Mobile Workforce Management in a Service-Oriented Enterprise

In a service-oriented enterprise, the professional workforce such as salespersons and support staff tends to be mobile with the recent advances in mobile technologies. There are increasing demands for the support of mobile workforce management (MWM) across multiple platforms in order to integrate the disparate business functions of the mobile professional workforce and management with a unified infrastructure, together with the provision of personalized assistance and automation. Typically, MWM involves tight collaboration, negotiation, and sophisticated business-domain knowledge, and thus can be facilitated with the use of intelligent software agents. As mobile devices become more powerful, intelligent software agents can now be deployed on these devices and hence are also subject to mobility. Therefore, a multiagent information-system (MAIS) infrastructure provides a suitable paradigm to capture the concepts and requirements of an MWM as well as a phased development and deployment. In this book chapter, we illustrate our approach with a case study at a large telecommunication enterprise. We show how to formulate a scalable, flexible, and intelligent MAIS with agent clusters. Each agent cluster comprises several types of agents to achieve the goal of each phase of the workforce-management process, namely, task formulation, matchmaking, brokering, commuting, and service.

Mobile Internet Adoption by Spanish Consumers

The chapter aims to present an in-depth study of the factors influencing Mobile Internet adoption. The authors analyse the influence of Internet use experience, compatibility, perceived financial risk, credibility and attitude towards Mobile Internet in the M-Internet adoption decision. After identifying the key drivers of M-Internet adoption, the second part of the chapter presents an empirical study of the Spanish market. Results based on a sample of 213 Internet users show that Internet use experience, MInternet compatibility, credibility and attitude are positive key drivers of M-Internet adoption. Perceived financial risk influences negatively on M-Internet usage intention. This chapter will give managers and students insight into the M-Internet industry and the different factors that influence M-Internet adoption. In addition, these factors can be applied to the specific context of the Spanish market.

UbiSrvInt

Peer-to-Peer applications harness sharing between free resources (storage, contents, services, human presence, etc.). Most existing wireless P2P applications concern merely the sharing of a variety of contents. For magnifying the sharing extent for wireless service provision in the vicinity (i.e., the wireless P2P environments), this chapter presents a novel approach (briefly named UbiSrvInt) that is an attempt to enable a pure P2P solution that is context aware and fault tolerant for ad-hoc wireless service provision. This approach empowers an autonomous peer to propel distributed problem solving (e.g., in the travel domain) through service sharing and execution in an intelligent P2P way. This approach of ad-hoc wireless service provision is not only highly robust to failure (based on a specific clustering analysis of failure correlation among peers) but also capable of inferring a user’s service needs (through a BDI reasoning mechanism utilizing the surrounding context) in ad-hoc wireless environments. The authors have implemented UbiSrvInt into a system platform with P-JXTA that shows good performance results on fault tolerance and context awareness.

Predicting the Adoption of Mobile Government Services

Mobile government transform many of the traditional governance practices. The citizens’ adoption of M-Government services (e.g. voting, tax services, health services, etc.), however, is determined by a series of factors (e.g. ease of use, image, compatibility, etc.). This chapter investigates the predicting power of these factors towards contributing to theory building and providing direct implications that are useful for the diffusion and adoption of mobile government services in Greece. The study reviews the available literature on adoption and diffusion of innovation as well as the available relevant research insights on the mobile commerce landscape. Then, the study empirically tests the predicting power of aseries of critical variables that are theoretically related to the Greek citizens’ intention to adopt mobile government services. The findings imply that compatibility and ease of use have significant predicting power on citizens’ intention to adopt M-Government services. Direct implications and further research directions are provided at the end.

Ubiquitous Communication

In a digital home a so-called multi-play system integrates networked entertainment and communications systems. Using a mobile phone, all those services can be controlled and used ubiquitously—from everywhere, at any time. Not much research has been conducted in the field of integrated communication offers. The novelty of this study is in that it addresses the ubiquitous communication system, called the multi-play service, from the perspectives of both the customer preference and operator strategy and transforms this into valuation of resources and capabilities. This chapter provides a framework to connect the customer value preferences to firm resources. The aim of the framework is to connect customer and resource-based strategies together. As a result of the analysis the authors reveal the most important resources in contrast to the customer value preferences.

