Caroline Chan

Collaborative implementation of e‐business processes within the health‐care supply chain: the Monash Pharmacy Project

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into the implementation of e‐business processes in the procurement area of a healthcare supply chain when multiple stakeholders are involved.Design/methodology/approach – A single longitudinal case study spanning three years is presented using data collected from interviews, participant observation, and documentary analysis.Findings – This study identifies the lack of consistency and poor data quality as well as the global nature of suppliers as key issues in the e‐business implementation in the healthcare supply chain. It also points out the need for collaboration and trust for a successful implementation.Practical implications – This study provides practitioners with a useful guide to the various technology‐related, management, and business issues that can arise during the implementation of e‐business processes in the context of supply chains involving multiple stakeholders.Originality/value – This study is distinctive on two grounds: the longit...

Employability skills : student perceptions of an IS final year capstone subject

Abstract This paper reports on a qualitative study aimed at investigating whether Australian Information Systems (IS) students undertaking a team-based capstone subject with real clients believed the subject had enhanced their employability skills. This research is important because UK and Australian governments and industry are increasingly pressuring universities to focus more on developing employability skills. The paper makes a contribution to the literature since there are few empirical studies examining students’ perceptions of capstone subjects and none, to our knowledge, focusing on employability skills. Our study suggests that students believed the capstone subject did improve a broad range of employability skills and it also demonstrates the interrelated nature of these skills. We conjecture that the team-based, real-client model of capstone is particularly useful, compared to other capstone models, because it is especially effective at integrating the range of employability skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and self-management.

Sharing Political Content in Online Social Media: A Planned and Unplanned Behaviour Approach

Human’s decision making is not necessarily always planned; their unplanned behaviour—determined by natural personality traits—also contributes to the decision making process. In this study, we investigate factors related to planned and unplanned behaviour to understand why people share political content in online social media. Based on an online survey of 257 social media users, our results demonstrate that the factors representing both planned (i.e., perceived social recognition and altruistic motivation) and unplanned behaviour (i.e., extroversion and impulsiveness) affect people’s political content sharing behaviour. Our study understands that sharing political content is not like sharing other forms of content such as tourist attractions—the former can provoke serious punishment in some countries. Accordingly, trait impulsiveness is negatively associated with political content sharing behaviour. We also found that collective opinion moderates people’s planned behaviour, but not their unplanned behaviour. In other words, personality traits are unaffected by others’ opinions, but traits that humans can control can be shaped by others’.

Hospital-supplier integration and hospital performance: evidence from Saudi Arabia

The purpose of this paper is to develop a comprehensive conceptual model for the impact of hospital-supplier integration on the overall performance of healthcare organisations. It also investigates the moderating role of lean practices between hospital-supplier integration and hospital performance.,Data were collected from 498 public and private hospitals in Saudi Arabia using a survey. Structural equation modelling was used for data analysis.,The results indicate that hospital-supplier integration has a positive impact on the hospital performance. These effects are even more notable when adopting lean practices in the hospitals.,The data were collected from one developing country, namely Saudi Arabia. Thus, the findings may be relevant to the Saudi context but not those of other developing countries. Second, the data were collected from the hospitals’ end but not from the suppliers, so the latter’s perspectives on the themes covered here are not known. Future research may investigate the validity of the model in various developing countries whose healthcare systems have different characteristics, and the relationships between hospitals and their suppliers may follow different governance models.,The developed model and results will help hospitals in the Saudi health system to make better decisions on managing their logistics and supply partners.,This study extends the current research by developing a model that highlights the impact of hospital-supplier integration on the overall performance of healthcare organisations and tests this model to confirm its validity. To the authors’ knowledge, this study would be one of the first that uses both lean thinking and relational view of competitive advantage theory combined to examine the moderating role of lean practices on the inter-organisational relationships in Saudi Arabia.

How signaling mechanisms reduce “lemons” from online group buying (OGB) markets? A study of China

