The Influence of Familiarity and Security on Decision Making Processes in E-Commerce

E-commerce can enhance its acceptance among users through fostering online trust, which is vital for decision-making process. The perception and computation of trust is crucial for vendors and users for the success of e-commerce. The calculation and measurement of trust antecedent involves complex aspect such as presence of security controls and familiarity within the website. Most companies are acquiring ‘security technology’ because everybody else is doing the same, but not because there has been a proper assessment of its association with trust. The purpose of this paper is to analyze the role of trust antecedents such as security, and familiarity when they are used collectively to do online transactions. Trust, in general, is an important factor in conducting e-transaction, which revolve around uncertainty and ambiguity. The Fuzzy logic approach provides a means for coping with this uncertainty and vagueness that are present in e-commerce. Therefore, the fuzzy logic approach is been deployed to develop scales to measure the effects of users’ familiarity and perception of security in an online business-to-consumer (B2C) context. This research provides guidelines to vendors on how they could ascertain the trust level of their business and ways of mitigate the negative impact on the trust level.

Implementing E-Business Models in the Public Services

Despite the significant progress made by research into e-business models, the issue of how public sector organisations can successfully make the transition from traditional approaches to e-business by taking advantage of e-technologies has received little attention. This chapter draws on qualitative, longitudinal case-study research carried out between 2001 and 2005 in Britain’s national mapping agency to reveal the processes of strategic and organisational transformation engendered by E-business in an organisation evolving from the classical, bureaucratic and centralised ‘public sector model’ towards a new organisational form through embracing e-business as a corporate philosophy. The study also explores the key components of the new e-business model implemented by the organisation and the contextual factors that impacted on the effectiveness of E-strategy implementation in order to draw a list of best practices for the implementation of E-business in a public sector context.

Markets, Hierarchies, and the Evolving Nature of Interorganizational Cooperation

The decreasing cost of IT has encouraged organizations to seek new ways of cooperating with members of the supply chain and other key strategic partners. This increased cooperation is giving rise to a new type of interorganizational system (IOS). Before the advent of the Internet, IS integration required significant investments on the part of organizations participating in an IOS. Such heavy investments, in turn, necessitated close strategic cooperation in the non-IS domain as well. Thus, IS integration went hand-in-hand with non-IS (relational) integration in the pre-Internet era. However, advances in Internet technology have commoditized IS integration to a significant extent, thereby allowing the uncoupling of IS integration and relational integration. It is now possible for organizations to have IS integration without developing strong non-IS linkages. We propose a framework to account for this recent shift and present a typology for classifying interorganizational systems based on the segregation of IS and relational integration. We also verify the typology in case studies of four large firms.

Metering and Accounting for Service-oriented Computing?

Distributed Systems of today have evolved from tightly coupled architectures such as CORBA and DCOM to loosely coupled service-oriented architectures such as Web Services. The success of such architectures depends upon availability of supporting functions such as security, systems management, service level agreements and development environments with associated tooling. An important management component of such an infrastructure is the metering and accounting for service usage which is essential for successful deployments in commercial environments. This paper explores the problem space and presents an architecture that addresses this need. We start by defining taxonomy of services from the perspective of usage metering, charging and business models. We discuss how service usage can be measured, aggregated and communicated in a uniform way. Finally, we report on a prototype design and implementation.

Web Service Orchestration and Choreography

The Web service domain is a fast growing and fast changing environment. From a business perspective, the trend over the last few years in the Web services area firmly points toward seamless business logic integration and inter-enterprise collaboration. However, in order to accomplish such goals, both technological and conceptual advances are required. Some already have proven their viability, others still have to be made. Among them, Web service orchestration and choreography are of crucial importance, but still lack a widely agreed on development framework comprising both technological and conceptual aspects. In this paper we try to provide a critical snapshot of current standards for Web service development and particularly we focus on Web service orchestration and choreography. We discuss problems and solutions from a conceptual point of view, exemplify the illustrated ideas by means of real-world technologies and standards and highlight the mutual dependencies that exist among orchestration and choreography of Web services.

Ambient E-Service

Most of existing mobile services were designed based on the client/server architecture. Those mobile services neither paid much attention to mobile users’ interactions with their environments nor considered the collective efforts between the mobile users in a dynamic peer group. In this paper, the notion of ambient e-service is so defined as to identify a new scope of mobile e-service, which address dynamic collective efforts between mobile users (enabled by Mobile Peer-to-Peer technology), dynamic interactions with ambient environments (envisioned by Location-based service), the moment of value (empowered by wireless technologies), and low cost service provision. The notable features of ambient e-services are the exhilarated linkage based on social context and significantly rapid growth of connections. We also present an ambient e-service framework that characterizes ambient e-services with three dimensions (value stack, environment stack and technology stack), followed by several exemplars of ambient e-service applications. Moreover, we present the Ambient e-service Embracing Model (ASEM) that addresses the integrated consideration of trust, reputation and privacy required for fostering the growth of ambient e-services and steers the directions of future fruitful relevant research. The embracing model can also guide the government or service providers to implement the ambient e-service applications that satisfy customers’ unique needs under various circumstances. Keywords: mobile commerce, ambient e-service, mobile peer-to-peer, trust/reputation/privacy