Kamel Rouibah

Change management in concurrent engineering from a parameter perspective

Information and communication technologies (ICT) have altered the balance of cost between activities within a firm and activities between firms. Easier co-operation allows companies to focus on their core strengths, while forming relations with other firms to supply the other needed skills to bring a product to market. Design, in one firm or in a consortium, is iterative and does require change. The ability of companies to better manage engineering changes (ECs) during product development can decrease cost, shorten development time, and produce higher quality products.This paper concerns engineering change management (ECM) when product development involves more than one company. A review of ECM related papers finds a lack of those that address multi-company design efforts. This approach is based upon recent work in collaborative engineering, which uses elementary engineering decisions, captured as parameters, to drive the collaboration. The relationship between parameters determines the involvement of suppliers and engineering partners. This allows design partners to be informed early as to the impact of design changes. We describe the use of this approach in simultaneous ECM, its implementation within a product data management (PDM) system, and initial test results. We term this approach as intelligent because it is based upon knowledge captured in the design process itself.

A decomposed theory of reasoned action to explain intention to use Internet stock trading among Malaysian investors

This article studied factors influencing the intention to use Internet stock trading among investors in Malaysia. To achieve this objective, this study selected the decomposed theory of reasoned action as a theoretical basis to explain variation in intention to use. Structured questionnaires were used to collect data from 144 current and potential investors who are aware of Internet stock trading in Malayisa. Findings show that attitude and subjective norm have a direct positive relationship towards behavioral intention to use Internet stock trading. Attitude was significantly influenced by perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness whereas subjective norm was significantly influenced by injunctive norm and descriptive norm which were proposed as antecedents. In addition the results of the study could serve as a guideline for online stock broking organizations in understanding the factors and programs that need to be initiated to increase online stock trading among current and potential retail investors. As not much has been written on decomposed theory of reasoned action, particularly in Internet stock trading, this study adds to the literature of understanding intention to use a technology in a developing country.

PUZZLE: a concept and prototype for linking business intelligence to business strategy

Abstract Business intelligence (BI) is a strategic approach for systematically targeting, tracking, communicating and transforming relevant weak signs 1 into actionable information on which strategic decision-making is based. Despite the increasing importance of BI, there is little underlying theoretical work, which directly can guide the interpretation of ambiguous weak signs. This paper gives an insight into the issue through a new strategic business intelligence system called PUZZLE. We describe this system and validate it by designing a prototype, test the system using in-depth interviews, and hold learning sessions in order to further knowledge about BI. The main results from tests show that: interpreting weak signs is potentially important for senior managers, consultants, and researchers; interpretation can be achieved gradually by bringing the weak signs together using a tracking form based upon the concept of actor/theme/weak signs/enrichment /links; interpreting weak signs is a complex process of establishing links between the weak signs. Final results show that the individual cognitive process appears heuristic when interpreting weak signs. Implications for strategic management practice and research are addressed.

Effect of management support, training, and user involvement on system usage and satisfaction In Kuwait

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the organizational factors and human motivations affecting information systems and information technology (IS/IT) usage and users satisfaction in an Arabic country.Design/methodology/approach – The study develops a research model that links three organizational factors (top management support – TMS, availability of training, and users involvement) to IS/IT usage and end‐users satisfaction via the mediation of TAM beliefs (usefulness and ease‐of‐use) by 382 IS users. The model was examined through the LISREL.Findings – The results indicate that IS/IT usage and user satisfaction is largely influenced by perceived usefulness. Among the organizational factors, TMS was found to have the strongest effect on IS/IT usage and users satisfaction, followed by availability of training and user involvement.Research limitations/implications – This study focuses on perceptions of respondents from public organizations who have had high experience with IS/IT. These...

Social usage of instant messaging by individuals outside the workplace in Kuwait: A structural equation model

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to study factors that affect adults acceptance of instant messaging (IM) for social and entertainment purposes in an Arab countryDesign/methodology/approach – An expanded version of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was used to test the impact of four factors (subjective norms, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, and perceived enjoyment) and a new construct, curiosity about other people, on the level of IM usage by 191 adults in Kuwait. Survey questions from prior studies were adopted and customized, and the model analyzing using Structural Equation Model with LISREL.Findings – IM usage is a different type of technology usage than work‐related forms of ICT since it is employed for social and recreational usage. Unlike prior studies that employed TAM in a work‐related setting, perceived usefulness was not a significant antecedent of usage; however, perceived enjoyment, social norms, curiosity about other people, and perceived ease of use were all importa...