A major transformation in retail logistics over the few years is backed by enormous improvements in internet technologies. It is now easy for e-retailers to entertain delivery progression, or consumers can share use-experience with future customers and thereby reducing information asymmetry. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of different signals on consumer behavior in the presence of information asymmetry, in the context of online group buying (OGB) markets in China.,Based on the lemon market theory (LMT) and signaling theory, the study develops a research model of the OGB consumers’ context in China, which is validated using data from an online survey. A total of 528 responses are used for data analysis applying structural equation modeling technique.,The findings of the study show that perceived vendor quality (PVQ) and perceived product quality (PPQ) have significantly positive effects on intention to purchase from OGB websites. PVQ is associated with perceived reputation and perceived trustworthiness (PT) of vendor, and the determinants of PPQ are quality assurance information of products, and information about mer-chants. Further, PT has a mediating effect, while asymmetry of information has a moderating effect.,The research model is valid as a generic OGB model that can be investigated in other contexts to understand the generalizability of the findings. Future research is needed to incorporate additional relevant factors (e.g. price, advertising activity/investments) that may help increase the acceptability of the model to a wide range of e-commerce contexts. Two of the control variables (gender and prior internet experience) were found to be significant; this could be further examined in future studies to determine the relative impact on each causal relationship.,Whereas prior studies in the domain of consumer service proposed different signaling mechanisms that were believed to eliminate information asymmetry from a market, the study sheds light on the effectiveness of the signals in the OGB context. This is a unique effort that applies and extends LMT and signaling theory in OGB context by theorizing the associated dimensions and their causal effects.

Institutional forces on Australian halal meat supply chain (AHMSC) operations

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of institutional forces in shaping the operations of halal meat supply chain in Australia, one of the world’s largest producer and exporter of halal meat. This research examines how the halal meat production requirements are fulfilled and maintained throughout the supply chain in a non-Muslim majority country. Design/methodology/approach The research employs a single-case study approach and uses semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection. It considers the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in the Australian halal meat supply chain (AHMSC). Thirty-one participants have participated in this research. Findings The findings show that institutional forces, especially which come through coercive forces, do affect and shape the overall operations of the AHMSC in particularly the way the stakeholders act within the supply chain, particularly in their role in ensuring the protection of halal status, or halal integrity of ...

The development and validation of a two-staged adoption model of RFID technology in livestock businesses

Grounded on the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework, the purpose of this paper is to develop a two-stage model of radio frequency identification (RFID) adoption in livestock businesses. RFID adoption is divided into two stages, acceptance and extension. It is argued that RFID adoption in livestock businesses is influenced by technological (interoperability, technology readiness), organizational (readiness, market scope), and environmental (competitive market pressure, data inconsistency) factors.,From a qualitative field study, along with the support of existing literature, the authors developed a research model, which was then validated with survey data of 318 livestock businesses in Australia. Data analysis used partial least squares structural equation modeling.,Empirical results showed that interoperability, organizational readiness, and competitive market pressure, and data inconsistency significantly influence acceptance of RFID technology in livestock businesses. In addition, the extended use of RFID is determined mainly by interoperability, technology readiness, organizational market scope, and data inconsistency. The results suggested differential effect of data inconsistency– it had a negative influence on RFID acceptance but a positive impact on the extent of its use.,This is one of the first studies to examine RFID adoption as a two-stage process. The theoretical basis was based on TOE framework and the factors were developed from a field study. The results of this study will provide insights for different livestock industry including technologists, farm managers, and market players.

Predicting People’s Intention Towards Sharing Political Contents in Social Media: The Moderating Effect of Collective Opinion

The purpose of this study is to establish and examine a model explaining sharing of political content in social media. From individuals’ perspective, this study identifies two personal (i.e., altruism and social recognition) and two content related attributes (i.e., perceived truthfulness and value) that can directly affect sharing intention of political contents in social media. Moreover, the proposed direct effects are arguably contingent upon ‘collective opinion’. The empirical results support all the hypotheses except the moderating effect of collective opinion between perceived value and intention. The implications of the findings and future research directions are also discussed.

Privacy-enabled mobile-health (mHealth)-based diabetic solution

Diabetes is one of the leading chronic diseases affecting the lives of millions globally and early detection and treatment of this disease can serve to improve the quality of life for patients as well as suspend further health complications arising from diabetes. Continuous Glucose Monitors (CGM) and Insulin Pumps (IP) have been widely deployed to monitor the sugar levels in the blood stream and inject appropriate amounts of insulin to compensate for the underperforming pancreas functions of the patients’ bodies and thereby may provide appropriate treatment solutions for many diabetic sufferers. With the invention and deployment of Smartphones, the quality and performance associated with treating diabetes has reached new heights, however the privacy and security of mobile-based diabetic systems remain in ongoing challenges. This paper aims to focus on the privacy and security challenges of Mobile-Health (mHealth)-based Diabetic solutions.

Participation and Engagement in Inter-organizational Groups: Synthesizing Social Network Analysis with Ethnography to Evaluate Social Capital

A network ethnography methodology was developed to understand and explain the influence of social capital on social network structures. This approach was applied to an inter-organizational technology cooperation group to identify causes of low group participation and engagement and opportunities to increase those factors. A cluster of key actors at the core of the group was found to hold the majority of the social capital, which is viewed as both a current constraint and a future opportunity. The methodology is evaluated with a view continuing its development.