Helen Hasan

Toward a Model for the Acceptance of Internet Banking in Developing Countries

The technology acceptance model (TAM) has been used in much of the research into technology diffusion conducted in the United States and other developed Western countries. There is, however, no empirical evidence that information-technology acceptance models established in developed countries can apply equally well to less-developed countries without some modification to account for the different context. This article questions the appropriateness of the traditional TAM model for the study of e-commerce in a developing country. It discusses the literature and presents the preliminary results of an investigation into the penetration of Internet banking in Jordan, a strategic developing country of the Middle East. The research results are used to suggest and evaluate modifications to the TAM to make it more relevant for research on technological acceptance in less-developed and developing countries.

Strategic management of electronic commerce: an adaptation of the balanced scorecard

The balanced scorecard is a formal management technique that is built on the premise that measurement is a prerequisite to strategic management. A broad range of business goals can be incorporated in the scorecard and realistic performance targets can be aligned with business strategies. Electronic commerce is rapidly becoming concerned with the many different ways organisations do business and is therefore an area of strategic concern to organisations. A case study of the implementation of the balanced scorecard in a public utility will be analysed to suggest how the basic concepts and philosophy of the balanced scorecard can be retained in its adaptation to the strategic management of electronic commerce.

The Wiki: an environment to revolutionise employees' interaction with corporate knowledge

Some corporations have adopted a Wiki on their Intranets for employees to collectively store, edit and access work-related material such as reports, best-practice features, and documents. As such collaborative software moves from the social to the corporate arena, it is bound to challenge management authority, engaging the knowledge worker in a more participatory knowledge capability and environment. This paper explores the implication that this revolution has for the interaction of corporate users with technology that will lead to a profound change in organisational culture.

Support for the sense-making activity of managers

Abstract The knowledge management literature has focussed on the creation and capture of organisational knowledge, but little attention has been paid to the ways in which senior managers make sense of, and use, this knowledge for decision making. This paper describes a new approach to the study of this problem using the cultural-historical activity theory. This theory takes activity, mediated by tools and the community, as the basic component in purposeful human work. A consequence of using this theory is the recognition of the pivotal role of the sense-making activity in linking the processes of knowledge management and strategic decision-making.

Green IT: A Matter of Business and Information Systems Engineering?

This panel discusses the impact of Green IT on information systems and how information systems can meet environmental challenges and ensure sustainability. We wish to highlight the role of green business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of IS in order to create an environmentally sustainable society. The management of business processes has typically been thought of in terms of business improvement alongside the dimensions time, cost, quality, or flexibility – the so-called ‘devil’s quadrangle’. Contemporary organizations, however, increasingly become aware of the need to create more sustainable, IT-enabled business processes that are also successful in terms of their economic, ecological, as well as social impact. Exemplary ecological key performance indicators that increasingly find their way into the agenda of managers include carbon emissions, data center energy, or renewable energy consumption (SAP 2010). The key challenge, therefore, is to extend the devil’s quadrangle to a devil’s pentagon, including sustainability as an important fifth dimension in process change.

The mediating role of technology in making sense of information in a knowledge‐intensive industry

This article contributes to the understanding of the means by which managers make sense of the huge amount of information that comes to them through various technological systems. The story is told of a six-year study of projects designed to support management in a university during a period when it was changing from a traditional public knowledge provider to a modern market-driven business. The results of the study have enabled the author to compare the effectiveness of different technological solutions to the problems of information and knowledge management in organizations. Copyright

Cocreating Corporate Knowledge with a Wiki

Wikis have a growing reputation on the open Internet for producing evolving stores of shared knowledge. However, such democratic systems are often treated with suspicion within corporations for management, legal, social, and other reasons. This article describes a field study of a corporate Wiki that has been developed to capture, and make available, organisational knowledge in a large manufacturing company as an initiative of their Knowledge Management (KM) program. As this approach to KM is a controversial and rapidly changing phenomenon, a Q Methodology research approach was selected to uncover employees’ subjective attitudes to the Wiki. Activity Theory was used to provide a deeper interpretation of the findings of the Q-study. The results are enabling the firm to more fully exploit the potential of the Wiki as a ubiquitous tool for successful tacit and explicit knowledge management as more employees are encouraged to participate in a process of cocreating the store of corporate knowledge. The article also demonstrates how meaningful and rigorous research on this new democratic direction of corporate KM should continue.

Management styles and performance: a knowledge space framework

The selection of an appropriate style for a knowledge management initiative for the company is recognized as a dilemma for most managers who have an interest in the knowledge asset and its applications. Innovation is an important part of organizational performance and a company’s innovative capacity may be dependent upon its ability to take advantage of its knowledge assets. It is therefore critical that there is compatibility between the firm’s knowledge management approach and the style that executive managers adopt for managing their knowledge assets in order to achieve the required optimum performance in their organization. In this paper the role of the knowledge management styles on organizational performance will be examined and understood through a conceptual model based on a k‐space framework.

An activity‐theory analysis of corporate wikis

Purpose – Wiki technologies, which are popular in social settings, are beginning to contribute to more flexible and participatory approaches to the exploitation of knowledge in corporate settings. Through the lens of activity theory, this paper aims to investigate contentious challenges to organizational activities that may be associated with the introduction of corporate wikis, in particular the potential democratization of knowledge work.Design/methodology/approach – From a study of several cases of corporate wiki adoption, this paper presents and interprets two representative cases sampled to provide more generalized results. Qualitative data were collected through semi‐structured interviews and observation. The analysis followed a systematic process of data reduction, display, and rich interpretation using the concepts of activity theory.Findings – This research provides new understandings of the undervalued activities of knowledge workers, their challenges as wiki users and resulting implications for...

Social and commercial sustainability of regional web-based communities

New information and communications technologies have disrupted many traditional forms of community but enabled the emergence of new ones. This paper examines pertinent characteristics of communities, before describing three case studies of commercially operated web-based communities. The research demonstrates the social and commercial value of the concept of community.