M.P. Gupta

E‐service quality model for Indian government portals: citizens' perspective

Purpose – E‐government implementation evolves through different stages of maturity, enforcing changes in strategies at each level. The transitions of service maturity phases pose continuous challenges to service providers in assessing the e‐service quality of web‐based services used in government. This study is conducted to propose a multi item scale for assessing the e‐service quality of government portals involving transactions.Design/methodology/approach – Factors influencing the e‐service quality of government portals were identified from an extensive review of research performed by academic scholars and practitioners. A questionnaire was designed based on a review and interviews with users of e‐government applications and was used to conduct a survey of fully operational portals. Responses were obtained and quantitative analyses were performed on the data to develop a scale. This scale can help in evaluating citizen perceived quality of e‐services.Findings – Seven constructs – i.e. citizen centricity...

An efficient statistical feature selection approach for classification of gene expression data

Classification of gene expression data plays a significant role in prediction and diagnosis of diseases. Gene expression data has a special characteristic that there is a mismatch in gene dimension as opposed to sample dimension. All genes do not contribute for efficient classification of samples. A robust feature selection algorithm is required to identify the important genes which help in classifying the samples efficiently. In order to select informative genes (features) based on relevance and redundancy characteristics, many feature selection algorithms have been introduced in the past. Most of the earlier algorithms require computationally expensive search strategy to find an optimal feature subset. Existing feature selection methods are also sensitive to the evaluation measures. The paper introduces a novel and efficient feature selection approach based on statistically defined effective range of features for every class termed as ERGS (Effective Range based Gene Selection). The basic principle behind ERGS is that higher weight is given to the feature that discriminates the classes clearly. Experimental results on well-known gene expression datasets illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach. Two popular classifiers viz. Nave Bayes Classifier (NBC) and Support Vector Machine (SVM) have been used for classification. The proposed feature selection algorithm can be helpful in ranking the genes and also is capable of identifying the most relevant genes responsible for diseases like leukemia, colon tumor, lung cancer, diffuse large B-cell lymphoma (DLBCL), prostate cancer.

Deciding the level of information systems outsourcing: Proposing a framework and validation with three Indian banks

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to suggest a framework that would guide the practicing manager to decide the degree of information systems (IS) outsourcing.Design/methodology/approach – The proposed framework has been derived from the findings of a previous empirical study and qualitative inputs. Analytical hierarchy process (AHP) is then used to apply the framework. The framework is finally validated in three India‐based banks.Findings – The proposed framework helps in creating a strategic alignment between the business strategy and information system strategy. The application of the framework shows the preference of managers towards high IS outsourcing. Strategic alignment and medium term impact emerge the important factors in IS outsourcing. The validity of the framework is proved in three banks.Research limitations/implications – The validation exercise has been done on a small sample due to resources constraints and a study involving a larger sample is desired. Further, it is advised to review...

Identifying factors of “organizational information security management”

Purpose – Despite many technically sophisticated solutions, managing information security has remained a persistent challenge for organizations. Emerging IT/ICT media have posed new security challenges to business information and information assets. It is felt that technical solutions alone are not sufficient to address the information security challenge. It has been argued that organizations also need to consider the management aspects of information security. Consequently, literature, especially in the last decade, has witnessed various scholarly works in this direction. Therefore, a synthesis exercise is required to bring clarity on categorizing the issues of organizational information security management (ISM) to take the research forward. The purpose of this paper is to identify management factors that address organizational information security challenges. Design/methodology/approach – Using a mix method approach, the paper adopts the qualitative (keyword analysis and experts’ opinion) and quantitat...

Identifying critical infrastructure sectors and their dependencies: An Indian scenario

Abstract Across the globe, critical infrastructures constantly face the risk of cyber and/or other attacks from hostile and malicious entities as well as damage inflicted by natural disasters. This paper seeks to identify the critical infrastructure sectors of a country, namely India, and to explore the dependencies existing among them. The research draws on the extant literature as well as expert opinion and judgments to identify the critical infrastructure sectors. Following this, the interpretive structural modeling (ISM) technique is employed to discover the relationships and dependencies existing among the identified critical infrastructure sectors. Next, cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis is used to categorize the critical infrastructure sectors into four sub-groups based on their driving power and dependence on other sectors. Policy implications for government entities and businesses in India are also discussed.

