Assessing and building municipal open data capability

Information Systems and e-Business Management - In the past decade, cities around the world have published their open data as a new service. Some have used this service innovatively, as a vehicle...     

Factors that determine residents’ acceptance of smart city technologies

ABSTRACT

While some cities attempt to determine their residents’ demand for smart-city technologies, others simply move forward with smart-related strategies and projects. This study is among the first to empirically determine which factors most affect residents’ and public servants’ intention to use smart-city services. A Smart Cities Stakeholders Adoption Model (SSA), based on Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2), is developed and tested on a mid-size U.S. city as a case study. A questionnaire was administered in order to determine the influence of seven factors – effort expectancy, self-efficacy, perceived privacy, perceived security, trust in technology, price value and trust in government – on behaviour intention, specifically the decision to adopt smart-city technologies. Results show that each of these factors significantly influenced citizen intention to use smart-city services. They also reveal perceived security and perceived privacy to be strong determinants of trust in technology, and price value a determinant of trust in government. In turn, both types of trust are shown to increase user intention to both adopt and use smart-city services. These findings offer city officials an approach to gauging residential intention to use smart-city services, as well as identify those factors critical to developing a successful smart-city strategy.     

Quality-driven recovery decisions for used components in reverse logistics

Reverse logistics has emerged as a promising strategy for enhancing environmental sustainability through remanufacturing, reusing, or recycling used components. It is crucial to pursue quality-driven decision-making for component recovery because quality is a dominant factor for component salvage value and its recoverability. To maximise the profit from component recovery, a quality-driven decision model was proposed in this study. Remaining useful life (RUL) was utilised as a measure of quality in the proposed model, where conditional RUL distribution was predicted by utilising both the failure data and condition monitoring data based on a proportional hazard model. Under RUL uncertainty, an interval decision-making approach was developed to suggest recovery strategies for the decision-makers to identify a satisfactory solution according to their risk preferences. Compared to the existing approaches for quality-driven recovery decision-making based on RUL prediction, this work provides a more accurate and powerful approach to managing and mitigating decision risk. Numerical experiments demonstrated the effectiveness and superiority of the proposed model.     

Consumer Acceptance of RFID Technology: An Exploratory Study

Radio frequency identification (RFID) technology is used in numerous applications and offers a plethora of interesting potential new applications. However, this potential raises issues that require addressing to achieve its widespread acceptance by consumers. This paper investigates the factors that affect consumer acceptance of RFID technology. The purpose of this effort is to develop and test a theoretical model that contextualizes the technology acceptance model (TAM) within the context of RFID technology. The research model proposes that convenience, culture, privacy, regulation, and security are the principal factors influencing the consumerspsila acceptance of RFID. However, the results show that convenience, culture, and security are significant predictors. This study is the first in the RFID literature to use the TAM for explaining consumer acceptance of RFID technology. The findings suggest that: (1) higher perceived convenience of RFID technology leads to greater acceptance of this technology; (2) societal beliefs, value systems, norms, and/or behaviors influence the extent of consumer acceptance of RFID technology; and (3) higher perceived importance of and less willingness to sacrifice personal information security lead to lower intention to use RFID technology. Contextualization of TAM to RFID technology makes this study relevant to practitioners because the results can provide insight to organizations using or exploring the use of RFID technology.     

Latent Semantic Analysis: five methodological recommendations

The recent influx in generation, storage, and availability of textual data presents researchers with the challenge of developing suitable methods for their analysis. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a member of a family of methodological approaches that offers an opportunity to address this gap by describing the semantic content in textual data as a set of vectors, was pioneered by researchers in psychology, information retrieval, and bibliometrics. LSA involves a matrix operation called singular value decomposition, an extension of principal component analysis. LSA generates latent semantic dimensions that are either interpreted, if the researcher's primary interest lies with the understanding of the thematic structure in the textual data, or used for purposes of clustering, categorization, and predictive modeling, if the interest lies with the conversion of raw text into numerical data, as a precursor to subsequent analysis. This paper reviews five methodological issues that need to be addressed by the researcher who will embark on LSA. We examine the dilemmas, present the choices, and discuss the considerations under which good methodological decisions are made. We illustrate these issues with the help of four small studies, involving the analysis of abstracts for papers published in the European Journal of Information Systems.     

A consumer perspective of E-service quality

E-service is an emerging and rapidly evolving area as demonstrated by new technological innovations introduced to improve e-service. Motivated by the growing interest in online commerce, we focus our research questions on examining the factors that contribute to e-service, the relationships among these factors and the consumers' attitude toward e-service. To explore answers to our research questions, we developed an e-service model. Specifically, our proposed model consists of such constructs as individual differences, e-service convenience, Web site service quality, risk, e-satisfaction, and intention. We develop an e-service quality survey instrument and use empirical data to validate the instrument. The results of our empirical study validate our eight hypotheses. We confirm seven of the eight hypotheses. One hypothesis that tested individual differences and service convenience was not confirmed. However, we found that service convenience, Web site service quality, and risk are significant factors affecting consumers' satisfaction level, which in turn affects intention. The findings suggest that managers need to understand e-convenience from the consumers' perspective. In order to provide better services for users, companies need to invest in Web site service quality design and evaluation, and at the same time, control the perceived risk associated with using it.     

Information and Communication Technology Offshoring Logistics Success: A Social Exchange Perspective

As emerging countries continue to enhance the education of their workforce and modernize their infrastructures, the opportunities the information and communication technology offshoring increase. This research offers a perspective on the client–vendor relationship using social exchange theory. Our findings show that partnership mediates the relationships between communication, lack of trust, shared values, and offshoring logistics success. In addition, shared values increase trust, whereas power and partnership influence the success of offshoring logistics.     

A comparison of Magal's service quality instrument with SERVPERF

The role of service quality has become critical to the success of organizations. Therefore, it is important to use a reliable instrument to measure information service quality. SERVQUAL is a popular instrument for doing this, but, though widely used, it has been criticized for its reliability and validity. Use of the performance measures from SERVQUAL to form SERVPERF has addressed some of these issues. However, Magal's instrument on information center success was found effective within a service context because of its service orientation.     

Hacking into the Minds of Hackers

ABSTRACT

This study presents results of a survey of self-proclaimed computer hackers about their perceptions in regards to illegal hacking. Results show that hackers continue to engage in illegal hacking activities despite the perception of severe judicial punishment. A closer look shows that hackers perceive a high utility value from hacking, little informal sanctions, and a low likelihood of punishment. These perceptions coupled with a high level of moral disengagement partially explain the hacker's illegal behavior.     

An Integrated Model of Voice-User Interface Continuance Intention: The Gender Effect

Advanced speech recognition technology facilitated the development of voice-based smart devices. Voice user interface (VUI) is now a common feature on smartphones, computers, smart home devices, and car systems. The fragmented and context focused literature on VUI motivates this examination of the relationship between perceived quality and customer satisfaction in VUI portable devices. This study is the first to introduce extrinsic motivational factors as an extension to Wixom and Todd’s model. These additional antecedent factors add an enriched explanation of VUI user behavior. This study is also the first to consider the role of gender in a VUI behavior model. Our findings suggest that the proposed driving factors, including trust, perceived risks, perceived enjoyment, and mobile self-efficacy, significantly affect VUI user attitudes, which influence their continuance intention. Our results also address the role of gender on the association of attitude toward VUI use and its antecedents. The findings show that perceived risk (privacy concerns) and perceived ease of use are more influential on VUI use behavior of males than females. However, the effect of trust and mobile self-efficacy play a more crucial role for females than males.