Ho Geun Lee

Market process reengineering through electronic market systems: opportunities and challenges

Over the past few years, various electronic market systems have been introduced by market-making firms to improve transaction effectiveness and efficiency within their markets. Although successful implementation of electronic marketplaces may be found in several industries, some systems have failed or their penetration pace is slower than was projected, indicating that significant barriers remain. This paper analyzes the economic forces and barriers behind the electronic market adoptions from the perspective of market process reengineering. Four cases of electronic market adoptions--two successful and two failed--are used for this analysis. Economic benefits are examined by investigating how the market process innovation enabled by information technology (IT) reduces transaction costs and increases market efficiency. Adoption barriers are identified by analyzing transaction risks and resistance resulting from the reengineering. Successful deployment of electronic market systems requires taking into account these barriers along with the economic benefits of adoption. The paper presents suggestions based on these case studies, which are relevant to the analysis, design, and implementation of electronic market systems by market-making firms.

Impacts of the electronic marketplace on transaction cost and market structure

Electronic markets have become increasingly popular alternatives to traditional market forms over the last few years. This article explains how electronic markets can be used either to create new markets or to strengthen existing markets, and provides examples of the impact alternative electronic market applications can have on firm competitiveness and market structures. The central claim of this article is that it is necessary to analyze the impact of electronic market implementation on search, price discovery, and trade settlement in order to understand the impact of the electronic marketplace on firms and markets. Two forms of electronic marketplaces-electronic brokerage and electronic auction--are examined from the perspective of fundamental economic factors that influence total transactions costs and the efficiency of alternative market structures. Social and organizational barriers to successful adoption of electronic markets are also discussed.

Erratum to: Examining influencing factors of post-adoption usage of mobile internet: Focus on the user perception of supplier-side attributes

Key supplier-side factors that affect the usage level of mobile Internet were identified and the procedural mechanism among the independent and dependent variables was investigated. For this, a research model was introduced to describe associations among four external variables (access quality, service variety, cost rationality, and ease of use), an intermediate variable (usefulness) and a dependent variable (the usage level of mobile Internet). Through the on-line survey, data were gathered from actual mobile Internet users. Confirmatory factor analysis and path analysis were applied to test the overall integrity of the research model and of proposed hypotheses. All four external variables affected user perceptions on the usefulness of mobile Internet. Among them, service variety and cost rationality had a relatively larger influence on perceived usefulness. Perceived usefulness of the mobile Internet had a positive effect on its usage, confirming the important role of usefulness as a significant mediator between the four external variables and the dependent variable. Meanwhile, the cost rationality was the only external variable with direct influence on the MI usage. Theoretical and practical implications of the study results are discussed.

Electronic intermediaries: trust building and market differentiation

As electronic commerce becomes increasingly popular, new intermediaries are emerging and transforming marketing and distribution channels. Intermediaries in electronic marketplaces provide the IT and business infrastructure to facilitate the completion of commercial transactions over interorganizational computer networks. If electronic intermediary services are introduced to wholesale markets where qualities vary, the provision of IT alone cannot create reliable electronic marketplaces for traders who have no pre-established relationships. To build trust among market participants, electronic intermediaries should establish policies and processes that regulate responsibilities and duties of market participants and legitimate transactions. Institutional policies and processes reduce risks and help establish trust among market participants. This paper provides empirical evidence that trust building processes by electronic intermediaries can lend to concentration of electronic transactions on high quality products, thus differentiating electronic and traditional markets.

Ubiquitous Computing‐Driven Business Models: A Case of SK Telecom's Financial Services

We expect that one of the earliest and most successful applications of ubiquitous computing will evolve around financial services. From the mobile financial services offered by Koreas SK Telecom (SKT), we can catch a glimpse of emerging value networking many telcos may ultimately adopt not only to survive competition but also to sustain their long‐term growth. With the marketplace for mobile communications service approaching saturation, SKT has been looking into associating its infrastructure to content provision, platform/system integration and application service provision to open up new business opportunities. It understood that the fusion between its mobile network and financial services could result in value networks benefiting both service providers and service users. MONETA, as an electronic payment platform, became the cornerstone of SKTs initiative. However, due to its disruptive nature on existing business models, the company had to face significant technical and non‐technical challenges.

