Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2008), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 21 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2008.08821aaa.001

Editorial

Dear readers, it gives me great pleasure to welcome you to the first issue of the 21st volume of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management. This issue involves papers that cover different subject areas; offering readers a diverse spread of both theoretical and technical contributions.

The first paper in this issue reports on an investigation of user perceptions of using software with embedded spyware that in turn affects trustworthiness. Based on a literature survey, Janice Sipior and Burke Ward formulated a research model that identifies five variables and the relationships amongst them, namely; the presence or absence of spyware in a software application, the users’ belief that the software vendor is trustworthy, the users’ perception of being able to control information privacy, the users’ perceptions of the protection afforded by existing spyware laws, and overall trust in the software vendor. The authors present findings of an experimental study that compares users of software with spyware versus users of software without spyware. The conducted exploratory study examines whether the presence of spyware in application software impacts users’ perceptions and beliefs about trustworthiness of the application software, privacy control of the software vendor, US legal protection, and overall tryst of the software vendor. Results from the study highlight the fact that software vendors should rethink the practice of embedding spyware in software applications, unless user trust can be maintained.

Aiming at tackling one of many critical questions concerning the business value generated by the significant investments that organizations made in information and communication technologies (ICT); Euripidis Loukis, Ioakim Sapounas, and Konstantinos Aivalis present findings of their study that investigates the effect of two external factors on ICT business value. Extensive research conducted in this area considered mainly the magnitude of the business value ICT generated for an organization mainly by “internal factors”, which are related to the internal functions of the organization, such as the simultaneous development of new work practices, new business processes, new human skills, innovation, new IS management structures, etc. However, limited research has been conducted on the effect of “external factors”, which are related to the external environment of the organization, on the business value generated by its ICT investment. Hence, two external factors are investigated in this study namely; the generalized competition that an organization faces and the strategy it follows in response to external environments. In doing so, econometric models of output are constructed (based on the microeconomic production theory – Cobb Douglas production function), using firm-level data from Greek companies, which has been collected through a survey through a structured questionnaire. The results of the study show that higher level of bargaining power of suppliers results in higher ICT business value generation. Also, when considering strategy, it is concluded that an organization following a strategy of frequently introducing of new innovative products and services generates higher ICT business value. The conclusions of this paper constitute evidence that there are external conditions that result in higher business value from ICT investment by necessitating a more efficient and effective use of ICT.

Striving to improve organizational performance Angel Meroño-Cerdan, Pedro Soto-Acosta, and Carolina López-Nicolás present a paper that studies the impact of collaborative technologies on a firm’s performance. The use of such collaborative technologies is made possible by the use of the intranet, which offer workable infrastructures for group communication and information processing by bringing geographically dispersed teams together for virtual meetings across great distances. This results in tremendous time and cost saving, greatly decreased travel requirements, faster decision-making and improved communication flows throughout the organization. This study reports the outcome of a structured questionnaire and interviews conducted in 310 Spanish firms. The paper considered a number of collaborative technologies namely; discussion forums, shared databases, document repositories, and workflow all made possible through the use of intranets. Also, the study considered three different intranet uses, namely: e-information, e-communication, and e-transaction. The research findings show that e-information improves organizational performance, while e-communication and e-transaction contribution cannot be demonstrated. Furthermore, empirical results demonstrate that greater e-information orientation, in conjunction with e-communication, is associated with better organizational performance. While this study focuses on e-collaboration within the organization, it could be interesting to include external agents, for instance, in the supply chain (providers, customers, etc. …).

The use of data mining techniques to identify patterns in HIV/AIDS patient data is a contribution by A. Vararuk, I. Petrounias, and V. Kodogiannis, which can be used for better management of the disease and more appropriate targeting of resources. The authors used a large number of anonymous records from HIV/AIDS patients in Thailand and imported them into a database. They used IBM’s intelligent miner for clustering and association rule discovery. Using the clustering technique enabled the authors to highlight patients with common characteristics and also to discover errors in data. They report that the association rules identified unexpected associations in the data that were different from traditional reporting mechanisms utilised by medical practitioners. The study establishes that the provision of a pragmatic and targeted approach to the management of resources available for HIV/AIDS treatment can provide a much better service, while at the same time reducing the expense of that service.

Driven by the need to develop new technologies that harness the use of digital media technologies while meeting various industries’ needs, this paper considers an application that targets the financial industry and implements novel media technology developed within the scope of the CYBERII project. The paper presents an ergonomic study that considers the potential utility and usability of augmented reality (AR) in finance. Soha Maad, Samir Garbaya, and Saida Bouakaz describe the used CYBERII technology to justify the outcome of this ergonomic study and highlight its implementation in finance. The CYBERII project aims at simulating, in real-time, the presence of a person (e.g. a TV presenter or a teacher) in a virtual environment. It adopts a five steps technique to insert one or several humans in a virtual interaction space. It uses the notion of “active regions” to initiate the interaction with the virtual world. Actions are triggered upon body interaction with “active regions”. This interaction may take the form of touching the “active region” and may be technically sensed using image analysis techniques that identify a body presence in the “active region”. The study is based on the comparative analysis of the use of augmented reality (AR) with a counterpart virtual reality (VR) approach used for the same application. The comparative analysis highlights an added value in the shift from the use of virtual reality (VR) to augmented reality (AR) in electronic financial trading. This added value is gained from augmented realism and less constrained interaction. Furthermore, the paper discusses the challenges and rewards of the emerging digital media technologies in meeting the needs of electronic commerce applications, particularly in electronic financial trading.

Peng Liu, Elia El-Darzi, Lei Lei, Christos Vasilakis, Panagiotis Chountas, and Wei Huang propose new methods for treating missing values in data sets in the healthcare domain to predict the inpatient length of stay (LOS). This follows the introduction, analysis and comparison of four well established treatment methods for missing data as part of the data preparation process for data mining. The empirical findings show that in the case where a large proportion of the data is missing and many attributes have missing data, treatment methods based on Naive Bayesian Classifier proved to be very effective. Altogether, the paper proposes an effective missing data treatment method and offers a viable approach to predict inpatient length of stay from a data set with many missing values.

The last contribution of this edition encompasses the paper by Ruxandra Gorunescu, P.H. Millard, and D. Dumitrescu who investigate whether an evolutionary model outperforms logistic regression in determining the institutional placement decisions made by a London social service department panel. According to the authors, as the skill mix of staff and levels of supervision vary in residential and nursing home care, clinical, social and psychological factors need to be considered when deciding whether a vulnerable person should be admitted to residential and nursing home care. In their study, they used a multi-model evolutionary classifier they matched correctly 89 per cent (range 81.6-97.7 per cent) of the 275 residential and nursing home placements. While using logistic regression with dichotomous outcomes and a smaller subset of the same data (195 records) matched 78 per cent of placement decisions. Thus, as a potential information management support tool, the evolutionary classifier outperformed logistic regression both in the number of records suitable for analysis and in the results obtained.

Zahir Irani