Mohammad Nazir Ahmad

The effects of transformational leadership and ERP system self-efficacy on ERP system usage

Purpose – During the past decade, there has been vast investment in Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system packages, in addition to a significant increase in the importance of acceptance by users of the ERP system regarding the success or failure of ERP implementation. The purpose of this paper is to identify the external factors which influence ERP system acceptance. The work is motivated by the realization that transformational leadership (TL) and ERP system self-efficacy are critical external factors that can affect ERP system acceptance. Design/methodology/approach – A framework has been developed from a study of literature in the field of TL, ERP system self-efficacy and the technology acceptance model (TAM). A survey utilizing a questionnaire was used to collect data and a total of 151 usable responses were analyzed by using the partial least squares method. Findings – The results of the study indicate that TL can either directly or indirectly influence perceived usefulness via the assimilation o...

Ontology-Based Knowledge Management for Enterprise Systems

Companies face the challenges of expanding their markets, improving products, services and processes, and exploiting intellectual capital in a dynamic network. Therefore, more companies are turning to an Enterprise System (ES). Knowledge management (KM) has also received considerable attention and is continuously gaining the interest of industry, enterprises, and academia. For ES, KM can provide support across the entire lifecycle, from selection and implementation to use. In addition, it is also recognised that an ontology is an appropriate methodology to accomplish a common consensus of communication, as well as to support a diversity of KM activities, such as knowledge repository, retrieval, sharing, and dissemination. This paper examines the role of ontology-based KM for ES (OKES) and investigates the possible integration of ontology-based KM and ES. The authors develop a taxonomy as a framework for understanding OKES research. In order to achieve the objective of this study, a systematic review of existing research was conducted. Based on a theoretical framework of the ES lifecycle, KM, KM for ES, ontology, and ontology-based KM, guided by the framework of study, a taxonomy for OKES is established.

A perdurant ontology for interoperating information systems based on interlocking institutional worlds

In this work we have developed a formal ontology for perdurants suitable for representing interlocking institutional worlds in the general area of interoperating information systems. The formal ontology is a specialization of the perdurant elements of the DOLCE and Bunge-Wand-Weber universal formal ontologies using an abstract material ontology based on the theory of speech acts embodied in a method of information systems design taken from the literature. The perdurant formal ontology is necessarily integrated with an endurant formal ontology. The one used is taken from the literature. Like the formal endurant ontology used, our formal perdurant ontology is represented as a UML profile, enabling us to re-use the vast structure of UML. The formal endurant ontology was able to re-use the UML Instances model, so did not have to make specific provision for individuals. Our formal perdurant ontology was not able to do something comparable, because UML does not have a concept of a static description of instances of perdurants. We therefore needed to develop an instances model, based on the dynamic behavior typical of database transaction management systems which must preserve the integrity of a database under conditions of catastrophic system failure. Finally, we looked at the question of how institutional worlds interlock using our formal ontology, and discovered that the process is far more complex than importing objects from one ontology into another.

Quality of service ontology languages for web services discovery: an overview and limitations

Web services discovery, ranking and selection based on QoS parameters is remained a hot topic for research since the start of the semantic web. Quality of service (QoS) plays an important role to resolve the issue of best service among the functional similar services. Semantic web relies on the ontologies for providing metadata schema and the vocabulary of concepts used in semantic annotation; resulting improved accuracy of web search. This is why; the success of semantic web depends on the proliferation of ontologies. Depending on the nature of the application, different companies may use different ontology languages and QoS models for web services selection which lead to the issue of heterogeneity. In this paper we have presented ontology evaluation criteria that if satisfied, can solve the problem of heterogeneity and interoperability. Moreover, ontology developers may also use these criteria to evaluate their developed ontology for the refinements. We have evaluated different ontologies in-order to know their strengths and limitations along with the new research directions.

The mediating role of knowledge integration in effect of leadership styles on enterprise systems success: The post-implementation stage

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to show empirically how knowledge management, particularly knowledge integration (KI), acts as a mediator between different leadership styles and Enterprise Systems (ES) success. It proposes a model of KI as a mediator between two leadership styles (the transformational and transactional leadership styles). The study also aims to expose the most relevant leadership styles to be practiced by leaders when managing the ES post-implementation stage. Design/methodology/approach – Valid data were collected from 263 survey respondents in Malaysian companies. The authors employed structural equation modelling and used the path modelling approach to investigate the underlying relationships between the variables. The authors then tested the mediating effects of KI by using the bootstrapping procedures proposed by Preacher and Hayes, which suits the path analysis method. Findings – The results provide empirical evidence on the relationships between the variables and on the role...

