Journal of Systems and Information Technology

Adel Alti; Abbdellah Boukerram; Philippe Roose

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322567

Purpose – The purpose of this paper was to design ontology for describing semantic context‐aware quality services, and to present a new web management tool that provides a great flexibility and enables automatic semantic adaptation and customization of mobile client services. Design/methodology/approach – The tool is developed using ontology‐based approach. This ontology captures a shared conceptual schema common in the tourism domain and maintains semantic quality information in heterogeneous service providers for service model. The results of the tool will be compared to prior works from other quality and distributed based service selection methods for mobile‐based application. Findings – The tool support is based in the ontology Context‐aware Quality Semantic Web Service called (CxQWS). At the first step, services are defined as a set of semantic metadata, reflecting service requirements and QoS parameters. At the second step, services with a semantic contextual metadata are elaborated. Such a procedure ensures that the selection decisions should be based on the semantic quality representation of the created services. The SELETOR tool results suggest that the level of intelligent method use continue to be high flexibility in World Tourism organisations. Research limitations/implications – The tourism services in a mobile environment have a critical role in creating tourist satisfaction. They are neither a uniform group, nor able to give consistently high service quality. Indeed they have significantly different platforms and a variety of heterogeneous service providers which make the management of service qualities complex. Practical implications – A significant proposition is to integrate new tourism quality attributes of mobile‐based application, to provide a dynamic adaptation of selection services based on context metadata parameters (user, environment, device, and service provider context) and the management of the heterogeneity of service needs, of mobile devices capacities and their various communication protocols (GPRS, WIFI, Bluetooth, etc.) as well as the media variety (sound, video, text and image), possibly reflecting the decreased time responses and the increased visibility of standard services management methods. Originality/value – The paper proposes SELECTOR, a dynamic service selection tool based on CxQWS ontology, defined as set of semantic metadata, which context and QoS parameters. The tool is based on semantic services and offer architecture, with three layers (semantic query, management and web services). The most innovative characteristic of the tool is that it profits from the potential of semantic representation techniques to express high level explicit constraints, while they may be useful to guide the selection and adaptation process. This tool provides low adaptation effort, e.g. takes into account all the heterogeneous services as its various communication protocols (GSM, 3G, Bluetooth, etc.) as consequences of self‐selection for dynamic context evolution guided by the adaptation policies.

Zied Kechaou; Ali Wali; Mohamed Ben Ammar; Hichem Karray; Adel M. Alimi

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322576

Purpose – Despite the actual prevalence of diverse types of multimedia information, research on video news is still in an early stage. Improving the accessibility of video news seems worth investigating, therefore, the purpose of this paper is to present a new combination mode of video news text clustering and selection. This method is useful for sorting out and classifying various types of news videos and media texts based on sentiment analysis. Design/methodology/approach – A novel system is proposed, whereby video news are identified and categorized into good or bad ones via the authors' suggested Hidden Markov Model (HMM) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) hybrid learning method. Actually, an exploratory video news sentiment analysis case study, conducted on various news databases, has proven that the feature‐selection‐combining method, encompassing the Information Gain (IG), Mutual Information (MI) and CHI‐statistic (CHI), performs the best classification, which testifies and highlights the designed framework's value. Findings – In fact, the system turns out to be applicable to several areas, especially video news, where annotation and personal perspectives affect the accuracy aspect. Research limitations/implications – The present work shows the way for further research pertaining to the personal attitudes and the application of different linguistic techniques during the classification. Originality/value – The achieved results are so promising, encouraging and satisfactory, that they highlight the originality and efficiency of the authors' approach as an effective tool enabling to secure an easy access to video news and multi‐media texts.

Muhammad Nazrul Islam

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322585

Purpose – The underlying objective of this literature review was to investigate what kinds of semiotics researches have been employed in user interfaces design and usability evaluation, and how were they employed. Design/methodology/approach – This research follows a systematic literature review process that consists of three key stages: planning the review, conducting the review, and reporting the review. Starting with an initial set of about 1,000 research articles, 65 were selected for this review, using an inclusion and exclusion criteria. Qualitative and quantitative data were extracted from the selected literatures following a data extraction strategy in six themes of data extraction. The extracted data were synthesized to formulate the stated research questions to obtain the review goals. Findings – This systematic review identified research strengths, gaps, and challenges. Apart from this, further research possibilities were also explored in this review. For research, the review showed clear needs for more researches to increase both the number and the quality of studies that can be focused on the research gaps identified by this systematic review related to: outcome validation; cultural issues consideration; user interfaces of mobile applications and websites; semiotics perception in usability evaluation; and further improve the value and applicability of research ideas. For practice, the review showed the significance of semeiotics in user interface design and usability evaluation to develop users' intuitive interfaces for boosting the system's usability. Originality/value – Based on a systematic literature review, the paper not only depicts the current status of semiotics research in user interface design and evaluation, but also provides a number of implications for research and practice. Thus, the review contributes to the scientific community of user interface design and evaluation, as well as suggesting the actual advances in the state of the practice in semiotics research on user interface.

