Journal of Systems and Information Technology

Taylor, Richard G. ; Brice, Jr., Jeff ; Robinson, Sammie L.

2016 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/JSIT-07-2015-0062

Purpose – The purpose of the paper is to determine whether management’s optimistic perceptions of their organization’s level of information security preparedness can ultimately result in increased information security risks. Design/methodology/approach – A case study was conducted in a financial institution. In all, 24 employees were interviewed. These employees came from all functional areas and various positions, from tellers to executives. Interviews were conducted, internal policies and examiners’ reports were made available and access was given to observe the employees during working hours and to observe the facilities after hours. Findings – Executives were overly optimistic about the level of information security at their organization. These optimistic perceptions guided security priorities; however, the findings show that their perceptions were misguided leaving their organization open to increased security threats. More specifically, the results show that optimist perceptions by management can put an organization’s information at risk. Originality/value – The paper uses existing theory and evaluates it in a “real-world” setting. For security research, it can be difficult to get honest responses from questionnaires; however, the hands-on approach provided a deeper insight to the problem of optimistic perceptions in an organizational setting. For practitioners, the case can raise managements’ awareness of perceptional inaccuracies, resulting in more informed information security decisions and ultimately improved security for their organization.

2016 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/JSIT-06-2015-0059

Purpose – There are five factors acting as a barrier to the effective evaluation of educational technology (edtech), which are as follows: premature timing, inappropriate techniques, rapid change, complexity of context and inconsistent terminology. The purpose of this paper is to identify new evaluation approaches that will address these and reflect on the evaluation imperative for complex technology initiatives. Approach – An initial investigation of traditional evaluative approaches used within the technology domain was broadened to investigate the evaluation practices within social and public policy domains. Realist evaluation, a branch of theory-based evaluation, was identified and reviewed in detail. The realist approach was then refined, proposing two additional necessary steps to support mapping the technical complexity of initiatives. Findings – A refined illustrative example of a realist evaluation framework is presented, including two novel architectural edtech domain reference models to support mapping. Practical implications – Recommendations include building individual evaluator capacity; adopting the realist framework; the use of architectural edtech domain reference models; phased evaluation to first build theories in technology “context” and then iteratively during complex implementation chains; and community contribution to a shared map of technical and organisational complexity. Originality – This paper makes a novel contribution by arguing the imperative for a theory-based realist approach to help redefine evaluative thinking within the IT and complex system domain. It becomes an innovative proposal with the addition of two domain reference models that tailor the approach for edtech. Its widespread adoption will help build a shared evidence base that synthesizes and surfaces “what works, for whom, in which contexts and why”, benefiting educators, IT managers, funders, policymakers and future learners.

Husin, Mohd Heikal ; Evans, Nina ; Deegan, Gaye

2016 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/JSIT-04-2015-0031

Purpose – Ensuring effective usage of Web 2.0 within government organisations is not as straightforward as it seems. The organisations should be aware of a number of issues when implementing Web 2.0 internally. This paper introduces a theoretical model that highlights the importance of management, technology and people issues influencing the level of Web 2.0 usage from an internal perspective. The purpose of this paper was to identify and explore these issues in a government context. Design/methodology/approach – This paper uses a mixed-method (qualitative and quantitative) analysis to identify the issues that should be focused on for achieving effective usage of Web 2.0 among government employees. A combination of interviews, surveys and usage data collected from two government organisations was used to gather the data. Findings – The main finding is that, a policy will act as an initial catalyst for culture change and effective usage of Web 2.0 technologies in a government environment. It was also found that it is important to develop an understanding among senior management about the motivation for their employees to utilise Web 2.0 internally. As a result, the proposed theoretical model could assist government organisations in developing effective adoption approaches through identifying their employees’ motivation to adopt Web 2.0 technologies and developing a suitable organisational social media policy. Research limitations/implications – There is the issue of the small number of both qualitative and quantitative respondents within the research. Such limitation is because the research relies solely on the voluntary participation of the employees. This limitation was coupled with the fact that both organisations had different security requirements that had affected the amount and level of feasible information that was accessible to the researchers. Practical implications – This paper extends the understanding of issues applicable to the adoption of Web 2.0 tools from a government organisations’ perspective. The developed theoretical model acts as an adoption guide for organisations to achieve effective Web2.0 tools usage. At the same time, this paper also examines related motivation aspects which higher management should consider while using a new social media or Web 2.0 platform internally. Originality/value – This paper highlights suitable overview approaches for organisations to consider in increasing adoption of Web 2.0 among their employees. This paper also provides an initial foray into identifying other complex issues that may exist within different government organisations in relation to internal technology usage.