Deciding Information Systems (IS) Outsourcing: A Multi-Criteria Hierarchical Approach

Attracted by the desire to cut cost and improve performance continuously, managers across the continents are showing interest in outsourcing their Information Systems. Influenced by this global trend, Indian firms, e.g., Bharti Telecom, Ballarpur Industries, Bank of India and many others have followed the path of extensive outsourcing of their IS services. However, while there is optimism regarding the benefits of outsourcing, there are also concerns regarding security issues, technological obsolescence, vendor captivity, risk assessment in IS outsourcing relationship and so on which require serious consideration in deciding on IS outsourcing, Outsourcing is a complex decision process, which is the interplay of various internal as well as external environmental factors. The concerned manager has to factor various dimensions, both short term and long term. Strategic alignment of business and information technology dimensions influence IS outsourcing strategy. Further, outsourcing drivers would also influence the IS outsourcing decisions in any organization. The manager therefore needs to identify various factors and also measure the intensity of each factor influencing the outsourcing decision. In this paper, Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP)—that has been used extensively in complex decisions and situations where hierarchical structure in factors are involved in decision goals—has been applied for analysing the IS outsourcing decisions. The.key outcome of the study are as follows: High IS outsourcing is the preferred strategy over low and selective IS outsourcing strategy. Strategic alignment of business and information technology emerges as the most important factor followed by the medium-term impact of outsourcing in deciding the degree of IS outsourcing. Among the sub-factors, business strategy is the most important factor in deciding the IS outsourcing degree, and its role is maximum in high IS outsourcing option. The second most important decision element emerges to be outcome-based performance. Among the business drivers, focus on core operations comes out to be the most important outsourcing driver. While the illustration in this paper tries to cover broad factors, it gives flexibility to practitioners to account for different sub-factors under these factors. The application of AHP using these broad array of sub-factors would lead to a decision model and customized solutions for the IS outsourcing in the particular situations.

A novel approach for distance-based semi-supervised clustering using functional link neural network

Semi-supervised clustering is gaining importance these days since neither supervised nor unsupervised learning methods in a stand-alone manner provide satisfactory results. Existing semi-supervised clustering techniques are mostly based on pair-wise constraints, which could be misleading. These semi-supervised clustering algorithms also fail to address the problem of dealing with attributes having different weights. In most of the real-life applications, all attributes do not have equal importance and hence same weights cannot be assigned for each attribute. In this paper, a novel distance-based semi-supervised clustering algorithm has been proposed, which uses functional link neural network (FLNN) for finding weights for attributes with small amount of labeled data for further use in parametric Minkowski’s model for clustering. In FLNN, the nonlinearity is captured by enhancing the input using orthonormal basis functions. The effectiveness of the approach has been illustrated over a number of datasets taken from UCI machine learning repository. Comparative performance evaluation demonstrates that the proposed approach outperforms the existing semi-supervised clustering algorithms. The proposed approach has also been successfully used to cluster the crime locations and to find crime hot spots in India on the data provided by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB).

Impact of information systems outsourcing: a study of Indian banking sector

In recent years information system (IS) outsourcing is increasingly being explored as an option to get the better output from the IS infrastructure. However the results of IS outsourcing are mixed. This paper has tried to assess the impact of IS outsourcing in short, medium and long term. The study also has compared the impact of IS outsourcing according to the different degree of outsourcing. The study shows that there is significant improvement in short-term impact in terms of efficiency, service level and cost savings with the increase in degree of IS outsourcing. However, in long-term, impact of outsourcing may not be favourable at high degree of outsourcing.

A framework of intelligent decision support system for Indian police

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to introduce architecture of an Intelligent Decision Support System to fulfill the emerging responsibilities of law enforcement agencies. Design/methodology/approach – The proposed Intelligent Police System (IPS) is designed to meet the emerging requirements and provide information at all levels of decision making by introducing a multi-level structure of user interface and crime analysis model. The proposed framework of IPS is based on data mining and performance measurement techniques to extract useful information like crime hot spots, predict crime trends and rank police administration units on the basis of crime prevention measures. Findings – IPS has been implemented on actual Indian crime data provided by National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), which illustrates effectiveness and usefulness of the proposed system. IPS can play a vital role in improving outcome in the crime investigation, criminal detection and other major areas of functioning of police organizati...

Effect of organizational factors on interoperability adoption for Indian portals

Purpose – The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of organizational factors on the adoption of interoperability technology for Indian portals.Design/methodology/approach – This exploratory study was conducted through a survey questionnaire from 300 portals of government departments and public sector undertakings (PSUs) in India. Data were also collected from portals of Indian companies.Findings – The study finds that adoption of interoperability for Indian portals is highly associated with certain organizational factors. In addition, multiple regression analysis reveals that the functionalities of government portals in India are significantly related to four organizational factors.Practical implications – The research provides insights for government officials and practitioners to understand and improve the level of interoperability in government portals. The study also provides a 2 by 2 matrix framework that helps the government officials to focus on the relevant organizational factors.Orig...