Ontology-Based Applications for Enterprise Systems and Knowledge Management

Throughout the past decade, the notion of ontologies has influenced research in many application areas including databases, information retrieval, electronic commerce, natural language processing, knowledge management, enterprise systems, systems analysis and design, the Web, and more.Ontology-Based Applications for Enterprise Systems and Knowledge Management provides an opportunity for readers to clearly understand the notion of ontology engineering and the practical aspects of this approach in the domains of two interest areas: Knowledge Management Systems and Enterprise Systems. A perfect reference for researchers, scholars, postgraduate students, and practitioners, this book aims to gather the recent advances and research findings of various topics in ontology use for these application areas.

Ontology-based service discovery framework for dynamic environments

With all the recent advancements in the electronic world, hardware is becoming smaller, cheaper and more powerful; while the software industry is moving towards service-oriented integration technologies. Hence, service oriented architecture is becoming a popular platform for the development of applications for distributed embedded real-time system (DERTS). With rapidly increasing diversity of services on the internet, new demands have been raised concerning the efficient discovery of heterogeneous device services in the dynamic environment of DERTS. Context-awareness principles have been widely studied for DERTS; hence, it can be used as an additional set of service selection criteria. However, in order to use context information effectively, it should be presented in an unambiguous way and the dynamic nature of the embedded and real-time systems should be considered. To address these challenges, the authors present a service discovery framework for DERTS which uses context-aware ontology of embedded and real-time systems and a semantic matching algorithm to facilitate the discovery of device services in embedded and real-time system environments. The proposed service discovery framework also considers the associated priorities with the requirements posed by the requester during the service discovery process.

A Study towards the Relation of Customer Relationship Management Customer Benefits and Customer Satisfaction

The purpose of this study is to investigate the efficacy of customer relationship management (CRM) benefits for customers in relation to customer satisfaction. A model has been developed and empirically tested through survey data collected from 150 customers of three Malaysian companies. The results indicate that the benefits of CRM for customers have had a significant positive effect on their satisfaction in marketing companies. Personalized service, responsiveness to customers needs, customer segmentation, customization of marketing, multichannel integration, time-saving and improving customer knowledge are the benefits that we proposed would affect customer satisfaction in order to significantly improve marketing performance. Additionally, the results reveal that all the benefits found, with the exception of time-saving, enhanced customer satisfaction. This paper contributes to the existing literature by incorporating the benefits of CRM for customers and the relationships of these benefits with their satisfaction in the proposed model.

Examining antecedents of knowledge-sharing factors on research supervision: An empirical study

The use of an effective supervision mechanism is crucial between a student and supervisor. The essential knowledge shared and transferred between these two parties must be observed and understood very well in order to ensure that students are produced at good level of quality for future professional knowledge workers. The aim of this study was to conduct an assessment of the impact of individual, organisational and technical factors on knowledge sharing in a research supervision domain. In order to achieve this aim, a specific research model was developed. This model was based on systematically analysing and extracting all the knowledge-sharing impact factors and then choosing the more iterative and adaptable ones, according to research supervision models. These factors categorized to individual, organizational and technological factors. To effectively evaluate the research model, a quantitative research method was adopted. Data was collected by a survey of 150 students from the Faculty of Computing at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia. The Smart PLS tool was used for data analysis. In sum, the results of this research show that the individual factor in the research supervision domain – namely, the ability of students to share knowledge – in addition to technological factors – specifically, IT systems – have the greatest impact on knowledge sharing in the supervision process. In addition, it was shown that organisational factors including the culture of the university, social networks, and supervisor support have a positive impact on knowledge sharing in research supervision. However, when compared with individual and technical factors, the effect of organisational factors on knowledge sharing in research supervision was not particularly strong in the case of this study. A positive relationship did not exist between the learning strategy and knowledge sharing in research supervision. This study is among the first of its kind to empirically examine the antecedent factors of knowledge sharing in the context of research supervision.

Ontology for Autonomous Mobile Robot System

In the dynamic environment of robots, the information of devices mounted on the robot may have alternative representations. Particularly, if the devices of the robot use different programming languages, operating platform and data management standards may restricts the ability of devices to interact with each other flawlessly. In order to handle such situations, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) can be used which can handle the complexity (different programming languages, operating platform and data standards) with the help of ontologies. Although the researchers working in the area of robots have achieved a big milestone in producing small, easily pluggable and energy-efficient sensors but still the research on the requirements like extensibility, correctness, modularity, relationship and activity monitoring is need to be researched in-order to achieve dynamicity and flexibility while managing heterogeneity complexity which restricts the ability of devices to interact with each other flawlessly. Therefore, for correct interaction among robot sensors and sharing of data between them, we have developed an robot ontology (OntAPIbot) for defining the formal specification of concepts in-order to reduce the heterogeneity and to facilitate the reasoning tools for correct knowledge interpretation and reuse.