Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2006), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 19 No. 2. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2006.08819baa.001

Editorial

The Editorial Review Board have been encouraged by the number of recent complimentary comments on the new style and revised scope of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management (JEIM). The journal’s contribution to our understanding of information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) is evident in this issue, with international contributions analysing the results of multi-disciplinary research and relation to the intersection of theory, method and empirical findings.

We start off with Al-Rousan and Al-Ali presenting an innovative mobile-based residential utility billing and management system. Their system consists of a wireless embedded board and a wireless belling server. The wireless board is installed at the consumer services and measures electricity and water consumptions while it transmits report figures to the billing server (based at the utility headquarters) as text messages (SMS). This GSM prototype uses a standard mobile service such as SMS messages to achieve a novel and much needed service for utility providers. Indeed, the work presented by the authors is based on the requirements of Sharjah Electricity and Water Authorities (SEWA) in the United Arab Emirates. This paper exploits existing technologies and raises interesting applications for wireless local area networks (WLAN; wi-fi).

Then, Mahdi presents a new perception-based objective method for non-intrusive assessment of speech quality voice communications and then evaluates its performance. The method uses a source-based approach to predict the quality of degraded (or output) speech that has been processed by a communication system by means of observing a portion of the speech with no access to the original (or input) speech. Given that the original speech signal in question is not available, an alternative reference was needed to measure objectively the level of distortion of the (distorted) speech. This was achieved by using an internal reference codebook formulated from clean speech records covering a wide range of human speech variations. The reported experimental results indicate that the proposed method provides a high level of accuracy in predicting the actual subjective quality of speech. The prototype developed of the proposed objective speech quality measure is sufficiently accurate and robust against speaker, utterance, and distortion type variation and with future optimisation it may be adopted as a standard non-intrusive quality measure. Remember, you read it in JEIM first.

Jakkilinki et al. describe the processes used to develop the Multimedia Design and Planning Pyramid (MUDPY) ontology, and the role played by the MUDPY as a planning, design and development tool in multimedia projects. MUDPY in essence is a meta-design framework that facilitates the creation of multimedia content. The MUDPY ontology defines the concepts existing in those domains, their attributes and the relationships between them, thus guiding developers through the various phases of a project in a systematic fashion. Multimedia project developers can then utilise MUDPY to specify functional requirements, decide on the navigation structure of their project, or create a storyboard.

In shifting attention to IT/IS adoption, Twati and Gammack explore the impact of organisational culture (OC) innovation on the adoption of IS in Libya’s oil and banking sectors. These are two well-resourced sectors of major economic importance but with relatively low levels of technological adoption. Using a structured survey questionnaire based on the organisational culture assessments instrument (OCAI), 400 questionnaires were administrated to middle and top management employees in more than 15 governmental and public organisations in the aforementioned sectors. The intrinsic findings indicate a correlation between organisational culture innovations and the adoption of IS, and there are no differences in organisational culture type between the two sectors covered by this study. This implies that organisational culture innovation can be influenced by other factors that are beyond the scope of OC alone, and that are worthy of further investigation.

In his paper, Muhammad Mustafa Kamal looks at evaluating the adoption of novel technology, such as enterprise application integration (EAI), in the public sector. The rationale of this paper is to acquire underlying knowledge of how IT is adopted in public sector organisations, and explores what factors impact such adoption. For this purpose, an interpretive and qualitative multiple case study approach is selected to test empirically and validate a comprehensive model that summarises critical success factors. This paper offers a deep synthesis that compares and contrasts the work of others, and in doing so provides the reader with a comprehensive review of the literature. Further, such analysis demonstrates that the author has built his arguments on synthesised research that has been debated and presented from multiple perspectives. The taxonomy presented identifies 43 critical success factors for IT innovation adoptions that provide sufficient understanding of their importance while adopting a novel technology. The author further exploits the “taxonomised” factors while developing a conceptual EAI adoption model. We look forward to receiving such contributions in the near future.

We conclude this issue with a contribution from Mladen Georgievski and Nalin Sharda, who seek to enhance usability testing for real-time multimedia systems by re-engineering usability testing processes. Their analysis shows that traditional usability testing procedures are suitable for testing systems in the static environment but prove to be sub-optimal in testing systems for dynamic (real-time) environments. The authors compare the traditional set-up with their innovative (re-engineered) laboratory configuration, which streamlined usability experiments, reduced the task completion times and enabled them to minimise the number of personnel required to carry out a usability experiment.

I hope you enjoy reading this issue of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management, and that it helps provide you with much knowledge.

Zahir IraniEditor (zahir.irani@brunel.ac.uk)

Omiros D. SarikasEditorial Assistant