Search results

Cloud computing is rapidly becoming the new norm of doing business. Lately, the extent of virtualization has enabled full-fledged cloud solution to become affordable, quantitatively and/or qualitatively. The purpose of this study is to explore the former in detail. In this paper, implementation of cloud-based services in the financial services, intermediaries and banking industry where security has always been the greatest concern are studied through actor-based stakeholder modelling. Drivers for adoption, benefits and trade-offs and challenges have been discussed in detail through a hypothetical comprehensive case study of a bank.

An actor-dependency-based technique for analyzing and modelling requirements prior to changes and charting out roadmap and rationale behind it all has been used. Through the use of i* modelling, dependencies and relationships between various stakeholders have been studied. Further, how decision makers in the financial services industry evaluate, consolidate and finally migrate to a new architecture is also explored.

Two hypothetical use cases on a hypothetical bank referred to as “The Bank” illustrate the technique and possible roadmap for implementation.

To the best of knowledge in the public domain, no similar work has been carried out with the perspective of modelling stakeholders and change management configuration in the financial services using cloud. This approach is valuable for augmenting technological advancements with business insights and spotting value in synergies of the sectors whenever and wherever apparent.

This research paper aims to analyze the critical barriers to implementing digitalization in the Indian construction industry as Indian construction companies are lagging in the implementation of digital technologies in the work environment.

In this research paper, a qualitative research approach is adopted, and multiple detailed interviews are conducted with industry and academic experts. Further, multi-criteria decision-making (MCDM) techniques are used to finalize the prioritization among various alternatives. The fuzzy-decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (Fuzzy-DEMATEL) and interpretive structural modeling (ISM) techniques are employed to find the exact relationship among the identified alternatives.

This study identifies 14 critical barriers from an extensive literature review and multiple interviews with industry professionals, and further driving and critical barriers are identified.

In this research paper, an exploratory study with a limited number of respondents from a large Indian construction company is carried out. Further, a detailed longitudinal analysis can be done to assess the subjectivity of the participants with more advanced statistical tools. However, this research discusses several points pertaining to the implementation of digitalization in the construction industry. The research further identifies the critical barriers to digitalization in the Indian construction industry.

The finding of the study has two-pronged implications. First, it provides a road-map to the construction industry by highlighting the engagement of top management as the key focus area for successful digitalization. Second, the finding also shows similarity of the digitalization process to the adoption of process improvement techniques like lean and total quality management (TQM), wherein the top management plays a crucial role in ushering in the implementation of a disruptive change.

The research is unique in two ways. First, this is one of the very few attempts to understand digitalization in the Indian context. Second, the research also demonstrates that the combination of fuzzy DEMATEL and ISM techniques can be successfully employed in the emerging field of construction digitalization research.

Use of cloud-based enterprise resource planning (ERP) services equips an SME to forego the requirements of high financial budget, IT infrastructure, and trained IT personnel as it is required for on-premise ERP solution. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the organizational and technological factors as well as the factors that concern the performance of cloud service provider. These concerns are known as extrinsic factors and they are compliance, network, and information security. This study links the organizational and technological factors of SMEs and the extrinsic factors of cloud vendor for the successful implementation of cloud ERP.

Resource dependence theory (RDT) was used to understand the relationship of SMEs and cloud service provider. Structural equation modeling was employed in analyzing the data of 208 SMEs that were collected through a survey.

The empirical analysis supports the RDT as the critical success factors of the SMEs have a positive relationship with the extrinsic factors (compliance, network, and information security) during the cloud ERP implementation.

The data collected in this study is from India and this acts as a limitation as the result might not hold true for other countries and regions. Also, the data collected are cross-sectional and only represent the perspective of the respondents at the time of filling the questionnaire.

This paper attempts to bring out a relationship between SMEs and cloud service provider for the successful implementation of cloud ERP.

Increasing pressure from government and consumer to be environmentally conscious has led firms to focus their attention on the assessment and controlling the adverse impacts their operations have on the environment. The current study focuses on identifying the factors and their relative importance in the implementation of Green Supply Chain Management (GSCM) process.

The factors influencing the GSCM are ranked from most important to least important using a novel method of ranking relying on rough sets theory. Opinions on the importance of the factors are gathered from the experts from industrial, environmental, and societal domains.

Involvement of government in promoting the importance of green practices in organizations and societal insistence of being environmentally conscious are the factors that demonstrated maximum potential in establishing a strong GSCM framework.

This study aids the management to discover important factors for the establishment of a strong GSCM framework. This encourages the management to follow and apply green practices in operations. Also, it sheds light on the current situation of environmental awareness in the Indian construction industries.

This paper adds to the existing literature on identification and ordering of factors for GSCM by introducing a novel method of ranking based on Rough set approach. The method includes the preference information of the decision makers to yield the final ranking of the factors.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a practical framework to measure the safety performance of workers in the Indian construction industry. The key safety performance indicators are identified and ordered on the premise that the higher order assignment of an indicator implies a strong indication of an effective safety performance.

Various indicators of safety performance in the construction industry were identified from extant literature review combined with author's personal viewpoint. The identified variables were inquired for appropriateness for the Indian construction scenario by consultation with experts. Fuzzy Technique for order preference by similarity to ideal solution (TOPSIS) technique was considered for the ranking of the indicators from most to least important.

The most important highlight of the study was the importance of the role of management by participating in informing workers about the safety rules and compliance toward safety measures. Proper and timely safety training to the workers and equipping them with sophisticated safety equipment for daily activities is perceived to be highly important in ensuring a safe and healthy workplace environment. Controlling the absenteeism rate reduces the burden of extra work on the employees, thereby, encouraging safe work-related behavior.

