Nurazean Maarop

Understanding the Need of Health Care Providers for Teleconsultation and Technological Attributes in Relation to The Acceptance of Teleconsultation in Malaysia: A Mixed Methods Study

The aim of this study was to explore the importance of service need along with perceived technology attributes in potentially influence the acceptance of teleconsultation. The study was conducted based on the concurrent triangulation design involving qualitative and quantitative study methods. These entailed interviews with key informants and questionnaires survey of health care providers who practiced in the participating hospitals in Malaysia. Thematic analysis involving iterative coding was conducted on qualitative data. Scale reliability test and hypothesis testing procedures were performed on quantitative data. Subsequently, both data were merged, compared and interpreted. In particular, this study utilized a qualitative priority such that a superior emphasis was placed on the qualitative method to demonstrate an overall understanding. Based on the responses of 20 key informants, there was a significant need for teleconsultation as a tool to extend health services to patients under constrained resources and critical conditions. Apparently, the latest attributes of teleconsultation technology have generally met users’ expectation but rather perceived as supportive facets in encouraging the usage. Concurrently, based on the survey engaging 72 health care providers, teleconsultation acceptance was statistically proven to be strongly associated with service need and not originated exclusively from the technological attributes. Additionally, the results of this study can be used to promote teleconsultation as an effective means in delivering better health services. Thus, the categories emerged from this study may be further revised and examined for explaining the acceptance of teleconsultation technology in other relevant contexts.

Novel Risk Assessment Method to Identify Information Security Threats in Cloud Computing Environment

Cloud computing model brought many technical and economic benefits, however, there are many security issues. Most of the common traditional information security risk assessment methods such as ISO27005, NIST SP800-30 and AS/NZS 4360 are not fit for the cloud computing environment. Therefore, this study applies medical research approach to assess the information security threats in the cloud computing environment. This study has been conducted as a retrospective cohort study and the collected data has been analyzed by using the survival analysis method. The study has been conducted on the software as a service (SaaS) environment that has more than one thousand and seven hundred cloud customers. The survival analysis method is used to measure the significance of the risk factor level. The information security threats have been categorized into twenty-two categories. This study has proven that the medical research approach can be used to assess the security risk assessment in cloud computing environment to overcome the weaknesses that accompany the usage of the traditional information security risk assessment methods in cloud computing environment.

Towards the Development of a Citizens’ Trust Model in Using Social Media for e-Government Services: The Context of Pakistan

The recent evolvements in social media attracted governments around the world to utilize its benefits for providing e-government services and rebuild their relationship with citizens’ through participation and engagement. However, lack of citizens’ trust is still a serious concern that discourages them to participate in these services. Majority of previous studies on relationship with people and government were conducted on e-government websites. Very few studies have attempted to investigate citizens’ trust factors in context of using social media for e-government services particularly in a developing country like Pakistan. Therefore, this study is designed to bridge this gap by identifying such factors and propose a model from multiple perspectives of citizens trust. The proposed model will assist government organizations in understanding factors that may influence citizens trust to participate in social media for e-government services.

A Systematic Literature Review of Augmented Reality Applications in Libraries

The Augmented Reality (AR) has existed for over five decades, but the growth and progress in the past few years has been exponentially increased and are getting more popular in recent years. Despite the importance and rapid growth of AR applications in a variety of fields, AR applications is not well known in a library setting. This paper aims to provide a systematic literature review (SLR) method to collect and review studies following a predefined procedure on AR application in a library setting. The review studies includes filtering relevant information of AR application from five databases to answer research questions. A total of 23 primary studies published between 2009 to 2017 were used in the analysis. Results from SLR shows that the most common categories of AR applications used in the libraries setting is reading materials and navigational.

Mobile payment framework for the unbanked Filipinos

One of the best methods to reach geographically remote and unbanked population is through mobile services. With the prevalent use of mobile phones, most parts of the ASEAN countries can be reached and this is a promising setting for mobile payment growth. One such country is the Philippines. This study conducted a quantitative research via online survey among the unbanked Filipinos to determine the factors that influence the intention to use mobile payment services. The motivation for this quest is the extremely low usage of mobile payment services reported by the World Bank Global Findex which indicated that only four percent of the adult population have an active mobile payment account. A new theoretical framework is suggested to study this phenomenon using adaptations of the UTAUT2.

