Challenges and Opportunities in the Digital Era

Mobile phone subscriptions are the largest form of consumer technology adopted across the world. Despite their potential, the research is very scant in understanding various predictors of consumer adoption towards mobiles technologies in particular mobile applications. This study intend to fulfil this purpose through weight analysis on mobile application adoption based studies that utilized UTAUT2 model. Studies needed for weight analysis were located through cited reference search method in Scopus and Web of Science bibliographic databases. The results of weight analysis revealed performance expectancy/perceived usefulness, trust and habit as best predictors of consumer behavioural intention to mobile applications adoption whereas behavioural intention was the best predictor of use behaviour. There were also two promising predictors with perfect weight of one such as perceived risk on behavioural intention and habit on use behaviour. Further steps of this research involves meta-analysis to develop comprehensive conceptual model concurrent with weight analysis results for empirical evaluation on various mobile applications.

This paper is devoted to online marketing tools and primarily focuses on the use of social networks and measuring their effectiveness. The theoretical part briefly presents the topic of online marketing and selected tools. The next section deals with the case study that analyses the use of social networks on a particular project, including measuring the efficiency of social networks by comparing the planned and actual state according to the selected metrics. In conclusion, there is a discussion on the results obtained and the possible directions, which would increase the efficiency of social networks, i.e. online marketing, are outlined. The results of assessing the current state of online marketing for the surveyed project in 2017, by comparing the planned and actual metric values, largely fail to meet the targets. With measuring social networking tools, the planned numbers of website visits and social networking orders didn’t reach their planned values. Regarding the number of fans on individual social networks, the planned status was only achieved with the Pinterest and Instagram social networks.

For learning organisations, acquiring knowledge is one of the key activities. Then for example, the acquired knowledge will allow organisations greater flexibility or a strategic advantage. As small and medium-sized organisations in the Czech Republic are of great importance from the employment of people viewpoint, this survey is focused on education in these organisations. The aim of this study is to evaluate learning time in small and medium-sized organizations in the Czech Republic and to compare the learning time of general staff and managers in these organizations. When comparing results with foreign studies, it can be argued that the results obtained correlate with each other and are satisfactory. In this study, there was a statistically significant difference found between people who are learning at least 1–10 h per month and those who are not. At the same time, the positive influence of learning on the evaluation of some dimensions was found.

Currently, there is an increase in the number of older generation groups. These demographic changes obviously cause serious social and economic problems. Therefore, there is a need to prolong an active life of elderly people, who want to lead active, fulfilling and quality life in a sense of their inclusion, socialization and independence. This can be achieved not only by continuous support from their family members, but current trends show an important role of information and communication technologies (ICT) in this process. The purpose of this study is to explore the acceptance and use of mobile technology, specifically mobile devices and applications by elderly people, both from the technical and sociological point of view. The methods used in this study include a method of literature review of available sources, a method of comparison and evaluation of the findings from the selected studies on this topic. The findings show that although there is a number of mobile apps for the elderly on the market, they do not usually meet specific needs of these people such as their physical and cognitive impairments or relevant technical specifications of mobile device designed for this group of people. In addition, since the use of mobile technologies by elderly people is quite a new field of research, there are almost no research studies which would prove acceptance of these mobile apps. Therefore, there is a need of vast and detailed research in this area and also find a solution to this complex technological and sociological issue.

At present, mobile learning (m-learning) seems to be a well established methodology at the institutions of higher learning. Most recently, smartphone apps started to be a popular part of m-learning. The purpose of this article is to evaluate mobile application effectiveness on students’ study achievements in the Course of English taught at the Faculty of Informatics and Management in Hradec Kralove, Czech Republic. The results of this study confirm that learning via the smartphone app is effective. However, the content of the mobile app has to be adapted to students’ needs in order to make them motivated to use the app. Therefore, the whole pedagogical process should be well planned, react to students’ immediate needs and implement appropriate teaching and learning methods, which can contribute to the positive learning outcomes.

Digital payment methods (DPMs) are evolving fast but they are yet to be widely adopted particularly in the developing countries. An initial review of literature suggests that several studies have already been conducted on this topic for understanding antecedents of digital payments adoption. However, only a few studies have examined this emerging topic in the context of developing countries. The aim of this submission is to identify antecedents of consumer adoption and usage of digital payments methods. The results of this literature analysis suggest that constructs related to technology acceptance model (TAM) and unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) along with trust and risk are the most frequently examined constructs for determining consumer’s behavioural intention to use and usage of DPMs. The findings from this work can help researchers selecting factors for inclusion in the future empirical works on this topic.

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) plays an important part in our everyday life. When seeking information online through eWOM, our attitude towards specific information is inevitably affected by a wide range of factors and motives. Identifying and studying how motivations to seek eWOM affect our attitude towards said information may play a role to help us devise strategies to deal with new products, services and technologies as they are released in to the wild and get exposure to consumers. The aim of this research is to develop a model to study how certain specific motivations may affect the attitude individuals hold towards eWOM information. This paper develops a set of hypotheses to help evaluate how motivations affects the information seeker’s attitude towards the information. Future empirical research will test the proposed hypotheses to advance our understanding of the role of motivations when seeking eWOM information.

