Determinants of Enterprise System Adoption Across the System Lifecycle: Exploring the Role of Economic Development

The authors studied enterprise systems adoption in transition and less-developed economies within the European Union in search of determinants (critical success factors and barriers) across the system lifecycle. They found 14 determinants drawing from interviews with practitioners whose experience exceeds 280 projects. The authors compared their data with prior results from well-developed countries and concluded that determinants and their criticality across the lifecycle depend on the level of economic development. The authors discussed implications and provided recommendations.     

Gender,culture and determinants of behavioural intents to adopt mobile commerce among the Y Generation in transition economies: evidence from Kazakhstan

This study investigates perceived risk and trust in relationship to the Diffusion of Innovation Theory [Rogers, E.M., 1962. Diffusion of innovations. Glencoe, IL: The Free Press; 1983. Diffusion of innovations. 3rd ed. New York: The Free Press] from a cultural perspective to understand the determinants of behavioural intent to adopt mobile commerce among the Y Generation in Kazakhstan. Surveys from 345 university-level students and subsequent structural equation modelling revealed perceived risk, trustworthiness and Rogers’ five innovation characteristics are important determinants. Perceived risk and trustworthiness are important determinants because of the high uncertainty avoidance characteristics of the Kazakh society. This study advances theory regarding culture- and generation-based characteristics to transition economies by verifying theoretical proposition regarding the behavioural intent towards mobile commerce adoption, resulting in a greater understanding of mobile commerce adoption among the Y Generation in transition economies. Marketing implications are discussed.     

Enterprise system programs: Goal setting and cooperation in the integration team

Fully implemented enterprise systems (ESs) become valuable tools by enabling a variety of business functions critical to an organization. Adopting a program implementation approach improves the chances of delivering an ES in accordance with budget, resource, and scope considerations. The program approach is more likely to succeed in meeting expectations when united by an overarching goal, yet an integration team representing the multiple business functions in an ES implementation must ensure attainment of the overarching goal while still retaining local goals for each project. We know little about the theoretical relationship that considers working toward goals across functional areas simultaneously with an overarching goal for the same system. In particular, the integration team must cooperate effectively under differing goals to deliver the expected product efficiently, which is often difficult to accomplish. We build a research model rooted in goal-setting theory to consider the unique context of an overarching goal for the system as a whole with additional goals set for cross-functional purposes. We indicate achievement of essential cooperation and realization of expected benefits with essential goal commitment. Survey data from key informants in cross-functional integration teams support the model and indicate a direction to enable targeted business functions for an ES program implementation.     

A PhD in information systems for emerging economies: the Addis Ababa University model

Information systems (IS) provides a critical skill set for all economies, yet many of the emerging economies find that when they send the best minds overseas for a PhD in IS, many of them do not return. As a result, many poor countries are unable to create the intellectual infrastructure that they need to improve internal efficiency and participate in the world outsourcing market. Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia has developed a PhD in IS based on the willingness of overseas IS faculty to conduct intensive PhD seminars on a yearly basis. Now in its third year, the program is a model that other countries or regions might consider emulating.     

Analyzing the problem of unsustainable health information systems in less-developed economies: Case studies from Tanzania and Mozambique

Most of donor-supported information technology (IT)–based projects developed or implemented in less-developed economies (LDEs) end up as complete or partial failures or unsustainable. Notably, a number of intra-organizational and external factors are associated with this problem, including inadequate infrastructure and human resource capacity, fragmented donor policy, and lack of policies to manage the sustainability problem. Accordingly, IT initiatives are often donor-driven, top-down, and hijacked by top managers who (normally) do not have adequate skills, but have enormous power to enforce such initiatives across organizational hierarchies.

In analyzing the concepts from sustainability and institutionalization, key insights towards a better understanding of the problem of unsustainability are developed. It is argued that health information systems (HISs) become sustainable if they are institutionalized in the sense of being integrated into the everyday routine of the user organization. However, a sustainable HIS should also be flexible enough to allow changes as the user needs change. Moreover, introduction of a new HIS is not only a technical change, but requires the cultivation and institutionalization of a new kind of culture.

Through a comparative case analysis of the HIS development and implementation processes in Tanzania and Mozambique, we have identified two sets of relationships, between the Ministry of Health (MoH) and donor agencies and between the MoH and software development agencies as critical and contributing factors to the unsustainability of a HIS. Given this setting, we highlight three key strategies for dealing with the problem of unsustainability in LDEs: (a) integration of a HIS, (b) local shaping of new cultures, and (c) cultivation approach to systems development. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Exploiting the European Union trusted service status list for certificate validation in STORK: design,implementation, and lessons learnt

Since December 2009, the European Union Trusted Service Status Lists (TSLs) have been specified and adopted across European Union countries in order to enable the verification of digital signatures with legal values. This paper deals with the exploitation of TSLs in real digital services, other than electronic signatures, that is for certificate validation service. In particular, we used such lists in the service provided by the pan‐European Secure identTities acRoss boRders linKed identity management infrastructure in order to validate X.509 public key certificates. In addition, we propose an XML data structure to be used in conjunction with a TSL, in the form of a Trust Service Association (TrSA) file, to hold trust relationships between different services in a TSL. The TrSA file in conjunction with the TSLs may be used directly by the service providers or users to validate certificates. For the generation of the TSLs, we propose also a tool for automatic generation of the TSLs, named TSLGenerator. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Robust H ∞ control of discrete‐time Markovian jump systems in the presence of incomplete knowledge of transition probabilities and saturating actuator

This paper deals with the problem of robust H _∞ control for a class of discrete‐time Markovian jump systems subject to both actuator saturation and incomplete knowledge of transition probability. Different from the previous results where the transition probability is completely known, a more general situation where only partial information on the exact values of elements in transition probability matrix is considered. By introducing some free parameters to express the relationship for the known and the unknown elements of transition probability matrix in stability analysis, a criterion is established to guarantee the stochastic stability of the closed‐loop system as well as an H _∞ performance index. The concept of domain of attraction in mean square sense is used to analyze the closed‐loop stability, and the mode‐dependent H _∞ state‐feedback controller is designed. It is shown that, even in the absence of actuator saturation, the obtained result is less conservative than the existing one. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.