Sevgi Özkan Yıldırım

A vulnerability-driven cyber security maturity model for measuring national critical infrastructure protection preparedness

Abstract Critical infrastructures are vital assets for the public safety, economic welfare and national security of countries. Cyber systems are used extensively to monitor and control critical infrastructures. A number of infrastructures are connected to the Internet via corporate networks. Cyber security is, therefore, an important item of the national security agenda of a country. The intense interest in cyber security has initiated research focusing on national cyber security maturity assessments. However, little, if any, research is dedicated to maturity assessments of national critical infrastructure protection efforts. Instead, the vast majority of studies merely examine diverse national-level security best practices ranging from cyber crime response to privacy protection. This paper proposes a maturity model for measuring the readiness levels of national critical infrastructure protection efforts. The development of the model involves two steps. The first step analyzes data pertaining to national cyber security projects using grounded theory to extract the root causes of the susceptibility of critical infrastructures to cyber threats. The second step determines the maturity criteria by introducing the root causes to subject-matter experts polled in a Delphi survey. The resulting survey-based maturity model is applied to assess the critical infrastructure protection efforts in Turkey. The results are realistic and intuitively appealing, demonstrating that the maturity model is useful for evaluating the national critical infrastructure protection preparedness of developing countries such as Turkey.

Internet users’ attitudes toward business-to-consumer online shopping: A survey

Rapid growth of online shopping activities in recent years has required careful identifications of key factors influencing consumers’ behaviors and attitudes toward online shopping. Identifying critical factors influencing online consumer behavior is very crucial for effective customer relationship management. It is very important that online sellers clearly understand critical factors influencing online customers’ shopping intention and take necessary actions accordingly. If identified and managed properly, those critical factors can provide competitive advantage to online sellers and also increase consumers’ satisfaction level and experiences with sellers’ website. This research investigated the attitudes toward online shopping of university students in Ankara, Turkey. Internet users’ interest, evaluation, trust, intention and concerns toward online shopping were assessed by conducting survey type research. Internet users’ concerns toward online shopping were assessed by considering financial issues, product quality issues, refund issues, product delivery issues, security issues and privacy issues. Findings of this study guide online retailers which factors to focus on in order to develop successful marketing strategies for online consumers.

Behavioral Issues in B2C E-commerce The-state-of-the-art

B2C e-commerce is one of the fastest growing industries worldwide. A lot of studies were carried out by both scholars and practitioners in order to assess online consumers’ behavioral issues in B2C e-commerce platforms. This paper aims to organize and classify the accumulated literature on B2C e-commerce in order to determine less-researched areas and provide future research directions. For that purpose 208 peer-reviewed articles from 71 journals published between 2005 and 2014 were retrieved and analyzed. The findings of the studies are discussed within the scope of developed framework.

Intention vs. Perception: Understanding the Differences in Physicians’ Attitudes Toward Mobile Health Applications

The current state of mobile technology demonstrated that dissemination of mobile health (mHealth) practices is dramatically increasing. However, the success of mobile health technologies does not depend on only the technology but the actual use as well. Understanding the perception and intention about mobile health use is important in order to utilize and adopt the mobile technologies in practice effectively. This chapter provided an overview on two different physician groups (mHealth application users and nonusers) revealing the differences in their attitudes (intentions of users and perceptions of nonusers) toward actual use of mHealth applications. The study employed a secondary research approach. A survey data collected from 137 mHealth user physicians and 122 nonuser physicians were used. A research model was tested in both groups, and the statistical findings were interpreted to identify the differences between the groups. Considering significant and nonsignificant factors influencing in each group, a number of suggestions were outlined in this chapter for developers, managers, and authorities.

Adoption of Internet of Things in Healthcare Organizations

The Internet of things (IoT) is a paradigm that integrates different types of devices which can operate in any environment with their sensing, communicating, and processing capability. This domain has been a revolutionary changing of healthcare operations by providing a new architecture for devices and applications through IP-based connection capability. Furthermore, IoT is a generic platform to exchange information between mobile health devices and other ubiquitous technologies. Although there have been several studies that focus on IoT applications in healthcare, adoption of IoT in healthcare remains largely unknown. The goal of this study is (i) to close the gap in literature by addressing IoT adoption in healthcare; (ii) to help decision-makers to understand the main variables which affect adoption decision among different users in terms of top level managers, healthcare professionals, technical staff, and patients; and (iii) to present recommendations for healthcare managers to improve the adoption process of IoT devices in their organizations. We believe that this study would provide a better understanding of main barriers and facilitators regarding user perspectives during organizational IoT transformation in healthcare.

Acceptance of Mobile Homecare Technologies: An Empirical Investigation on Patients with Chronic Diseases

In this study, the factors affecting the acceptance of mobile homecare system were investigated. The factors were assessed by employing unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) as a theoretical model. The user acceptance model was employed for a mobile homecare system model during system design phase. This study has two different perspectives. The first one is the use of the results of UTAUT for a system in the design phase. The second one is the investigating the relations of factors that affect the acceptance of mobile homecare by patients with chronic diseases. During the study, a mobile homecare system model was formulated based on the literature. A quantitative research was conducted to test the model. The results were evaluated by structural equation model. The results presented that most of the hypotheses were supported, and they were supported by the literature. The study showed that, for systems in the design phase, the acceptance models can be used. Furthermore, the results also presented that performance expectancy was the most significant predictor for patients’ intention to use the system. For the proposed system, UTAUT was able to provide a reasonable explanation for patients’ acceptance of mobile homecare technology for behavioral intention with variance (R2) of 68%.

Behavioural segmentation analysis of online consumer audience in Turkey by using real e-commerce transaction data

This study is about determining the different consumer segments in online shopping platforms. Consumer segmentation is a marketing strategy which involves firstly dividing customers into groups based on their underlying characteristics, needs and interests, and then designing and implementing strategies to target them. One of the most common types of segmentation approaches is behavioural segmentation analysis in which consumers are grouped based on their certain behavioural characteristics such as decision making, spending, usage, etc. This study carried out behavioural segmentation analysis based on real e-commerce transaction records of 10,000 online customers and found five different types of online consumer segments which are opportunist customers, transient customers, need-based shoppers, skeptical newcomers and repetitive purchasers. Behavioural characteristics of each segment were discussed in detail and recommendations were made about how to approach to each segment in order to increase their online shopping rates. Understanding the behavioural characteristics of each segment will enable the selling companies to develop marketing strategies accordingly.

A Quantitative Analysis on the Opinions of Different Stakeholder Groups in Turkish e-Government Transformation

This study focuses on the opinions of external and internal stakeholders on the probable success factors that are assumed to be effective on the e-Government transformation success in Turkey. It uses a generic methodology previously developed by the same researchers to collect data from four central and four local Turkish public institutions and applies correlation analyses on the collected data to present its results. Apart from the similar studies in the literature, this study is a multidimensional quantitative one considering the technical, social, organizational, political, legal, and economic dimensions of the subject concurrently, and it uses the data of not only external stakeholders (the set of all stakeholders who only use the e-Government services provided by a public institution) but also internal stakeholders (the set of all stakeholders who only provide the e-Government services in a public institution) while doing its analyses to create an opportunity for the researchers to clearly compare and contrast the perspectives of these two different groups.