Senior management should make safety induction programs compulsory at the time of joining of the employees. The guidelines for safety practices, rules and information about the safety equipment should be properly documented and arranged in safety manuals. Periodical drills involving visual demonstration of the safety practices should be followed to ensure safety at workplace.

This study aims to investigate the interrelationships among the Lean manufacturing (LM) adoption barriers in Indian SMEs. This issue has its own importance as LM has become the inescapable requirement for small- and medium-scale enterprises (SMEs) because of the increased concerns about quality, cost, delivery time and rapidly growing competition in the manufacturing sector and in India it is opposed by many factors/barriers. To act for the eradication of these barriers, we need to systematically analyze them.

Based on the available literature and consultation with the experts, the authors identified 16 LM barriers for Indian SMEs. The authors analyzed the interdependencies among the barriers and prioritized them using integrated Grey-decision-making trial and evaluation laboratory (grey-DEMATEL) approach.

The findings show that limited financial resources, fear in adopting new technology, lack of top management commitment and poor leadership quality are the most critical barriers for LM diffusion in Indian SMEs.

The present research is based on the experts’ inputs, which may be subject to individual biases. In developing countries, such as India, geographical influences are also possible, which are neglected in this study.

This study provides significant insights that can help SMEs to focus on critical cause group barriers to accelerate the LM penetration.

The authors have proposed a Grey-DEMATEL-based LM barrier evaluation framework. Here, the authors analyze the interrelationships among the barriers for LM and segregate them in cause and effect groups.

The purpose of this paper is to identify the critical challenges in the implementation of cloud enterprise resource planning (ERP). The challenges identified were customization, organizational change, long-term costs, business complexity, loss of information technology competencies, legal issues, integration, data extraction, monitoring, migration, security, network dependency, limited functionality, awareness, performance, integrity of provider, perception, and subscription costs. Here the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and large organizations were differentiated with respect to the challenges identified. This paper also suggested ranked lists of challenges both for SMEs and large organizations.

An online survey was conducted and data of 93 respondents were analyzed. Exploratory factor analysis and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to statistically test the data. Here the SMEs and large organizations were differentiated with respect to the challenges identified.

This study shows that SMEs and large organizations differ from each other for most of the challenges except business complexity, integration, monitoring, security, limited functionality, performance, and integrity of provider. Also from the ranked list of challenges in cloud ERP, security was the top concern for both SMEs and large organizations.

The findings may help organizations to get a broad idea about the challenges which are critical for the implementation of cloud ERP.

Presents the results of a study aimed at investigating the antecedent software development factors that affect quality of final products. By monitoring those causal factors from the early phases of development, one can have a final product of enhanced quality and reduced costs.

The study considered an unprecedentedly large number of 30 C++ object‐oriented systems of varied size and application domains, a comprehensive suite of large number of predictive software design or code measures in one study, and compared their results on a common platform.

It was found that many of the software design or code measures have a significant positive or negative relationship with quality.

The value of the paper lies in the fact that it addresses some of the major problems from which most of the studies conducted in this research domain suffer. The objective and justification of this paper are to address these deficiencies, in addition to validating some of the results obtained in earlier studies. Another important value of the paper lies in the fact that, based on the results of the study, the paper enlists useful lessons learned that can provide some practical insight for practitioners and quality managers.

The article aims to identify the possibility of contextual shift in traditional notions of e‐government service environment. The authors propose the existence of a new institutional entity as core service providers in addition to the government (G) and citizens (C) in the existing G2C e‐government service environments. Considering the nature of actors involved, the authors position the new e‐government environment under “credence based” service setting that emphasizes user's perspective. The work expands the scope of e‐government to accommodate a much broader range of similar services.

Scenario study has been chosen to understand the proposed contextual shift in traditional e‐government service setting. Study of one of the e‐government practices – “e‐counseling in India” – has been illustrated to advocate the authors' viewpoint. The data is collected from authorized government websites in India that offer e‐counseling services. In addition, 15 in‐depth interviews were also performed with government officials and users to have a deeper understanding about the new service setting.

The study has revealed and defended the authors' proposition on “contextual shift” and validated the existence of “credence based” setting in e‐government service environments. Moreover, it provides preliminary insights about why and how information quality can be a critical element for the aforesaid setting.

Identification of “credence based” e‐government service environments may require a different design strategy for structures, policies, systems, and services to fulfil the user expectations.

Attention is given to developing credence based context for G2C e‐government environments. This “contextual shift” identified in this paper contributes to the existing stream of research that emphasizes user's perspective in e‐government services.

Because of the competitive economy, organizations today seek to rationalize, innovate and adapt to changing environments and circumstances as part of business process reengineering (BPR) efforts. Irrespective of the process reengineering program selected and the technique used to model it, BPR brings with it the issues of organizational and process changes, which involves managing organizational changes (also called “change management”). Change management is non‐trivial, as organizational changes are difficult to accomplish. Though some attempt has been made to model change management in enterprise information systems using conventional conceptual modeling techniques, they have just addressed “what” a change process is like, and they do not address “why” the process is the way it is.

The approach presents an actor‐dependency‐based technique for analyzing and modeling early‐phase requirements of organizational change management that provides the motivations, intents, and rationales behind the entities and activities.

A case study illustrates this approach.

This approach is novel in the sense that there is no similar intentional modeling approach for change management to the best of our knowledge. The approach is expected to be valuable because using this approach one can reason about the opportunities and changes that are associated with BPR and can incorporate prominently the issues related to change in the process of system analysis and design.