Editorial

Citation

Irani, Z. (2010), "Editorial", Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Vol. 23 No. 6. https://doi.org/10.1108/jeim.2010.08823faa.001

Editorial

Article Type: Editorial From: Journal of Enterprise Information Management, Volume 23, Issue 6

It gives me great pleasure to welcome you to volume 23, issue 6, of the Journal of Enterprise Information Management. This issue covers a variety of contributions that span the theoretical and practical.

This issue of JEIM, starts with a viewpoint article from, Drs Yogesh Dwivedi and Navonil Mustafee. In their piece, they explore cloud computing where they evaluate, through arguments, the enabling factors that are expected to facilitate the adoption of Cloud Computing. The approach used is based on the study of recent developments in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) and the authors’ views and arguments as to how such advancements are expected to lead to an increased adoption of Cloud Computing. Several ICT areas have to be developed in conjunction with the promise of Cloud Computing. These include (but not limited to) the development of parallel programming paradigms and open source software, Cloud access to High Performance Computing, Green IT, investment in low-cost access-cum-computing devices and hi-speed networks. This viewpoint identifies the current advances in ICT and its expected influence on the adoption of Cloud computing. Furthermore, it lays emphasis on the developing economies and discusses the low-cost technologies and infrastructure investments (including Government subsidies) required to provide Cloud-access to the masses.

Mantzana et al., examine a model that supports the management, design and delivery of Healthcare Information Systems (HIS) training activities for older healthcare employees. In this quantitative study, the authors investigate older employees training management in Healthcare Information Systems and proposed a novel model. The model was tested by 139 healthcare employees, with the research identifying:

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  older healthcare employees need to be trained on HIS;

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  older healthcare employees should be trained by combining new technologies and considering theories on older employees training;

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  given the many other pressures on today’s clinicians, and health care workers’ relative lack of experience with computing, there should be a well organized and managed training process; and

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  healthcare organizations should realize the benefits gained by well managed training processes and support their employees.

The research suggests that at a theoretical level the paper extends the body of literature as it proposes a validated model that can be replicable. At a practical level, this research demonstrated that using the proposed model older employees in the healthcare sector:

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  can be trained on healthcare information system in a more organized way;

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  can improve their skills; and

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  seek new career paths.

Then, Sharif explains that developments in the world of distributed computing have made possible the successful integration of diverse information systems working in different environments. Electronic government (eGovernment) provides governmental stakeholders with a wealth of information stored at the various entities in the organisation. He goes onto explain that decision makers are often overloaded with the amount of information that they receive. Notwithstanding the logistics of information flows from government bodies to citizens, the flow of information between various entities with national and local government organisations has become a critical issue. As a result, this paper analyses the logistics of information decision-making flows, within an eGovernment implementation, by modelling and extrapolating those key decision factors, via a cognitive mapping approach. The paper adopts a multi-method approach in terms of combining an empirical qualitative case study with a quantitative analytical simulation technique for analyzing decision-making behavior relating to policy considerations within the eGovernment realm in a Gulf municipality, through the use of a Fuzzy Cognitive Mapping (FCM) approach. By using the FCM approach, the author was able to highlight the unique interplay between eGovernment stakeholders in the case context, whereby inherent relationships were shown to exist between decision-making eGovernment stakeholders and the consumers of eGovernment information. Thus, project management information, relationships and deployment; evaluation of information systems, relationships and policy, change management policy and processes, system validation, processes and deployment; and alignment with strategic eGovernment drivers, deployment with policy are identified. This realization of the demand and supply of the underlying logistics information management needs within an eGovernment context, provide an understanding of the principal factors which drive and define those technological and organisational challenges experienced by the eGovernment municipality. By exploring these factors through a combination of qualitative discourse and quantitative simulation, the authors have subsequently shown that an abundance of information exists within a seemingly placid organisational system. The basis for which resides in the constant flow of information between and among stakeholders, processes, and systems. This paper uses and interesting combination of a qualitative case research with quantitative analysis/simulation technique in order to identify inter-relationships in the decision-making criteria of a Gulf-based municipality in order to shed light on the key components of their policy control.