EDI-enabled channel transformation: extending business process redesign beyond the firm

This paper examines the relationship between process reengineering and channel performance for firms implementing electronic data interchange (EDI) ordering within the U.S. grocery industry. Both quantitative and qualitative data sources are combined to demonstrate that channel transformation (interorganizational reengineering) involving both technological innovation (EDI) and redesign of replenishment processes enables performance improvements more than an order of magnitude greater than implementation of EDI ordering alone. New replenishment processes, enabled by EDI, provide retailers with 50-100 percent higher inventory turns for products using continuous replenishment processes (CRP) relative to retailer performance using traditional ordering processes. Firms adopting EDI for ordering without reengineering ordering processes have failed to realize statistically significant improvements in inventory levels or stockouts. This demonstrates the potential for extending the business process reengineering concept to include the entire supply chain.

The Mediating Role of Psychological Contract Breach in is Outsourcing: Inter-Firm Governance Perspective

A substantial body of previous research on the client–vendor relationship has identified inter-organizational partnerships and formal contracts as important governance mechanisms for outsourcing performance. Successful IS development through outsourcing, however, may be more dependent on the people who execute the project in the field than on inter-firm relationships and agreed-upon formalities. Among individual-level variables, the special importance of psychological contracts has recently been noted in IS literature. This study investigates the mediating role of psychological contract breach between these two firm-level governance factors and outsourcing performance. By analyzing matched responses from project managers, vendor participants, and system users, we found that the effects of explicit legal contracts and partnership quality on outsourcing outcome are fully mediated by the clients perception of breach by the vendor. This study offers an extended theoretical perspective on the governance of firm-level collaboration, especially revealing that the benefits of formal contracts and inter-organizational partnerships eventually translate into satisfactory outsourcing outcomes for system users through each partys perception of breach on the individual level. Moreover, discrepancy was observed in this study between the client and vendor regarding the impact of legal contracts on individuals’ psychological contract while that of partnership was prominent in both sides.

Investigation of Factors That Have Impacts on Usage Increase and Decrease of Mobile Data Service

This study is to investigate factors that affect usage change in mobile data service (MDS). The central claim of this paper is that influencing forces of usage increase in MDS are different from those of usage decrease. We propose that information quality as the motivator (forces of usage increase) and system quality as the demotivator (forces of usage decrease) of MDS. A research model is proposed and subsequent hypotheses are empirically tested with partial least square (PLS) based on 478 responses from the users of mobile data service. We have found that information quality (as a motivator) is positively associated with usage increase in mobile data service, but system quality (as a demotivator) is not. Also, system quality is negatively associated with usage decrease, but information quality is not. Despite the recognized limitations, our study highlights the potential value of the two-factor theory in explaining user behaviors associated with mobile data services.

A graph-based approach for rule integrity and maintainability in expert system maintenance

Just as conventional software systems have maintenance costs far exceeding development costs, so too do rule-based expert systems. They are frequently developed by an incremental and iterative method, where knowledge and decision rules are extracted and added to the system in a piecemeal manner throughout system evolution. Thus, ensuring the correctness and consistency of the rule base (RB) becomes an important, though challenging task. However, most research work in expert systems has focused on building and validating rule bases, leaving the maintenance issue unexplored. We propose a graph-based approach, called the object classification model (OCM), as a methodology for RB maintenance. An experiment was conducted to compare the OCM with traditional RB maintenance methods. The results show that the OCM helps knowledge engineers retain rule-base integrity and, thus, increase rule-base maintainability.

Examining an extended duality perspective regarding success conditions of IT service

This work empirically examines the viability of the extended duality perspective.Information quality is an asymmetric bi-directional influencer.System quality is a pure inhibitor.The economic factor is more influential as a satisfier than as a dissatisfier.Self-efficacy is a pure enabler in the context of MDS usage. IS research predominantly presumes that the success factors of IT service have one-dimensional influences: the higher (or lower), the better. Sporadic arguments, however, have been made that, depending on the antecedent, such a monolithic premise may not sustainable. Despite the rich evidence of the dichotomous role of success factors on measured consequences in non-IS fields, especially in the marketing discipline, theoretical and empirical efforts to examine this duality have received limited attention in IS research. Especially, no previous IS study took the extended duality position in which the role of success conditions can be any of pure enabler, pure inhibitor, asymmetric bi-directional influencer or symmetric bi-directional influencer . The extended duality becomes the theoretical thesis of this research, setting it apart from the scant IS research that viewed duality through the rather simplified lens of statistical significance in each direction. To test the validity of the extended duality theory in the IT service context, cross-sectional survey data were gathered on post-adoption usage of mobile data services (or MDS), the most prevalent form of IT service. Frequently used success conditions of IT service - system quality, information quality, economic value and self-efficacy - are chosen as the explanatory variables. The analysis suggests that success conditions of IT service can have a highly divergent and diversified form of duality effects on measured outcomes. The findings have important practical and theoretical implications to practitioners and researchers.