Rayed AlGhamdi

Factors Influencing E-Commerce Adoption by Retailers in Saudi-Arabia: A Qualitative Analysis

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a study researching the diffusion and the adoption of online retailing in Saudi Arabia. It reports new research that identifies and explores the key issues that positively and negatively influence retailers in Saudi Arabia regarding the adoption of electronic commerce. Retailers in Saudi Arabia have been reserved in their adoption of electronically delivered aspects of their business. Despite the fact that Saudi Arabia has the largest and fastest growth of ICT marketplaces in the Arab region, e‐commerce activities are not progressing at the same speed. Only a tiny number of Saudi commercial organizations, mostly medium and large companies from the manufacturing sector, are involved in e‐commerce implementation. Based on qualitative data, collected by conducting interviews with a sample population of retail sector decision makers in Saudi Arabia, both positive and negative issues influencing retailer adoption of electronic retailing systems in Saudi Arabia are identified. A number of impediments which include cultural, business and technical issues were reported. Facilitating factors include access to educational programs and awareness building of e‐commerce, government support and assistance for e‐commerce, trustworthy and secure online payment options, developing strong ICT infrastructure, and provision of sample e‐commerce software to trial. While literature reveals that government promotion has had limited effects on the diffusion of e‐commerce in most countries, this study significantly indicates government promotion and support as a key driver to online retailing in KSA.

EGovernment Stage Model: Evaluating the Rate of Web Development Progress of Government Websites in Saudi Arabia

This paper contributes to the issue of eGovernment implementation in Saudi Arabia by discussing the current situation of ministry websites. It evaluates the rate of web development progress of vital government websites in Saudi Arabia using the eGovernment stage model. In 2010, Saudi Arabia ranked 58 th in the world and 4 th in the Gulf region in eGovernment readiness according to United Nations reports. In particular, Saudi Arabia has ranked 75 th worldwide for its online service index and its components compared to the neighbouring Gulf country of Bahrain, which was ranked 8 th for the same index. While this is still modest in relation to the Saudi governments expectation concerning its vision for eGovernment implementation for 2010, and the results achieved by the neighbouring Gulf countries such as Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates on the eGovernment index, the Saudi government has endeavoured to meet the public needs concerning eGovernment and carry out the implementation of eGovernment properly. Governments may heed the importance of actively launching official government websites - the focus of this study - as the main portals for delivering their online services to all the different categories of eGovernment (including G2C, G2B, and G2G). However, certain Saudi ministries have not given due attention to this vital issue. This is evidenced by the fact that some of their websites are not fully developed or do not yet exist, which clearly impedes that particular ministry from appropriately delivering eServices.

Strategic government initiatives to promote diffusion of online retailing in Saudi Arabia

This paper presents findings from a study of factors affecting the rate of diffusion and adoption of online retailing in Saudi Arabia. In general, Saudi retailers have not responded actively to the global growth of online retailing. Accordingly, this research was conducted to find the key factors involved in this phenomenon. A major finding presented here, is that both buyers and sellers emphasize the need for government involvement to support and promote development of online commerce. Particularly, it indicates the need for strategic government initiatives to provide regulation, legislation, education, and trusted infrastructure for secure payment and delivery. Saudi Arabia presents a unique cultural, technological and political context for the development of e-commerce. We highlight the particular motivators and potential benefits of Saudi government involvement in e-commerce development. A new model for formulating roles and strategic government initiatives to support the successful diffusion of online retailing in KSA is presented and discussed. This will be of interest to any following the development of e-commerce and the information economy in the Arab nations.

Self-schedule and self-distributive MAC scheduling algorithms for next-generation sensor networks

The distributive nature of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) poses great challenges for the design of distributive scheduling to maximize network life and spatial reuse of time slot with minimum frame length. Most of the existing scheduling techniques are either centralized or contentional. The existing techniques cannot efficiently adapt to the dynamic wireless environment. In this paper, self-scheduled and distributed MAC (SSD-MAC) and self-distributive MAC (SD-MAC) medium access control algorithms are proposed to reduce the complexity and variety of scheduling problems. The proposed algorithms do not require any synchronization and can effectively adapt to dynamic topology changes without incurring global communication overhead. According to the proposed algorithms, each node maps a conflict-free time slot for itself up to 2-hop neighboring nodes. Consequently, each node successfully schedules a unique time slot for itself in a heuristic manner based on its local information. Moreover, the proposed algorithms also guarantee conflict-free edge coloring because all the incident edges to a single node are assigned to colors in such a way that none of the edges should have the same color. It has been demonstrated that, with regard to communication overhead, energy consumption and execution time through simulation proposed that algorithms outperform existing distributed randomized scheduling algorithm (DRAND).

Wheel of B2C E-commerce Development in Saudi Arabia

Online retailing (a model of B2C e-commerce) is growing world-wide, with companies in many countries showing increased sales and productivity as a result. It has great potential within the global economy. This paper looks at the current status of online retailing in Saudi Arabia, with particular focus on what inhibits or enables both the customers and retailers. It also analyses the status of Government involvement and proposes a layered model, known as the “Wheel of Online Retailing” which illustrates how Government intervention can benefit the e-commerce in Saudi Arabia.

Investigate the use of Anchor-Text and of Query-Document Similarity Scores to Predict the Performance of Search Engine

Query difficulty prediction aims to estimate, in advance, whether the answers returned by search engines in response to a query are likely to be useful. This paper proposes new predictors based upon the similarity between the query and answer documents, as calculated by the three different models. It examined the use of anchor text-based document surrogates, and how their similarity to queries can be used to estimate query difficulty. It evaluated the performance of the predictors based on 1) the correlation between the average precision (AP), 2) the precision at 10 (P@10) of the full text retrieved results, 3) a similarity score of anchor text, and 4) a similarity score of full-text, using the WT10g data collection of web data. Experimental evaluation of our research shows that five of our proposed predictors demonstrate reliable and consistent performance across a variety of different retrieval models.