Houn-Gee Chen

E‐commerce Web site design: strategies and models

The rapid adoption of the Web as a commercial medium has caused firms to experiment with innovative ways of doing business. Those firms that effectively market themselves on the Web have a distinct advantage. This paper presents two e‐commerce Web site design strategies and 12 e‐commerce models for gaining that advantage.

The Relative Influence of IS Project Implementation Policies and Project Leadership on Eventual Outcomes

Project leadership and a favorable development environment both are important to the successful delivery of an information system (IS). One issue that confronts organizations is where the responsibility for creating a positive environment lies. Should the project manager be responsible for building the climate to suit the needs of the project team, or should the organization provide the climate? Data from a survey of Project Management Institute members involved with IS projects indicates that the project managers performance is a better predictor of project outcome, but preproject partnering and software implementation policies directly relate to the project managers performance.

The impact of financial services quality and fairness on customer satisfaction

Purpose – Customer satisfaction in the banking industry has long been measured as a function of service quality by using a variation of the SERVQUAL instrument. The purpose of this paper is to build a broader understanding of the determinants of customer satisfaction throughout the financial services industry by incorporating the perceptions of fairness in service delivery (FAIRSERV) and outlining why and how FAIRSERV is important to customer satisfaction.Design/methodology/approach – The authors conduct a cross‐sectional questionnaire survey, including samples of 420 customers from the financial services industry in Taiwan. PLS‐Graph is used to evaluate the measures of reliability as well as validities, and to test the hypotheses.Findings – The results show that fair service not only has a significant impact on customer satisfaction, but also plays a role equivalent to service quality in determining customers’ trust and perceived value, which in turn lead to customer satisfaction.Research limitations/imp...

Service fairness and customer satisfaction in internet banking: Exploring the mediating effects of trust and customer value

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to explore and empirically test fairness in predicting online customer satisfaction in the internet banking context. The paper also aims to further explore the mechanism through which fairness influences customer satisfaction online, i.e. identifying the mediators.Design/methodology/approach – A survey is used to validate a research model based on equity theory and relationship marketing theory that incorporates fairness, trust, perceived value and customer satisfaction. A total of 331 surveys were analyzed using Partial Least Square.Findings – In internet banking, fairness that includes distributive fairness, procedural fairness and informational fairness is positively related to customer satisfaction. Trust is identified as the key mediator of fairness to customer satisfaction.Research limitations/implications – In an online context, where human interactions are replaced by graphic user interfaces, fairness still plays an important role in customer satisfaction. Fu...

The impacts of user review on software responsiveness: Moderating requirements uncertainty

Rapidly changing business environments and evolving processes increase the uncertainties in IS development. To produce a high-quality system that responds to user needs is challenging. We attempted to determine whether user reviews during the development process could reduce uncertainties and improve the product. Technology structuration theory indicated that users, as actors participating in reviews during the development of a system, could help reduce uncertainty in the organizational requirements and thus improve the software product. A survey of system developers indicated that user requirements uncertainty had a direct, negative effect on software responsiveness but that user review, serving as a moderator, could reduce this effect.

Online privacy control via anonymity and pseudonym: Cross-cultural implications

Privacys exact nature needs to reflect the contemporary view of a society. A growing number of online users demand the protection of their personal privacy via anonymity and pseudonym. The efficacy of these two privacy controls in different online environments is unknown. This study applies social psychology theories to explore the relationship between these personal sentiments—authoritative personality, empathy, fear of negative evaluation, self-esteem, and motives of online privacy rights. We conducted a quasi-experiment by manipulating four online environments (personal e-mail exchange, members-only newsgroup, public newsgroup, and online chat room), and three user identification modes (real name, anonymity and pseudonym). More than 600 subjects from the USA and Taiwan participated in the experimental study. The results of path analysis confirm the effects of some personal sentiments on the motives of online privacy rights. The study concludes with theoretical and practical implications for the roles of privacy in the online society.

Closing the user and provider service quality gap

A method for measuring service quality that includes both the user and IS service provider perspectives.

Communication skills of IS providers: an expectation gap analysis from three stakeholder perspectives

Communication skills are crucial to the successful completion of an information system (IS) project. The ability to interact with all potential stakeholders in an organization, to clearly document requirements, and to effectively express ideas has long been recognized by researchers and practitioners as critical success factors. This study examines how communication skills of IS professionals during a development project are viewed by three different stakeholders. Specifically, each of three stakeholder groups is examined to determine the extent to which a gap between expectations and perceived performance leads to lower satisfaction of the system of the users, lower perceived job performance by IS managers, or less career satisfaction for the IS professionals. A matched survey indicates that user satisfaction and job performance ratings by managers are related to a perceived failure to meet expectations, but that IS professionals do not relate career satisfaction directly to a lack in these skills. Organizations looking for success in the IS function must take steps to improve the communication skills of the IS professionals to the level expected by other stakeholders.

The information requirements of total quality management

This article is divided into two main sections. In the first section, we argue that total quality management (TQM) implementation necessitates reliance on substantially more information in the design, production and service activities of firms. In the second section, we present a blueprint of TQM information requirements using data flow diagramming and suggest changes that occur in system usage within the three main organizational functions: planning organizational activities, making products and the selling of products. The major contribution of the paper is in presenting evidence, albeit anecdotal, from organizations at the forefront of TQM practice, that TQM is an information-intensive management system, and then developing a model for the information requirements in TQM.

The Critical Issues about Deploying RFID in Healthcare Industry by Service Perspective

Although the Hospital Information Systems (HIS) have been rapidly deployed in hospital and clinical management, there are still some obstacles existed in integrating object flow and information flow within HIS architecture. Deploying Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) technology could provide advantages indentifying, tracking and tracing objects to provide high medical quality service and promote value-added operation efficiency. Taiwan government has heavily advocated and even taken the initiates for the RFID deployment in healthcare industry. Over years, there are hospitals have deployed pilot projects with an intent to verify and evaluate the potential of RFID applications in healthcare service. However, some of the pilot sites were terminated due to resource shortage; some manages to more to the next phases. Case study methodology was applied in this study by interviewing ten experts who have actively participated in different projects. The results indicate that the critical key factors on RFID deployment in healthcare applications are not only technological concern, but also the value-added service perspective on the technology, in particular the value proposition on RFID adoption, diffusion and system integration.