Electronic word of mouth (eWOM) plays an important part in our everyday life. eWOM communications have been shown to affect the adoption of information, thus affecting the information seeker’s decision-making. Identifying and studying how motivations to seek eWOM affect information adoption can prove beneficial in aiding new product, services and, in general, technology strategy development and adoption. This research aims at developing a model to investigate how certain specific motivations may affect the adoption of information sought through eWOM. This paper develops a set of hypotheses to help evaluate how motivations affect the information seeker’s adoption of the information sought, based on the moderating effect of gender. The paper improves on the knowledge of factors affecting information adoption and the impact of gender, and thus help advance our understanding of consumer behaviour online and information processing. Future empirical research will test the proposed hypotheses to advance our understanding of the role of motivations when seeking eWOM information.

The classical public-key schemes are based on number theory, such as integer factorization and discrete logarithm. In 1994, P.W. Shor proposed an algorithm to solve these problems in polynomial time using quantum computers. Recent advancements in quantum computing open the door to the possibility of developing quantum computers sophisticated enough to solve these problems. Post-quantum cryptography (PQC) is resistant against quantum attacks. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the performance of different post-quantum public-key schemes for constrained-resources smart mobile devices; and to give a comparison between the studied post-quantum schemes in terms of computational time, required memory, and power consumption.

This paper investigates the dual effects (i.e. benefits and dangers) of a social networking site (SNS). Our dependent variables are subjective vitality and addiction. We employ self-determination theory (SDT), specifically the concepts of autonomous and controlled motivation and hypothesize that social enhancement and enjoyment represent autonomous motivation and contributes to subjective vitality while voyeurism and exhibitionism represent controlled motivation and contribute to SNS addiction. We test our hypotheses with data from 289 student Facebook users using Partial Least Squares (PLS). The results suggest that both social enhancement and enjoyment predict subjective vitality. In contrast, exhibitionism is the sole predictor of SNS addiction while voyeurism has no effect.

The concept of ecosystem emanates from ecology and subsequently has been broadly used in business studies to describe and investigate complex interrelationships between companies and other organizations. However, it is widely known that borrowing constructs from natural sciences to social sciences, or vice versa, can be problematic. For example, the use of the ecosystem concept outside its original domain has received criticism. To better understand the essence, applicability and boundaries of the business ecosystem concept, this study conducts a conceptual analysis of a set of concepts used to describe business networks. To this end, we analytically comparing business ecosystem with other prominent concepts, namely industry, population, cluster, inter-organizational network and value network. We then present an illustrative case of an emerging business ecosystem of digital services for real-estate and facility services and scrutinize the applicability of the focal concepts for our case. The results indicate a need for increased conceptual clarity when describing business networks. The results indicate a need for conceptual clarity when describing business networks. We conclude with a synthesis and discuss under what circumstances using the business ecosystem concept may add value for research and practice. The paper contributes to the business ecosystem literature by clarifying the similarities and differences between business ecosystem and other concepts used to describe business networks.

This paper introduces a conceptual framework for strategic big data utilization. We discuss big data through (i) its origins (where and how does the data accumulate), (ii) its constitution (what is the nature of the data), and (iii) its applications (how and why can the data be processed and utilized). Based on this conceptual analysis, we argue for three continua that can guide the process of making strategic decisions regarding the utilization of big data. We further use these continua as a foundation for proposing a conceptual framework for strategic data use and strategic positioning. The conceptual framework facilitates understanding the firm-specific possibilities that emerge from aligning the overarching business goals with the opportunities emerging from big data.

This study aims to identify the values of MOOCs in education from students’ perspective in China. The value of Massive Open Online Course (MOOCs) can be seen as the benefits associated with the use of MOOCs in education. To address this, we employed the Value-Focused Thinking (VFT) approach to identify the values of MOOCs with university students in China. Twenty active students of MOOCs were interviewed in China. Based on the data collected from the interviews, we developed a means-ends objective network describing the value of MOOCs in education. According to the results, efficiency in learning, effectiveness in learning, convenience of learning, learning experience of MOOCs, and usability of MOOCs were identified as the fundamental objectives to maximize values of MOOCs in education.

The term ecosystem has been widely adopted outside its original domain in biology, for example in business and engineering studies. Ecosystem health is a derivative metaphor used to describe the success of the ecosystem. In this paper, we describe the key shortcomings of ecosystem health research. We put forward two key postulates of ecosystem health. Based on these postulates we present a research agenda for ecosystem health.