Kock, Ned ; Moqbel, Murad

2016 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/JSIT-04-2015-0028

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to fill a gap in evolutionary theorizing in the field of information systems. Evolutionary theorizing has recently been added as a useful tool to the research repertoire of information systems investigators. However, the literature on evolutionary theorizing and related empirical research lacks a clear framework that explicitly shows how information systems researchers can go, step-by-step, from a generic model of the evolution of traits in our ancestral past to a more specific model depicting the effects of technology facilitation of those traits among modern humans. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap through a framework composed of six stages. Design/methodology/approach – To discuss and illustrate the framework, the authors develop an easy-to-understand generic path model explicitly depicting relationships among variables related to events that occurred in our evolutionary past. We then incrementally adapt this generic path model, eventually arriving at a focused path model depicting causal relationships among social networking site use, job satisfaction, organizational commitment and job performance. In doing so, the authors also develop a theoretical model about how social networking site use can affect job performance, where a positive total effect is predicted via positive intermediate effects on job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Findings – To discuss the final stage in the framework, the authors present an illustrative example where the focused path model is tested based on a study of the effect of Facebook use on job performance among 178 working professionals across the USA. This illustrative example provides general support for the theoretical model. Research limitations/implications – The counterintuitive hypothesis that Facebook use is associated with increased job performance is supported. Practical implications – Social networking site use by organizational employees is likely to be associated with improved job performance. Originality/value – This study provides a clear framework that shows how researchers can go from a generic evolutionary path model in our ancestral past to a more specific model comprising technology effects in modern humans.

Hodeghatta, Umesh Rao ; Sahney, Sangeeta

2016 Journal of Systems and Information Technology

doi: 10.1108/JSIT-12-2014-0074

Purpose – This paper aims to research as to how Twitter is influential as an electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication tool and thereby affecting movie market. In present days, social media is playing an important role in connecting people around the globe. The technology has provided a platform in the social media space for people to share their experiences through text, photos and videos. Twitter is one such online social networking media that enables its users to send and read text-based messages of up to 140 characters, known as “tweets”. Twitter has nearly 200 million users and billions of such tweets are generated by users every other day. Social media micro-blogging broadcasting networks such as Twitter are transforming the way e-WOM is disseminated and consumed in the digital world. Twitter social behaviour for the Hollywood movies has been assessed across seven countries to validate the two basic blocks of the honeycomb model – sharing and conversation. Twitter behaviour was studied for 27 movies in 22 different cities of seven countries and for six genres with a total tweets of 9.28 million. The difference of Twitter social media behaviour was compared across countries, and “sharing” and “conversation” as two building blocks of the honeycomb model were studied. t -Test results revealed that the behaviour is different across countries and across genres. Design/methodology/approach – The objective of the paper is to analyse Twitter messages on an entertainment product (movies) across different regions of the world. Hollywood movies are released across different parts of the world, and Twitter users are also in different parts of the world. The objective is to hence validate “conversation” and “sharing” building blocks of the honeycomb model. The research is confined to analysing Twitter data related to a few Hollywood movies. The tweets were collected across nine different cities spanning four different countries where English language is prominent. To understand the Twitter social media behaviour, a crawler application using Python and Java was developed to collect tweets of Hollywood movies from the Twitter database. The application has incorporated Twitter application programming interfaces (APIs) to access the Twitter database to extract tweets according to movies search queries across different parts of the world. The searching, collecting and analysing of the tweets is a rather challenging task because of various reasons. The tweets are stored in a Twitter corpus and can be accessed by the public using APIs. To understand whether tweets vary from one country to another, the analysis of variance test was conducted. To assess whether Twitter behaviour is different, and to compare the behaviour across countries, t -tests were conducted taking two countries at a time. The comparisons were made across all the six genres. In this way, an attempt was made to obtain a microscopic view of the Twitter behaviour for each of the seven countries and the six genres. Findings – The findings show that the people use social media across the world. Nearly 9.28 million tweets were from seven countries, namely, USA, UK, Canada, South Africa, Australia, India and New Zealand for 27 Hollywood movies. This is indicative of the fact that today, people are exchanging information across different countries, that people are conversing about a product on social media and people are sharing information about a product on social media and, thus, proving the hypothesis. Further, the results indicate that the users in USA, Canada and UK, tweet more than the other countries, USA and UK being the highest in tweets followed by the Canada. On the other hand, the number of tweets in Australia, India and South Africa are low with New Zealand being the lowest of all the countries. This indicates that different countries’ users have different social media behaviour. Some countries use social media to communicate about their experience more than in some other country. However, consumers from all over the world are using Twitter to express their views openly and freely. Originality/value – This research is useful to scholars and enterprises to understand opinions on Twitter social media and predict their impact. The study can be extended to any products which can lead to better customer relationship management. Companies can use the Internet and social media to promote and get feedback on their products and services across different parts of the world. Governments can inform the public about their new policies, benefits of governmental programmes to people and ways to improve the Internet reach to more people and also for creating awareness about health, hygiene, natural calamities and safety.