Kevin K. Y. Kuan

Research on IT value: what we have done in Asia and Europe

European Journal of Information Systems (2007) 16, 196–201. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ejis.3000666 Introduction With trillions of U.S. dollars spending on information technology (IT) annually by organizations and individuals worldwide, what value IT can bring to the society is no doubt a big issue in research and practice. Surprisingly, not much has been done in this critical area, especially in Asia and Europe. One possible explanation is that IT value is such a broad term or concept that can encompass different things to different people. Another reason is that the information systems (IS) discipline in Asia and Europe is young compared to that in North America. Although with a tremendous growth in IS research in Asia, particularly in China, in the past decade or so (Chau et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2006), there is still a long way to catch up. The theme of the Ninth Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS 2005) is ‘IT and Value Creation’. It focuses on the roles, functions and impacts of information and communication technologies on creating sustainable value, which can be created by a number of innovative business computer applications ranging from efficient management information systems to innovative decision support or e-business technologies. This special section includes three papers that examine the issue from different perspectives: business adoption of B2B exchange, extended use of complex information systems by employees and use of innovative IT by customers in the retail industry. Before introducing these three papers, we would like to present a snapshot of IT value research done in Asia and Europe in the past decade. In this editorial, we first examine and compare IT value research in Asia and Europe. We chose to use papers published in the proceedings of two major information systems conferences in Asia and Europe, respectively, namely Pacific-Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) and European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS) as the subjects of the examination and comparison because they are the most representative IS conferences and thus provide a good snapshot of IS research undergoing in the regions. In the next section, we first provide a literature review on IT value research with the objective of ‘setting the stage’ of our subsequent data analysis. With Seddon et al.’s (1999) review article on ‘Dimensions of Information Systems Success’ as a basis, a taxonomy of IT value research is proposed. An examination of the papers published in the conference proceedings of PACIS (from 1993 to 2005) and ECIS (from 2000 to 2005) is then conducted by looking at the dimensions of IT value being studied, research methods, unit of analysis and type of data used, etc. Discussion on what and where we can go in terms of IT value research is then presented. We conclude with a brief description of the papers selected from PACIS 2005 for this special section.

Do Mobile Device Applications Affect Learning

Mobile devices (e.g., PDAs and smartphones) are increasingly emerging as part of daily life, particularly with university students. The City University of Hong Kong has embarked on a long-term program to develop and integrate mobile learning activities into the context of undergraduate courses. This paper reports on the development, introduction and evaluation of a portfolio of collaborative mobile learning applications. Results support convictions that intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to embrace mobile applications correlates with enhanced performance, albeit with constructive alignment of student learning interests as a moderator

The Effects of Moving Animation on Recall, Hedonic and Utilitarian Perceptions, and Attitude

An increasing number of firms are investing in moving animation to create more vivid and attractive Web sites. Animated contents are usually invisible to search engines or Web spiders, involve lengthier download time, and are inaccessible to less technology-savvy users who are not equipped with the necessary software or browser plug-ins or users who are wary of malicious Internet downloads. The development costs of animated Web sites are considerably higher too compared with static Web sites. Do the benefits provided by animation justify all of these potential weaknesses? We answer this question by studying the effects of moving animation on consumer responses toward a product. Using an exploratory laboratory experiment, we found that moving animation enhances product recall, perceived product values in terms of the hedonic and utilitarian dimensions, and attitude toward products that are high on the hedonic dimension. It does not, however, enhance consumer attitude toward products that are more ldquoutilitarianrdquo in nature. We draw related managerial implications from these findings.

A Semantically-Enriched Digital Portal for the Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage with Community Participation

Understanding our past can determine our ability to understand the present. Many people associate cultural heritage with the ancient past and history; however, cultural heritage should be seen as a continuous tradition that lives through daily practices. In this paper, we present the details of our research dealing with one aspect of Balinese culture, the Balinese traditional communication system (kulkul), undertaken in the Indonesian island of Bali. The central aim of our project was to document, organize, and preserve the relevant kulkul knowledge for the benefit of the Balinese community, and the younger generations in particular by designing and developing a digital portal as a dynamic repository. A basic ontology of key kulkul-related concepts and terms and their interrelationships that as part of our digital portal was developed to support the semantic searching and browsing of the online portal and related resources. Much of the content for the digital portal was acquired through community-based crowdsourcing and the informants came from the different geographical areas in Bali. Members from the community were invited to contribute their knowledge to enable the online digital portal to evolve into a living repository of Balinese cultural knowledge. The significant number of digital cultural resources uploaded and the substantial growth of the kulkul ontology by the community are indicators of the success of this research project. The prototype digital portal is implemented on the cloud to facilitate elastic growth and easy user access to the resources both to read and to add content. Finally, the digital portal was made available online and extensive evaluation was carried out based on responses from selected users drawn from community by letting them use and experience the digital portal in order to evaluate the ease of use and usefulness. The evaluation results suggest that, for the most part, the users perceived the digital portal to be relatively useful and easy to use.

Patient-centric implementation of an electronic medication management system at a tertiary hospital in Western Sydney

Background Traditional implementations of electronic medication management (EMM) systems have involved two common formats – a ‘big bang’ approach on the day of go-live, or a phased ward-by-ward approach over months. Objective To describe the patient-centric roll-out, a novel implementation model in converting from paper to EMM. Method This model iteratively converted a large tertiary teaching hospital to electronic from paper medication charts, commencing the roll-out in the emergency department (ED). The tenet of ‘one patient, one chart’ was maintained with new patients commenced on EMM, while existing inpatients were maintained on paper charts until their discharge. In the second week, all other intake points commenced patients on EMM, and in the third week, all remaining patients were manually converted to EMM. The implementation was assessed with training completion rates, staff satisfaction surveys, focus group interviews and incident logs. Results At go-live, 79% of doctors, 68% of nurses and 90% of pharmacists were trained in the EMM system. The ED converted to electronic prescribing within 24 hours; by day 20, all patients were on EMM. Two hundred and thirty issues were logged, none critical, of which 22 were escalated. Of the 51,063 medications administered, there were 13 EMM-related clinical incidents including three double dosing errors, none of which led to an adverse event or death. Overall, 77% of staff surveyed were satisfied with the EMM implementation. Conclusions The patient-centric roll-out model represents an innovative and safe approach with a single medication chart reducing transcription and improved medication safety for the patient and the organisation.

Multi-swarms Dynamic Convergence Optimization for object tracking

Swarm intelligence has been applied to many research projects in recent years, many scientists are working on developing the full potential of a self-organized and decentralized system to help solving complex problems. In image processing, it also demonstrates fast and accurate in searching solutions for trajectory clustering and precise object tracking. This paper is aim to introduce a novel multiple particle swarms with dynamic convergence approach for object tracking in complicated environment. Our new approach absorbs the advantages of other multi swarm algorithms to optimize the resources and process iteration. So it can provide more accurate and faster tracking result for both linear and non-linear movement pattern when compared to basic PSO and other PSO based algorithms such as inertia weight PSO and constriction factor PSO. In addition, multiple independent populations will not only inherit each of their own attributes weights through dynamic range convergence, but also influence by each others solution effects. The experiments have been conducted with different types of testing videos in real environment. The results examined with different types of moving pattern have demonstrated that the new method required less resources and iteration process and could have better tracking performance and scarcely lost target with diverse interferences.