For Those About to Tag

The recent evolution of mobile auto-identification technologies invites firms to connect to mobile work in altogether new ways. By strategically embedding “smart” devices, organizations involve individual subjects and real objects in their corporate information flows, and execute more and more business processes through such technologies as mobile Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID). The imminent path from mobility to pervasiveness focuses entirely on improving organizational performance measures and metrics of success. Work itself, and the dramatic changes these technologies introduce to the organization and to the role of the mobile worker are by and large ignored. The aim of this chapter is to unveil the key changes and challenges that emerge when mobile landscapes are “tagged”, and when mobile workers and mobile auto-identification technologies work side-by-side. The motivation for this chapter is to encourage thoughts that appreciate auto-identification technologies and their socio-technical impact on specific mobile work practices and on the nature of mobile work in general.

Business Models for Mobile Payment Service Provision and Enabling

A sizeable body of research on mobile payment evolved in recent years. Researchers analyzed success factors and acceptance criteria as well as strengths and weaknesses of different mobile payment service providers. This chapter explores business models for mobile payment service provision and mobile payment service enabling. While a mobile payment service provider offers a mobile payment procedure to end-users and merchants, a mobile payment service enabler targets on enabling other companies tooffer mobile payment services. The authors primary contribution is to demonstrate the applicability of a general mobile payment business model framework, which was proposed in prior research. In doing so, they analyze, as an example, the case of SEMOPS as a typical mobile service enabler. Representing any m-payment business model, the resulting framework enables researchers and practitioners for comprehensive analysis of existing and future models and provides a helpful tool for M-Payment business model engineering.

Bringing Secure Wireless Technology to the Bedside

Wireless technology has broad implications for the healthcare environment. Despite its promise, this new technology has raised questions about security and privacy of sensitive data that is prevalent in healthcare organizations. All healthcare organizations are governed by legislation and regulations, and the implementation of enterprise applications using new technology is comparatively more difficult than in other industries. Using a configuration-idiographic case-study approach, this study investigated challenges faced by two Canadian healthcare organizations. In addition to interviews with management and staff of the organizations, a walk-through was also conducted to observe and collect first-hand data of the implementation of wireless technology in the clinical environment. In the organizations under examination, it was found that wireless technology is being implemented gradually to augment the wired network. Problems associated with implementing wireless technology in these Canadian organizations are also discussed. Because of different standards in this technology, the two organizations are following different upgrade paths. Based on the data collected, best practices for secure wireless access in these organizations are proposed.

Finland

This chapter describes the Finnish mobile telecommunications industry trends and prospects. In addition, it presents two theoretical frameworks based on the Finnish companies’ experiences in the turbulent m-commerce markets. First, the internationalization framework is targeted to facilitate m-commerce actors to position themselves in the global telecom business. Second, the mobile media framework is targeted to facilitate analyses related to the emerging mobile media markets. Furthermore, the chapter presents five mini-cases of Finnish m-commerce companies and concludes with theoretical and managerial implications to m-commerce actors.

Mobile Code and Security Issues

Over the years computer systems have evolved from centralized monolithic computing devices supporting static applications, into client-server environments that allow complex forms of distributed computing. Throughout this evolution limited forms of code mobility have existed. The explosion in the use of the World Wide Web coupled with the rapid evolution of the platform independent programming languages has promoted the use of mobile code and at the same time raised some important security issues. This chapter introduces mobile code technology and discusses the related security issues. The first part of the chapter deals with the need for mobile codes and the various methods of categorizing them. One method of categorising the mobile code is based on code mobility. Different forms of code mobility like code on demand, remote evaluation and mobile agents are explained in detail. The other method is based on the type of code distributed. Various types of codes like Source Code, Intermediate Code, Platform-dependent Binary Code, Just-in-Time Compilation are explained. Mobile agents, as autonomously migrating software entities, present great challenges to the design and implementation of security mechanisms. The second part of this chapter deals with the security issues. These issues are broadly divided into code related issues and host related issues. Techniques like Sandboxing, Code signing and Proof carrying code are widely applied to protect the hosts. Execution tracing, Mobile cryptography, Obfuscated code, Co-Operating Agents are used to protect the code from harmful agents. The security mechanisms like language support for safety, OS level security and safety policies are discussed in the last section. In order to make the mobile code approach practical, it is essential to understand mobile code technology. Advanced and innovative solutions are to be developed to restrict the operations that mobile code can perform but without unduly restricting its functionality. It is also necessary to develop formal, extremely easy to use safety measures.