free services to try to earn a profit by developing premium goods or services to market created by their free goods or services. It is a kind of versioning strategy where lower quality versions of information goods are provided free. And a direct network effect was also considered. And we tried to find the profit maximizing strategies for monopolistic e-business companies. As a result, the optimal quality and price for the premium goods or services can be obtained at the same level of the intensity of the direct network effect. And the exact term related with the network externality is derived and insights are demonstrated through numerical explorations.     

Knowledge-intensive systems in the social service agency: Anticipated impacts on the organisation

Shrinking resources and the increasing complexity of clinical decisions are stimulating research in knowledge-intensive computer applications for the delivery of social services. The expected benefits of knowledge-intensive applications such as expert systems include improvement in both the quality and the consistency of service delivery, augmentation of institutional memory, and reduced labour costs through greater reliance on paraprofessionals. This paper analyses the likely impacts of knowledge-intensive systems on social service organisations, drawing on trends in related service-delivery fields, and on known impacts of computer applications in organisations. A structural change may be anticipated: decision making and planning functions will shift increasingly from social service professionals to administrators.     

Managing cooperation in e-business systems

E-Business management involves monitoring and controlling all forms of business transactions conducted over the Internet, extranets, and related communications technologies and services. As such, it includes the management of networks, systems, and software applications. E-Business management is beginning to depend increasingly on knowledge of the cooperative aspects of partners in a business chain and the cooperative aspects of stake-holders in e-business operations. The study of cooperation offers many opportunities to apply social network analyses to derive software solutions for the management of e-business. This article provides a methodology and case study that recognises the dimension of cooperation among a multiplicity of organisations, coined “Awareness-based Cooperative Management.” It is aimed towards the design or re-engineering of effective e-business management systems, where the key concept involves the degree of awareness held by e-business stake-holders. Awareness is defined in terms of stake-holder interactions and artefacts used in those interactions such as buyer specifications, requests for proposals, offers, service level agreements, and the like. Since awareness is an indispensable, albeit an inherently vague concept, we cast it and reason about it with the apparatus of fuzzy logic.

A review on E-business Interoperability Frameworks

Interoperability frameworks present a set of assumptions, concepts, values, and practices that constitute a method of dealing with interoperability issues in the electronic business (e-business) context. Achieving interoperability in the e-business generates numerous benefits. Thus, interoperability frameworks are the main component of e-business activities. This paper describes the existing interoperability frameworks for e-business, and performs a comparative analysis among their findings to determine the similarities and differences in their philosophy and implementation. This analysis yields a set of recommendations for any party that is open to the idea of creating or improving an E-business Interoperability Framework.     

Determinant elements of customer relationship management in e-business

This study investigates the composition of customer relationship management (CRM) in e-business by examining the possible elements that determine different aspects of the relationship between customers and e-businesses. A web-based CRM survey of 38 items, constructed from SERVQUAL (service quality instrument), SITEQUAL (website service quality instrument) and literature findings, was completed by 200 customer contact professionals. Results of a factor analysis indicated three main customer relationship attributes of e-business, which are: general CRM (accounting for 51% of the total variance); personalization (accounting for 9% of the total variance); and privacy (accounting for 7% of the total variance). Results of a stepwise regression indicated that these customer relationship attributes significantly predict customer attitude (83% of the explained variance). Within the general CRM dimension, website content organization correlated highly with customer attitude (65% of the explained variance). The results of the study indicate that customers perceive three main dimensions of relationship attributes of e-business (general CRM, personalization and privacy) and that all three significantly contribute to customer attitude. These findings support the importance of including relational-type e-business attributes when investigating interactions between customers and e-business. The study concludes with related implications and design guidelines to enhancing customer perception of e-business.     

Using situation calculus for e-business agents

As the Internet grows, it is becoming less feasible for customers and merchants to manually visit each web site, analyze the information there, and make sound business decisions regarding the trading of goods or services. To cope with this evolution, software agents can be designed that are capable of automating the more routine, tedious, and time-consuming tasks involved in current trading processes. At a higher level agents may also be able to negotiate and make autonomous decisions and commitments on behalf of their owners.

This paper describes an agent implementation using the situation calculus, which offers a possibly unifying paradigm for dynamic agents. Interesting applications are currently being developed. Our contribution is a situation calculus agent system developed for e-business. Ongoing work is focused on implementing this system in an open marketplace environment.