The fight against digital piracy: An experiment

With the increased reliance on the Internet, digital piracy is a hot topic that is receiving substantial interest. And while most studies concentrate on understanding piracy in developed countries, few studies have been done in developing countries. In order to fill in this gap, this study reports on an experiment to deter/prevent digital piracy behavior in an Arab and a Middle Eastern country. The study used an experiment where different treatments (effect of religion, law, and awareness) were applied to the samples. Results revealed that only the religion and awareness treatments contributed to a decline in digital piracy, and that awareness having the higher effect on the piracy intention. This study discusses the study results and implications for both research and practice.

The effects of perceived enjoyment and perceived risks on trust formation and intentions to use online payment systems

Electronic payments systems (EPS) still have a low adoption rate in Arabic countries.We study EPS in Kuwait using a trust-based model.We find customer trust and enjoyment influence Kuwait EPS adoption.We find risk has no influence on EPS adoption.Enjoyment, third-party seals, familiarity, trust propensity, and personal innovativeness positively influence trust. Although there is a large body of research on trust in e-commerce, a crucial gap is that extant studies have not examined the role of perceived enjoyment on trust in the presence of risk perception in Arab countries. In this paper, an online trust model is presented that exhibits the impact of four external factors (personal innovativeness, propensity to trust, familiarity, and presence of third-party seals) on the intention to use an online payment via the mediation of three endogenous variables (enjoyment, risk, and customer trust). The data was collected from Kuwait, an Arab country, with a mixed of data collection survey methods of 150 online questionnaires and 200 paper-based questionnaires. The data was then analyzed using partial least squares (PLS) regression. The findings revealed that customer trust and enjoyment are two important drivers of the online payment adoption, which neutralized risk perceptions. This study discusses these results as well as research and a managerial perspectives that could assist in enhancing online payment acceptance in Kuwait.

Requirement engineering elicitation methods: A Kuwaiti empirical study about familiarity, usage and perceived value

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the perceptions of 19 requirement engineering (RE) techniques in Kuwait in term of three criteria “awareness,” “use,” and “perceived value generated over past system development projects.” Also, this paper aims to examine possible relationships between these RE techniques and two information system development success factors.Design/methodology/approach – This paper develops a questionnaire and tests with a sample of respondents from 175 organizations in Kuwait.Findings – Results show that: Arab culture influence perception of RE techniques; most companies have good knowledge of different techniques; several different techniques for identifying and analyzing customer requirements are used; the most highly valued RE techniques are decision trees, goal oriented, prototyping, data flow diagram (DFD), and interviews; six techniques (tree analysis, role playing, unified modeling language, Kawakita Jiro method, flow charts, and Ishikawa) are found to have th...

The failure of mobile payment: evidence from quasi-experimentations

With the increase use of mobile phone and diffusion into peoples everyday life as trusted communication devices, businesses have recently begun exploring their potential as payment devices. While many mobile payments were introduced in different parts of the world, some of them were successful, and others failed to achieve their expected benefits. In this paper we conduct a quasi experiment with 175 potential users in Kuwait in order to shed light on the following two issues: Why do mobile payment services fail? And what do providers need to do to better persuade adopters to use the mobile service?

Identifying Priority Using an Importance-Performance Matrix Analysis (IPMA): The Case of Internet Banking in Malaysia

This study used the combined Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) as the theoretical underpinning to examine the adoption of Internet banking. Five factors (perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness, attitude, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control) were identified to model their impact on intention to adopt Internet banking individual bank customers in Malaysia. Survey questions from prior studies were adopted and customized to collect data. A total of 239 customers responded to the survey. Partial least Square (PLS) SmartPLS M2 Version 2.0 was used for data analysis. Perceived ease of use significantly influenced perceived usefulness but did not impact attitude. Perceived usefulness was positively related to attitude and also intention to use. Attitude and subjective norm were significant predictors of intention to use while perceived behavioral control was not significant. Further to that we conducted an Importance-Performance matrix analysis to determine priority variables to focus on for the implications to practitioners.