Technology-Related Trust Issues in Inter-Organizational Business Relations

The emergence of inter-organizational system has facilitated easy and fast flow of information among the trading partners. This has affected the business relations among the trading parties involved. Though the inter-organizational systems have helped a lot in improving the business relations, the vulnerability and the virtual environment of such systems raise the issues of trust that may affect the long-term business relations. This chapter makes an attempt to empirically examine the relationship between the levels of assurance with regard to deployment and implementation of relevant technology tools in addressing the identified technology-related trust issues and ultimately enhancing the perceived level of trust in inter-organizational business relations. The empirical evidence presented in this paper is based on a survey of 106 Indian companies using inter-organizational systems for managing their business relations.

Strategic Metamorphoses of ICT Sector for Human Development in India

As Indian economy gets integrated to the global economy and strives to improve in terms of human development indicators, a special role exists for information and communication technologies (ICT) in this process. The strategic metamorphoses and the resultant expansion of ICT linked telecommunication services in India have favorably influenced the effort to accelerate the pace of human development by enabling equality in access to information, creation of employment, improving the quality of life, better livelihood opportunities in rural areas, growth of agriculture, impetus to business development, environmental management and many more. After the initiation of economic planning in India, telecom services were assumed to be natural monopoly and were provided by one entity without competition. The government launched ambitious ICT infrastructure initiatives, radically changing its communication policy framework. The resultant growth of ICT services in India has led to significant improvement in human development levels. It has led to a reduction in information asymmetry between the rich and the poor, improvement in telecom density and ICT accessibility in rural areas, fostering inclusive growth, providing better access to market information to people in remote and rural areas, facilitating technological leapfrogging, enhancing business networking and offering new opportunities from the perspective of human development.

Enhancing the Educational Experience of Calabrian Cultural Heritage

To achieve this goal, the chapter focuses on the use of 3D technologies, on virtual and augmented reality, with emphasis on the stereoscopic Virtual Theatre. These innovative tools support the creation of a global vision of the fragmentary archaeological Calabrian heritage, as well as the possibility to play with the virtual findings as in a videogame, by choosing what to explore and the contents to access. Moreover, these technologies exploit the entertaining components of the systems in order to provide personalized and interactive educational contents.

Reorganizing People in Customer Knowledge Management Change

The transition to knowledge-intensive customer-centric enterprise is important, but never easy. Reorganizing people is likely to face critical structural and cultural change issues related to people. Addressing these issues is essential for the continued success of customer-value-building services and products. In light of today’s competitive business environments and changing power of customers, organizations need to be able to deal with people-based issues in order to secure high quality customer service and long-life and profitable customer relationship. The chapter presents a recommended solution to deal with people change management in competitive business environments, viz. to ‘reorganize people’ in a customer-centric networked organization. ‘Reorganization of people’ is operationally defined by three sub-interventions: a) reconfiguring structure, b) reshaping culture, and c) rehabilitating people.

Digital Divide, Social Divide, Paradigmatic Divide

The digital divide is nothing else than the reflection of the social divide in the digital world. The use of ICT for human development does offer opportunities to reduce the social divide for individual beings or communities; yet there exists a series of obstacles to overcome. The very existence of an infrastructure for connectivity is only the first obstacle, although it often receives an exclusive focus, due to the lack of an holistic approach which gives an essential part to digital and information literacy. Telecommunications, hardware and software are predictable prerequisites; however, the true pillars of human-focused information societies are education, ethics, and participation, interacting together as a systemic process. As long as decision makers are not ready to consider these evidences, and keep on favoring a mere technological vision, we will suffer from the most dangerous divide in terms of impact: the paradigmatic divide. Any resemblance to characters, projects, or policies in real life is quite intentional.

National Culture and E-Government Readiness

Diffusion of information and communication technologies is a global phenomenon. In spite of rapid globalization there are considerable differences between nations in terms of the adoption and usage of new technologies. Several studies exploring causal factors including national cultures of information and communication technology adoption have been carried out. The focus of this article is slightly different from other studies in this area. Rather than concentrating on the individual information technology an overall e-Government readiness is the focus. This research conducted an analysis of the impact national culture has on e-Government readiness and its components for 62 countries. E-Government readiness assessment used in this study is based on the UN E-Government Survey 2008, while the national cultural dimensions were identified using Hofstede’s model of cultural differences. The research model and hypotheses were formed and tested using correlation and regression analysis. The findings indicate that worldwide e-Government readiness and its components are related to culture. The result has theoretical and practical implications.

FOSS Solutions for Community Development

The use of ICT solutions in developmental activities and the deployment of them in modern telecentres have been widely accepted phenomena. In this article, we examine the use of FOSS – Free/Open source software in ICT solutions and categorize them into two types: ‘FOSS in’ and ‘FOSS for’, in order to emphasize the difference between those solutions, where FOSS play a meager or symbolic role and those solutions that are specifically developed to address a community need. We discuss about our experience in developing a FOSS-based ICT solution that is specifically built to address the needs of a community information system. We illustrate our three-tiered multi-stakeholder model of development, deployment and usage. We also describe our experience in the process of development and pilot deployment of our solution in various locations of India, and emphasize on the synergies between our model and the FOSS mode of ICT solution development.

Enhancing Service Quality in Hospitals

Large organizations use multiple data sources, centralize processing in these organizations require analysis of huge database originating from various locations. Data mining association rules help perform exploration and analysis of large amounts of data to discover meaningful patterns which can facilitate effective decision-making. The objective of this article is to enhance service quality in a hospital using data mining. The improvement in service quality will help to create hygienic environment and enhance technical competence among staff members which will generate value to patients. A weighting model is proposed to identify valid rules among large number of forwarded rules from various data sources. This model is applied to rank the rules based on patient perceived service parameters in a hospital. Results show that this weighting model is efficient. The proposed model can be used effectively for determining the patient’s perspective on hospital services like technical competence, reliability and hygiene conditions under a distributed environment.

Users’ Perception of Internet Characteristics in the Academic Environment

This paper examines the characteristics of internet that motivate faculty members of Imam Muhammad Bin Saud University (IMSU) in Saudi Arabia to utilize the Internet in their research and instructional activities. The framework of the study was the attributes of innovations offered by Rogers. A modified instrument was adopted to collect the data and measure the attributes. The result revealed that the majority of IMSU faulty members used the Internet for research and academic activities twice a month or less, indicating a low Internet adoption rate. Multiple regression analysis showed that all attributes of innovation individually predicted Internet adoption. The combination of all attributes indicated the model could predict Internet adoption among faculty.

A Case Study of Information Technology Education and Economic Development in Rural Nigeria

This essay presents a case study of Information Technology (IT) education as a contributor to economic and human development in rural Nigeria. The case of Summit Computers suggests that for developing countries to benefit from advances in IT, the following factors are of great importance and can be enhanced by IT education initiatives: convenience, affordability, emphasis on participation and empowerment of local users, encouragement of entrepreneurship, and building awareness among potential users. Additionally, careful attention should be given to how IT training can meet local employment and other needs are important factors in rural communities in developing countries such as Nigeria.