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The purpose of this paper is to develop a collaborative agent-based web architecture and an agent-based green IS assessment tool to aid information technology (IT) practitioners in data centers assess their current green information systems (IS) practice toward attaining sustainability.

The methodology comprises that the collaborative agent-based web architecture, agents’ algorithm and the green IS assessment tool, which is validated by employing focus group questionnaire targeting IT practitioners in seven Malaysian-based enterprises that have an in-house data centers. With 105 valid samples at hand, descriptive analysis and exploratory factor analysis was utilized to determine the applicability of the implemented agent-based green IS assessment tool.

Findings reveal that the agent-based green IS assessment tool possesses the capability to evaluate benchmark and rate enterprise data centers current green IS practice. Additional findings indicate that the agent-based green IS assessment tool provide suggestions on how green IS practice can be improved in enterprise data centers.

This study only collected data from 105 IT practitioners in enterprise data centers based in Malaysia; as such results from this research cannot be generalized to other countries. Moreover, the developed collaborative agents for green IS practice assessment can only be fully deployed after domain experts has added green IS practice assessment questions and alternative answers.

This study presents an autonomous agent-based green IS assessment tool that supports the assessment of enterprise toward inclusion of sustainability considerations to enhance enterprise environmental performance.

This study provides empirical evidence for data centers efficacy leading toward a greener society for environmental conservation for future generations to come.

This study creates awareness by presenting the green IS practice to be implemented by IT practitioners in data centers. In addition, the agent-based green IS assessment tool provides a web-based platform for promoting environmental sustainability by supporting data centers toward evaluating, benchmarking and rating their current green IS practices.

As smart cities flourish amidst rapid urbanization and information and communication technology development, the demand for building more and more data centers is rising. This paper aims to examine the principal issues and considerations of data center facilities from the cost and benefit dimensions, with an aim to illustrate the approaches for maximizing the net benefits and remain “green.”

A comprehensive literature review informs the costs and benefits of data center facilities, and through a case study of a developer in Hong Kong, the significance of real estate costs is demonstrated.

Major corporations, establishments and governments need data centers as a mission critical facility to enable countless electronic transactions to take place any minute of the day. Their functional importance ranges from health, transport, payment, etc., all the way to entertainment activities. Some enterprises own them, whilst others use data center services on a co-location basis, in which case data centers are regarded as an investment asset. Real estate costs affect their success to a great extent, as in the case of a metropolitan where land cost forms a substantial part of the overall development cost for data centers.

As the financial information of data center projects are highly sensitive due to the competitive status of the industry, a full set of numerical data is not available. Instead, the principles for a typical framework are established.

Data centers are very energy intensive, and their construction is usually fast tracked costing much to build, not to mention the high-value equipment contents housed therein. Their site locations need careful selection due to stability and security concerns. As an essential business continuity tool, the return on investment is a complex consideration, but certainly the potential loss caused by any disruption would be a huge amount. The life cycle cost and benefit considerations are revealed for this type of mission-critical facilities. Externalities are expounded, with emphasis on sustainable issues. The impact of land shortage for data center development is also demonstrated through the case of Hong Kong.

Introduction: New ideas and concepts of big data have emerged in recent years in response to the astounding growth of data in many industries. Furthermore, the phenomenal increase in the use of the internet and social media has added enormous amounts of data to conventional data processing systems. Still, it has also created challenges for traditional data processing.

Purpose: A significant characteristic of the insurance sector is critically dependent on information. This sector generates a great deal of structured and unstructured data, which traditional data processing techniques cannot handle. As compared to conventional insurance data processing and decision-making requirements, this lesson shows an analysis of data technology’s value additions.

Research methodology: The author assesses the primary use of cases for data in the insurance industry via a case study analysis. From the perspective of the insurance sector, this chapter examines the concepts, technologies, and tools of big data. A few analytical reviews by the insurance company are also provided, which justified several gains gained either through inefficient processing of massive, diverse data sets or by supporting better decisions.

Findings: This chapter demonstrates the importance of adopting new business models that allow insurers to move beyond understand and protect and become more predictive and preventative by using the tools and technologies of big data technology.

This study aims to explain the implementation of Cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and underlying factors and challenges that might be practiced by the users. It also provides a comparison between traditional and Cloud ERP systems.

The study uses qualitative case study and analyzes the primary evidences from in-depth interviews. It conducts a thematic analysis of the interviews' findings. Furthermore, the current study uses three groups of factors (technological, management and environmental) that are expected to be best determinants of the Cloud ERP implementation.

The findings provide an evidence that using the Cloud EPR system, as alternative to on premise traditional ERP system, is constructive to the success of organizations and improve the quality of their decision-making process. The findings also reveal that effectiveness of implementing Cloud ERP is reliable on the provider's professionalism; hence resulting in issues related to minimize organizational independence.

This paper is subjected to case studies limitations, as it lacks rigor and generalization. The paper has important implications for practitioners and decision-makers alike as it presents real-life example about Cloud ERP implementation. It thus enhances decision-makers' ability to make a relevant reporting process in the small and medium enterprises (SMEs).

This study can be considered as a one of very few case studies that discusses Cloud ERP implementation in UAE organizations particularly SMEs. It also provides three groups of factors (technological, management and environmental) that are influenced by the Cloud ERP implementation.

Cloud eases information processing, but it holds numerous risks, including hacking and confidentiality problems. It puts businesses at risk in terms of data security and compliance. This paper aims to maximize the covered human resource (HR) vulnerabilities and minimize the security costs in the enterprise cloud using a fuzzy-based method and firefly optimization algorithm.