Chuah et al. present a case study, where the authors examine the relationships among supplier management practices, organizational context, and supplier performance. The contexts selected for supplier management practices are economics transactional practices and high involvement work practices (HIWP); while power asymmetry and competition intensity are considered within the organizational context. The methodology used was a questionnaire survey was conducted on a multinational semiconductor company. A two-phase statistical analysis, which comprised of phase one (reliability and factor analysis) and phase two (hierarchical multiple regression analysis) were used to analyze the data.

The study provides empirical evidence to support the conceptual and prescriptive statements in the literature regarding the impact of supplier management practices and the dynamics between organizational context and supplier management towards supplier performance. The results show that high involvement work practices (HIWP) mediate the impact of competition intensity on supplier’s quality performance and partially mediate the effect of competition intensity on supplier’s flexibility. The limitation of this study is that, it does not use longitudinal data, which would be more useful to examine changes in variables that affect performance; nevertheless, as this study was conducted in-house, it was able to control the extraneous factors. This study provides important insights for managers to understand the disposition of the firm to better leverage organizational context by exploiting relationships with suppliers. This paper does make a valuable contribution to JEIM by extended organizational theory and marketing theory into supply chain context. Moreover, it is among the first empirical work that specifically investigates the relationship between organizational context and supplier management practices; thus this paper fills an important gap in the supply chain literature.

A study investigating homeworkers’ inclination to remain connected to work at anytime, anywhere, via mobile phones is presented by Lal and Dwivedi. Mobile phones are said to enable homeworkers to remain connected for work purposes at “anytime, anywhere”, irrespective of time or location. This paper argues that despite this assertion, little is known beyond the anecdotal literature about whether homeworkers actually remain connected as such. This paper seeks to address the issue described above by conducting semi-structured interviews with 25 homeworkers who were recruited using snowball sampling. The findings show that homeworkers tried to distinguish between “work” and “home” by allocating specific time and space to each domain, but nevertheless remained connected via their mobile phones outside of the time and space allocated for work activity. This resulted in work crossing into the home domain and individuals potentially becoming connected and contactable at “anytime, anywhere”. However, the findings identify that homeworkers took various actions to control their availability outside of the work domain, which suggests that despite the potential, remaining connected “anytime, anywhere” is often not the reality. Such actions are discussed in this paper in the context of existing literature. The implications for organisations employing homeworking are also presented, together with how the limitations of the study can be overcome in future research. The paper contributes to the less explored and existing homeworking and boundary literature and provides implications for practitioners of homeworking.

Finally, Mohamed et al., build an integrated business-to-business e-Commerce hub architecture based on Service Oriented Architecture and semantic ontologies. The previous generations of implemented B2B e-commerce hub solutions (e-Marketplaces) did not successfully fulfil the requirements of buyers, and suppliers (“Participants”) in different business domains to carry out their daily business and online commercial transactions with one another. The limitations provided significant challenges that include:

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  a document-centric focus rather than business-process focus;

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  the complexity of creating new business models or business services at runtime; and

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  the interoperability limitations and the data transformation problems, which require huge efforts from “Participants” (buyers and suppliers) in customizing, and modifying their internal back end systems and internal business processes to join these implemented (e-Marketplaces).

This research addresses some of these challenges through making use of bottom-up/top-down approaches to building an integrated solution and resolves the reasons for the failure of previous generations of B2B e-commerce hubs and applies the proposed architecture to the building of a vertical B2B e-Marketplace for the oil and gas sector in Egypt.

Previous B2B e-Commerce hub initiatives failed to extend their products and services to their “Participants”, and required substantial investment and effort from each “Participant” to join such a B2B e-Commerce hub. The failure of these IOS projects lies in their inability to integrate B2B e-Commerce networks based on IOS (top-down and bottom-up systems) and consequently, they supported very few partners and “Participants”. These IOS approaches did not resolve the existing challenges of B2B e-Commerce hubs, especially in the realm of interoperability. The main contribution of the proposed architecture comes from the creation of a clear automatic path between a business requirements layer and a technology layer by combining both Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) and management requirements in a single framework to provide dynamic products and flexible services.

This issue of JEIM offers an eclectic picture of the enterprise information management landscape. I do hope you enjoy reading this issue!

Zahir IraniEditor-in-Chief