Rubén A. Mendoza

Online Privacy Concerns Associated with Cookies, Flash Cookies, and Web Beacons

Web-tracking and information-gathering technologies, including cookies, Flash cookies, and Web beacons, offer marketers the opportunity to collect a wealth of consumer information. The purpose of this article is to examine Web users’ privacy concerns associated with these tracking technologies. We first describe the capabilities of each of these tracking technologies. We then address whether the use of tracking technologies is an intrusion upon an expectation or right of privacy, within the United States and within the European Union. We conclude by offering directions for future research.

An Exploratory Analysis of the Relationship Between Organizational and Institutional Factors Shaping the Assimilation of Vertical Standards

Vertical standards describe products and services, define data formats and structures, and formalize and encode business processes for specific industries. Vertical standards enable end-to-end computing, provide greater visibility of the organizations supply chain, and enable transactional efficiencies by automating routine tasks, reducing errors, and formally defining all parameters used to describe a product, service, or transaction. Research on standards diffusion has explored either firm-level and institutional variables, without integration of the two areas. This study develops scales for 11 constructs based on concepts culled from diffusion of innovations theory, organizational learning theories of technology adoption, institutional theory and network effects theory. The scales are validated with data collected from the membership of OASIS, a leading international standards-developing organization for electronic commerce technologies. Using data cluster analysis, relationship patterns between the 11 constructs are investigated. Results show that low fit between vertical standards and existing organizational business processes and data formats, low levels of anticipated benefits, and inadequate momentum with critical business partners contribute to slower vertical standards assimilation. However, organizational involvement with influential standards-development organizations, and the right set of technologies, skills, and structures to readily benefit from vertical standards spur their assimilation.

Organizational Assimilation of Vertical Standards: An Integrative Model

Vertical standards are complex networked technologies whose assimilation is subject to extensive interorganizational dependence and network effects. Classical theories of diffusion of technological innovation cannot sufficiently explain their assimilation without taking community-level effects into account. This paper introduces a two-level model of organizational assimilation of vertical standards which extends diffusion of innovations theory by including network effects. It combines the most consistently significant firm-level variables from diffusion of innovations with community-level variables subject to network effects. Results of a large-scale empirical test of the model in the insurance, reinsurance, and related financial services industries are presented. The test is the first of its kind in the growing vertical standards literature. The model is strongly supported and confirms the value of integrative approaches employing variables at both the firm and community levels

Drivers of Organizational Participation in XML-based Industry Standardization Efforts

XML-based vertical standards are an emerging compatibility standard for describing business processes and data formats in specific industries that have emerged in the past decade. Vertical standards, typically implemented using eXtensible Markup Language XML, are incomplete products in constant evolution, continually adding functionality to reflect changing business needs. Vertical standards are public goods because they are freely obtained from sponsoring organizations without investing resources in their development, which gives rise to linked collective action dilemmas at the development and diffusion stages. Firms must be persuaded to invest in development without being able to profit from the output, and a commitment to ensure the diffusion of the standard must be secured from enough potential adopters to guarantee success. In this paper, the authors explore organizational drivers for participation in vertical standards development activities for supply-and demand-side organizations i.e., vendors and end-user firms in light of the restrictions imposed by these dilemmas.

Delivering Internal Business Intelligence Services: How Different Strategies Allow Companies to Succeed by Failing Fast

This chapter reviews opportunities and issues propelling and limiting the success of business intelligence and analytics services for a company’s internal use. We describe three strategies for providing these services internally (on-premises, cloud, and hybrid) and explore issues of importance in the shaping of current demand and of future offerings by web-based providers. It also discusses opportunities for the development of academic curricula to offer better training to graduate and improve recruiting outcomes for organizations and for the development of more relevant academic research to address topics of current and strategic importance to the firm.

Organisational assimilation of vertical standards: exploring the interplay of technology destiny, firm-level factors and network effects

Vertical standards define industry-specific vocabularies, formalise business processes and provide data portability across systems by embedding semantic information in data payloads. Despite their potential, their assimilation across industries has been uneven. We consider the effect of a vertical standard’s winning or non-winning industry position on assimilation rates within organisations. We posit assimilation will be influenced by a firm’s ability to overcome value-realisation and implementation barriers, and by community-level effects such as business partner pressures and orphaning risks. We argue these effects are moderated by the winning or non-winning position of vertical standards in an industry.