Lizette Weilbach; Elaine Byrne

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322594

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the implementation process of an open source enterprise management system in the South African public sector. Change management was observed in relation to challenges and opportunities in the alignment of the internal organisational changes to the imperatives of the national Free and Open Source Software policy. Design/methodology/approach – An interpretive case study, using interviews, observation and document review was used. Findings – Alignment of the organisational environment, change management strategies and technology is required to address many of the “common” change management challenges. However, ICT policies are formed and adopted in a highly complex environment and have embedded property and power relations which impact the nature and direction of their implementation. In this case, one of the main challenges arose from the alignment of internal organisational change to a national policy, which did not seem to have the full support of the agency which was tasked with implementing it. Originality/value – Many of the challenges faced by the public sector department are commonly described in change management literature, such as inadequate consideration for the social context in which the change was to take place. What emerges from this paper is a caution that there is not a single voice within government and that in a multi‐levelled and multi‐sectoral institution, many different rationalities exist. The internal alignment of the divergent voices within government would be a prerequisite for the organisational environment, change management strategies and technology to be aligned.

Dimitrios Maditinos; Dimitrios Chatzoudes; Lazaros Sarigiannidis

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322602

Purpose – The recent advances in the technology of electronic banking have helped develop new ways of handling banking affairs, especially through online banking. Moreover, the rapid development of the internet has stimulated the banking sector towards encouraging customers to make their transactions online. The purpose of this paper is to introduce an extended technology acceptance model (TAM) model as a tool for examining the factors that have a significant impact on customers' online banking acceptance. Design/methodology/approach – The typical TAM constructs were enhanced with the variables of perceived risk and quality of the internet connection. The proposed conceptual framework of the study (extended TAM), was tested on a sample of Greek internet users. Data were analysed using the “structural equation modelling” technique. Findings – Results provide overall support for the extended TAM model and confirm its robustness in predicting customers' intention of adoption of internet banking. More specifically, results underlined the important impact of perceived usefulness, security risk and performance risk on the intention to use internet banking. On the contrary, the impact of perceived ease of use and quality of the internet connection seemed to have only an indirect effect on internet banking adoption. Practical implications – The paper makes an analytical effort in order to point out areas that banking organisations should emphasize in order to successfully implement online banking and, therefore, harvest its potential benefits. Originality/value – The paper proposes an enhanced conceptual framework (extended TAM) that examines vital issues concerning online banking acceptance, thus providing valuable outcomes for decision makers and academics. To the best of the researchers' knowledge, such an extension of the TAM model has never been examined in the relevant literature. Moreover, the results of the study may be generalised in other developed countries whose financial sector faces significant challenges (e.g. Spain, Italy, Portugal, Ireland, etc.).

Richard Fulford

2013 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/13287261311322611

Purpose – Today enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications are a substantial proportion of many corporations' capital expenditure and the effective management of this pliable asset has significant consequence for business performance. The purpose of this paper is to examine the corporate strategy of a global corporation that, in pursuit of competitive advantage, deployed ERP applications. Design/methodology/approach – This inductive case study research examines the corporate processes utilised to strategically manage ERP in a global corporation. The approach is explorative and method qualitative. Semi‐structured interviews were conducted over a period of a year with senior executives, IT directors, IT managers, financial controllers, country managers and end‐users. Findings – The study found that devolving responsibility of ERP applications to subsidiary organisations increased cost and hindered corporate parenting. The considerable cost of centralising IS management and standardising ERP processes was found to be greatly exceeded by the numerous benefits. The primary benefits being reduced cycle time, the ability to benchmark subsidiary performance, improved customer satisfaction and increased market share. Research limitations/implications – The research is limited by the analysis being of a single corporation. The major implication for future research is the need to understand the manner of ongoing management and control of ERP applications in different types of organisations. Particularly, their relationship with strategic management, how ERP enable and inhibit strategy, and ongoing management of operational ERP systems. Practical implications – The dissemination of the management practices that have been employed to achieve a very successful ERP application‐based business strategy is helpful to the many organisations that have or intend to implement ERP applications. It is particularly noteworthy that centralised corporate objectives, when mandated and focused upon, provide benefits that could not be achieved in the ad hocracy that existed prior to the ERP implementation. Originality/value – The dearth of theory about ongoing management of ERP and the plight of the many organisations that are having difficulty understanding how to strategically manage these ubiquitous systems in a rapidly changing business landscape makes the study significant to both theory and practice.