Sustainability through Innovations Of Enterprise Architecture (EA) in Public Sector’s Management: Issues & Challenges

Innovations through Enterprise Architecture (EA) require a transformation in public sector’s management. EA has been identified as one of the prime initiatives towards public sector transformation. EA implementation is highly recommended to execute efficient and effective public service delivery. However, building upon several public sector agencies that had implemented these initiatives, EA implementation in Malaysian Public Sector (MPS) was reported as unfavourable. This study aims to identify related issues and challenges towards sustainability of EA implementation. A qualitative research approach was employed in this study. Semi structured interview was held involving five EA experts. From the analysis, six related issues such as (i) absence of the mandate from government to implement EA initiatives; (ii) improper EA governance leading to difficulty in managing EA implementation; (iii) absence of EA tool to maintain EA document; (iv) lack of EA awareness (v) lack of EA readiness and (vi) limited knowledge and skills on EA among the team were discerned in sustaining EA practices. With regard to the practical implication, this paper can serve as reference in EA implementation in the public sector.

Defense Mechanisms against Machine Learning Modeling Attacks on Strong Physical Unclonable Functions for IOT Authentication: A Review

Security component in IoT system are very crucial because the devices within the IoT system are exposed to numerous malicious attacks. Typical security components in IoT system performs authentication, authorization, message and content integrity check. Regarding authentication, it is normally performed using classical authentication scheme using crypto module. However, the utilization of the crypto module in IoT authentication is not feasible because of the distributed nature of the IoT system which complicates the message cipher and decipher process. Thus, the Physical Unclonable Function (PUF) is suggested to replace crypto module for IoT authentication because it only utilizes responses from set of challenges instead of cryptographic keys to authenticate devices. PUF can generate large number of challenge-response pairs (CRPs) which is good for authentication because the unpredictability is high. However, with the emergence of machine learning modeling, the CRPs now can be predicted through machine learning algorithms. Various defense mechanisms were proposed to counter machine learning modeling attacks (ML-MA). Although they were experimentally proven to be able to increase resiliency against ML-MA, they caused the generated responses to be instable and incurred high area overhead. Thus, there is a need to design the best defense mechanism which is not only resistant to ML-MA but also produces reliable responses and reduces area overhead. This paper presents an analysis on defense mechanisms against ML-MA on strong PUFs for IoT authentication.

Digital Forensic Challenges in the Cloud Computing Environment

The cloud computing model has been developed with promises to overcome the difficulties of other computing models. The low cost of computing resources, availability, location independence, and more focus on business objectives that this model promises are the most attractive features for companies. However, security issues are still the main obstacle that prevent widespread cloud computing adaptation. Digital forensics, a necessary process after any security incident, is faced with many challenges in the cloud computing environment. In this paper, we discuss the challenges digital forensics face in a cloud computing environment.

Skills Sets Towards Becoming Effective Data Scientists

The tsunami of data and information brings with it challenges in decision making to organisations especially so to the government sector. Decision making is vital in ensuring effective service delivery to constituents. Nowadays, Big Data Analytics (BDA) tools and software are readily available but what is lacking are the skills and competency of the personnel to handle and manage these data. The Government of Malaysia requires its IT officers to assume a more important role to extract data and turn into valuable information which is beneficial to operations and planning. However initial findings revealed that these IT officers are lacking in data scientist skills. Therefore, there is a need to propose a guideline on the direction towards acquirement of these skills to become data scientists. This paper presents the findings conducted recently via experts’ views using the Delphi technique, regarding data scientist skills required by the Government IT officers. The findings revealed 46 in-service skill sets which are deemed mandatory for IT officers to have, of which the top seven being analysis, data visualisation, data modelling, decision making, ethics, communication and basic database knowledge and skills. This data is helpful towards building a Data Scientist Competency Development Roadmap for the next five years as a stop gap measure before data scientists graduates are churned from universities.

Understanding Relationship Between Security Culture and Knowledge Management

Despite the widely recognized importance of information security as a vital asset in an organization, there has been lack of understanding of how organizations actually cultivate security culture amongst the employees in a particular environment. Based on previous researches, the vast majority of information security incidents are caused by human factor, and not by flawed technology. Knowledge has been highlighted as one important parameter of the human factor in information security. Previous literature has suggested the Knowledge Management (KM) approach as one of the approaches to implement information security management. However, the knowledge dimension of information security management in the healthcare industry has been neglected. The goal of this paper is to investigate the relationship between security culture and KM. Thus, a conceptual model has been proposed to describe the relationship. The findings suggest that security culture may have a positive relationship with knowledge creation, knowledge sharing, and knowledge use through security behaviour. The proposed conceptual model will be further evaluated with selected healthcare organizations in Malaysia.