Search results

The emergence of internet-enabled technology has led to the software service model in which the software firm, instead of the consumer, maintains software ownership. This model can curtail software piracy more effectively than the traditional on-premises software model. However, software firms are not abandoning traditional on-premises software but embracing both models simultaneously. In this study, the authors consider a firm’s software bundling decision in combination with its piracy deterrence strategy. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

The authors build three stylized models to analytically compare the bundling strategies under three scenarios: no piracy, piracy is present and piracy is present while the firm applies digital rights management (DRM).

The authors find pure bundling (PB) to be the optimal strategy due to the combination of competition and cannibalization effects in mixed bundling (MB). Simultaneously, consumers may enjoy greater surplus in PB than in MB, making PB the preferred strategy for both the firm and consumers. Interestingly, the win-win outcome coexists with some degree of piracy in the market.

The results provide important insights for firms and policy-makers and contribute to the literature on piracy and product bundling. First, the authors show piracy could be another driver for product bundling, which has never been discussed in prior literature. Second, the authors suggest an alternative perspective; that PB may be a desirable outcome for both firms and consumers when considering piracy and DRM. More surprisingly, this desirable outcome occurs with some level of piracy in the market. The presence of piracy leads to competition and cannibalization effects in MB, which eventually results in the win-win outcome in the software market for both the firm and the consumers.

Technology has profoundly transformed the international business environment, particularly regarding the flow of information and the way in which knowledge is acquired and shared. Yet, the extent of this transformation is still underappreciated. The purpose of this paper is to examine how small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) owner/founders acquire and utilize knowledge for internationalization via internet-enabled platforms.

The empirical analysis draws on multiple case study methodology to examine 13 Australian SME owner/founders and the knowledge they acquire from utilization of internet-enabled platforms.

The analysis reveals four differing types of internet-enabled experiences: “technical internet-enabled experiences,” “operational internet-enabled experiences,” “functional internet-enabled experiences,” and “immersive internet-enabled experiences.” The findings indicate that internet-enabled experiences can generate both explicit and tacit forms of knowledge for the pre, early and later phases of internationalization.

The findings provide a structured approach by allowing SMEs to “plot” themselves against the classification of internet-enabled experiences to denote their level of technological involvement, and for discerning the types of knowledge that can be acquired. The findings are particularly helpful for owner/founders, highlighting that internet-enabled platforms are affecting the ways in which knowledge can be acquired and applied to international businesses processes.

The findings extend the conventional notion of knowledge acquisition for international business by highlighting how information and knowledge can be acquired via internet-enabled platforms. The findings lay the necessary groundwork for building an evidence base and theoretically extending the concept of knowledge acquisition via internet-enabled platforms.

This article reports a study of e‐business adoption among SMEs in the knowledge‐intensive service sector in three countries, the results of which contain a number of practical lessons and some much needed encouragement to laggards. The new spatial possibilities of internet‐based technologies provide a powerful route to innovative marketing strategies. Consequently, organisations of all sizes are finding it necessary to establish a web presence to increase their ability to survive in an increasingly dynamic and competitive business environment. Strategically, firms need to be creative and innovative in order to deal effectively with the e‐marketing opportunities the internet can deliver. The findings of a comparative study conducted in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland and New Zealand provide evidence of primitive and localised exploitation of the technology, a general lack of enthusiasm about its possibilities, and a perception that there are many barriers to successfully adding value at the customer interface. It is hoped that the somewhat pessimistic tone of the analysis will be taken as an opportunity to win competitive advantage in the knowledge‐intensive service sector, rather than a reason to postpone adoption of internet‐enabled technology.

Aims to show that workflow management needs to rethink its basis of discussion in order to meet today's challenges and to provide adequate IT support for heterogeneous workflow networks.

First, the need for flexibility in relating resources in workflow management is examined in more detail. Second, some approaches to managing workflows in heterogeneous networks are inspected and it is found that all of these improve flexibility on the basis of contracting services. Third, it is elaborated how processing by contract supports decentralized resource management through dynamically interrelating social and technical services driven by a cycle (“wheel”) of execution and monitoring, evaluation and demand, as well as selecting and contracting.

Conclusions are drawn for systems architecture and implementation to guide the design of internet‐enabled workflow support.

Important questions for the research agenda are: how can one enrich application‐oriented workflow modelling languages in order to describe processes as consisting of heterogeneous services? How should one design and implement workflow engines which enable the turning of the “wheel” with the support of integrating human activities and technical agency as workflow process services?

The idea of processing by contract may lead to new workflow concepts and technology to meet the challenges of an internet economy based on the “pay as you go” principle.

Whereas the workflow paradigm of the past may be phrased as processing by definition, i.e. process execution according to predefined process patterns and resource relations, the idea of processing by contract is suggested, i.e. a mode of process execution driven by recurrent process evaluation and service contracting.