Cloud computing provides a platform to improve the quality and availability of IT resources. It changes the way people communicate and conduct their businesses. However, some security concerns continue to derail the expansion of cloud-based systems into all parts of human life. Enterprise cloud security is a vital component in ensuring the long-term stability of cloud technology by instilling trust. In this paper, a fuzzy-based method and firefly optimization algorithm are suggested for optimizing HR vulnerabilities while mitigating security expenses in organizational cloud environments. MATLAB is employed as a simulation tool to assess the efficiency of the suggested recommendation algorithm. The suggested approach is based on the firefly algorithm (FA) since it is swift and reduces randomization throughout the lookup for an optimal solution, resulting in improved performance.

The fuzzy-based method and FA unveil better performance than existing met heuristic algorithms. Using a simulation, all the results are verified. The study findings showed that this method could simulate complex and dynamic security problems in cloud services.

The findings may be utilized to assist the cloud provider or tenant of the cloud infrastructure system in taking appropriate risk mitigation steps.

Using a fuzzy-based method and FA to maximize the covered HR vulnerabilities and minimize the security costs in the enterprise cloud is the main novelty of this paper.

One of the most critical infrastructures is a data center (DC) because of it having many servers, computers and other equipment. DCs provide online services for various companies in the information technology (IT) industry. DC facilities should provide reliable online services while addressing the required quality and performance level considering maximum reliability and availability. The purpose of this study is to represent and classify the main findings in this area and to identify the main research gaps and shortcomings from the perspective of research.

This paper provides an organized and systematic literature review focusing on topics regarding the operation and maintenance (O&M) management of DCs.

Although there are several studies on O&M management systems for industrial systems and facilities, a limited number of studies with few methods and models have focused on DCs so far and these facilities require more attention. This paper identifies the issues and challenges for DC buildings and facilities and provides a conclusion of the findings to highlight the main research limitations for discovering new potential methods as future research opportunities.

The paper has highlighted the main practical issues of DCs in terms of maintenance management. Several research works have been discussed specifically for DC’s maintenance, which makes this paper a credible source for researchers, maintenance managers and companies involved in the area of DC. Because several of the reviewed literature were based on real case studies, decision-makers in the DC maintenance sector can take advantage of new research on maintenance scheduling to reduce the costs of maintenance.

The paper has presented a comprehensive list of frequent keywords in recent publications related to O&M management for DCs. It has provided a categorized list of publications based on by their topic, methodology and case study. Because this paper has discussed research works specifically for DC’s maintenance, it is a credible source for researchers, maintenance managers and companies involved in the area of DCs.

The purpose of this paper is to develop an eccentric model to examine the factors that influence environmental performance in organizations based on belief–action–outcome framework and natural resource-based view theory.

Data were collected by employing online survey from respondents in organizations to statistically test the eccentric model and its associated hypotheses. Partial least squares–structural equation modeling and Statistical Package for Social Sciences were utilized to analyze the survey data.

The results show that information technology (IT) professionals and IT executives’ behavior positively influences environmental performance. Further results suggest that the belief of IT professionals and IT executives is significantly influenced by the action of IT infrastructure, institutional pressure, organizational strategy and information diffusion. In addition, results reveal that the action of IT infrastructure, institutional pressure, organizational strategy and information diffusion in organizations significantly has an impact on the outcome of environmental performance. Moreover, results indicate that green information systems (IS) for pollution prevention, product stewardship and clean development initiatives adopted positively influence the environmental performance of organizations.

The developed eccentric model further shows how green IS practice integration can improve environmental performance. However, the selected respondents are from a single country as such findings from this study cannot be generalized to other countries.

Practically, this paper has implications for the capability of IS to promote environmental performance in organizations.

This study provides a pertinent contribution in developing and validating an eccentric model for green IS adoption. Besides, a survey instrument is developed that can be used by future studies.

The developed model helps to explore the factors that influence environmental performance and also the outcomes of green IS adoption for environmental performance. Accordingly, IT professionals and IT executives can draw upon the eccentric model in assessing their current environmental-friendly practice for the effective initialization of green IS for corporate value.

This study aims to develop a software agent-knowledge procurement management tool to address uncertainties from external and internal environments, such as record failure, slow logistics auditing and distribution delay toward improving procurement management in retailing enterprises.

Quantitative methodology was used to collect data using a self-administered survey from randomly selected procurement staffs, marketers and customers to measure their perception regarding the feasibility and acceptance of the implemented agent-knowledge-based procurement management tool.

Results from empirical analysis reveal that the implemented tool facilitates collaboration and interaction among buyers, sellers and procurement managers toward enhancing procurement managers’ flexibility to handle unexpected exceptions. In addition, results confirm the feasibility of the implemented tool in supporting procurement management toward handling inventory failure exception, which occurs in traditional procurement approaches. Moreover, descriptive results from user acceptance test verify that the tool was accepted by the respondents.

The limitation of this study is that the implemented tool is evaluated using data collected from respondents in Malaysia retailing enterprise only; thus, the results cannot be generalized to other enterprises and country. In addition, research implications from this study design a methodological and comprehensive software agent-knowledge-based model that support buyers, sellers and procurement managers with information to facilitate buying and selling operations.

Practically, the designed software agent-knowledge-based model describes how software agents collaborate with each other to facilitate procurement tasks and also use the knowledge base in the implemented tool to provide information sharing platform that manages the dynamics of procurement operations.

This research integrates software agents which are autonomous programs that carryout pre-defined task on behalf of end users. Socially, this study would be useful for procurement managers in developing mechanisms for instilling insights in retailing operations.

This research is among the first to attempt to develop a software agent-knowledge-based model to support procurement management in the retailing enterprise domain. It contributes to promote e-procurement practices by implementing a software agent-knowledge-oriented tool to address uncertainties experienced in retailing enterprise. It is envisaged that this study will provide basis for future research into e-procurement practices for retailing businesses in Malaysia and beyond.