In the last decade, bureaucratic organizational hierarchies have been increasingly replaced with flatter organizational forms, bringing together people from different disciplines to form project teams within and between organizations. Distributed project teams often are self‐configuring networks of mobile and “fixed” people, devices, and applications. They are the natural next step in the evolution of distributed computing, after client‐server, web‐based, and peer‐to‐peer computing. Seeks to show that a newly emerging requirement is to facilitate not just mobility of content (i.e. to support a multitude of devices and connectivity modes) to project members, but also mobility of context (i.e. to provide traceable and continuous support of dynamic relationships between people, artifacts, and business processes).

The contribution of this paper is to present the design goals, the architecture, and implementation of a system aiming at supporting internet‐enabled workflow and groupware for project teams, enabling traceable and continuous support of associations (relationships) between people, artifacts, and business processes.

The findings indicate that building internet‐enabled workflow and groupware systems is valuable for virtual teamwork, since they provide a foundation for context‐aware and process‐aware information systems.

This article outlines some foundations of process‐aware collaborative work. Provides an analysis of current workflow and groupware shortcomings in respect of virtual teamwork, outlines the design goals, architecture and an implementation of a system aiming at supporting virtual teams on the internet.

Using Internet‐enabled mobile handheld devices to access the World Wide Web is a promising addition to the Web and traditional e‐commerce. Mobile handheld devices provide convenience and portable access to the huge information on the Internet for mobile users from anywhere and at anytime. However, mobile commerce has not enjoyed the same level of success as the e‐commerce has so far because mobile Web contents are scarce and mostly awkward for browsing. The major reason of the problems is most software engineers are not familiar with handheld devices, let alone programming for them. To help software engineers better understand this subject, this article gives a comprehensive study of handheld computing and programming for mobile commerce. It includes five major topics: (i) mobile commerce systems, (ii) mobile handheld devices, (iii) handheld computing, (iv) server‐side handheld computing and programming, and (v) client‐side handheld computing and programming. The most popular server‐side handheld applications are mostly functioning through mobile Web contents, which are constructed by using only few technologies and languages. On the other hand, various environments/languages are available for client‐side handheld computing and programming. Five of the most popular are (i) BREW, (ii) J2ME, (iii) Palm OS, (iv) Symbian OS, and (v) Windows Mobile. They are using either C/C++ or Java programming languages. This article will explain J2ME, a micro version of Java, and Palm OS programming, using C, by giving step‐by‐step procedures of J2ME and Palm application development.

Merges the latest results obtained by the holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) consortium with the latest developed standards for platform interoperability released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e‐business model: the holonic e‐enterprise (HE). The HE extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with one top level, the inter‐enterprise one. On the other side it extends the multi‐agent system (MAS) paradigm to the hardware (physical machine) level.

Superlatives abound when talking about the impact of the Internet in business. Facilities management is no exception. However, simply becoming Internet enabled is not enough for facilities management firms. The Internet itself is undergoing a process of perpetual renewal. Firms already have Internet based systems that are obsolete. Systems have passed through a first phase of static delivery, through to dynamic delivery and we are now witnessing the emergence of intelligent delivery. This will result in an Internet environment that can be interpreted by machines (agents) as well as humans. This paper attempts to shed some light on this evolution. The author considers the groundswell of activity that is likely to take place as facilities management addresses the virtual value chain as well as the physical value chain. The discussion in the paper is based in the research explored in a forthcoming book Net Gain in Construction.

The aim of this study is to understand why some New Zealand firms in the professional services industries have been slow to embrace e‐business technologies.

The authors employ a postal survey approach and involve a sample of 500 professional service small to medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs) in New Zealand.

The main conclusion derived from this study is that a combination of factors influences a firm's current and future level of e‐business adoption. These factors include: being able to understand potential e‐business benefits; being able to respond to customer and competitor practices; being prepared to develop staff skills and knowledge of internet‐based technologies (IBTs); and having a well justified and strategic orientation towards e‐business.

The research was restricted in scope to professional service sector SMEs in New Zealand. Further research is planned to provide valuable benchmarks of other country and sectoral adoption and diffusion behaviours.

Adopting firms must continue to extend their e‐business capabilities and levels of sophistication. The biggest challenge that lies ahead is how to change the mindset of non‐adopters and make them realise the benefits that e‐business can deliver. In the final analysis choices about new technology and the exploitation of e‐business opportunities must be owner‐manager led.

The contribution of this research is that the relationship between technology adoption and professional service‐sector firms in New Zealand has become better understood. Implicitly the study has revealed the factors that impact on the decision‐making processes of owner‐managers in relation to the adoption (or otherwise) of IBTs for business purposes.

Internet‐based robotic systems have received much attention in recent years. A number of design issues are essential for designing this new type of robotic systems. This paper addresses the Internet time delay, the user interface design and concurrent user access for an Internet‐enabled arm robot. The implementation and application of the Internet‐enabled arm robot in an open control laboratory has been illustrated as a case study.