In this paper we present the findings of a case-study on IT system security in the area of EU internal security and justice. We have analyzed the implementation of information security for the EU information systems EURODAC, SIS II and VIS in case of Estonia. The analysis comes in a situation, where there are multiple regulations, directives, guidelines; but it lacks a unified standard for the implementation of the member states subsystems. The main finding is that a separate standard is not necessary; however, there is a need for setting minimum requirements, ensuring security of the information systems, that come with appropriate guidelines that help the member states to achieve the minimum requirements. The second finding is that there is a need for greater cooperation and an increased knowledge exchange of the methods used in the member states. Following defined guidelines and exchanging knowledge would help to strengthen the level of security for the entire system.

In recent years, emphasis in development studies has shifted toward knowledge creation and innovation that fosters economic growth and sustain development. Globalization is offering new opportunities, especially for developing countries, to acquire knowledge, information and skills for building capacity for development. Modern information and communication technologies (ICTs) are empowering countries to diversify the economic structure and enhance sectoral productivity through access to global markets. In this age of information, individuals, organizations and institutions are able to enhance communication and increase collaboration through social networking aimed at promoting innovation and improving global competitiveness. Digital technologies can be used to bridge the digital divide between rich and poor countries as a mechanism designed not only to increase connectivity and improve services, but also to facilitate innovation and capacity building for development. The aim of this paper is to examine the role that digital technologies plays in economic diversification in GCC countries. Digital technologies encourage investment in manufacturing production and knowledge creation, which stimulates linkages and support diversification. To this end, building capacity for digital economy could have a profound impact on the ability of these countries to speed up the process of socioeconomic transformation involving reduction of dependency on oil production.

In an adaptive learning environment, the feedback provided during problem-solving requires a means, target, goal, and strategy. One of the challenges of representing feedback to meet these criteria, is the representation of the effect of multiple concepts on a single concept. Currently, most of the methods (linguistic knowledge base, expert knowledge base, and ontology) used in representing knowledge in an adaptive learning environment only provide relationships between a pair of concept. However, a cognitive knowledge base which represents a concept as an object, attribute, and relations (OAR) model, provides a means to determine the effect of multiple concepts on a single concept. Using the OAR model, the relationships between multiple pedagogical, domain, and student attributes are represented for providing adaptive feedback. Most researchers have proposed adaptive feedback methods that are not fully grounded in pedagogical principles. In addition, the three knowledge components of the learning environment (pedagogical, domain and student models) are mostly treated in isolation. A reason for this could be the complex nature of representing multiple adaptive feedback characteristics across the main components of a learning environment. Thus, there is a need to design a concept operator that can relate the three facets of knowledge in an adaptive learning environment. Using the algebraic concept operator $$ R_{i}^{in} $$ , the effect of multiple attributes of the three knowledge components on the student’s performance is represented. The algebraic concept operator introduced in this article will allow teachers and pedagogy experts to understand and utilize a variety of effective feedback approaches.

Smart city is a strategy that aims at employing technology to improve life quality in urban areas. Among its main objectives, the environment quality is the top one. The EU vision on smart cities is strongly focused on energy efficiency, on nearly-zero energy buildings, on the reduction of CO2 emissions and so on. Therefore, some aspects of the smart city overlap with the idea of green city. Green city is an older but always updated vision, that aims at creating cities with a lower environmental impact, able to reduce the consumption of natural resources and to improve the quality of air and water.This study is designed to understand if smart city and green city have similarities, to what extent they do overlap and how many synergies it is possible to create pursuing these two urban strategies at the same time. After a deep analysis of the international literature about these two subjects, we examined the portfolio of the initiatives that are usually employed, and we compared it with the international indicators related to the green city performances. We outlined overlapping areas and reached conclusions on the convergence of smart and green urban policies.

The advancement in technology is transforming societies into digital arenas and paves the way towards the achievement of digital transformation. With every transaction in the digital world leading to the generation of data, big data and their analytics have received major attention in various fields and different contexts, examining how they may benefit the different actors in the society. The present study aims to identify how startups that develop products with both software and hardware parts can generate value from data analytics and what challenges they face towards this direction. To this end, we performed a multiple-case study with early-stage startups and employed qualitative analysis on a dataset from 13 startups. Through semi-structured interviews, we examine how these companies use data analytics. The findings show that although the benefits from data analytics are clear, multiple barriers and challenges exist for the startups to be able to create value from them. The major ones are about their resources, including human skills, economical resources, as well as time management and privacy issues.

The concept of ‘Minimum Viable Product’ (MVP) is largely adapted in the software industry as well as in academia. Minimum viable products are used to test hypotheses regarding the target audience, save resources from unnecessary development work and guide a company towards a stable business model. As the game industry is becoming an important business domain, it is not surprise that the concept has been adopted also in the game development. This study surveys how a Minimum Viable Game (MVG) is defined, what is reported in extant literature as well as present results from a small case study survey done to nine game development companies. The study shows that despite popularity of minimum viable games in the industrial fora, the presented views on the concept are diverged and there is lack of practical guidelines and research supporting game companies. This study points out research gaps in the area as well as calls for actions to further develop the concept and to define guidelines.

The recent financial crisis unveiled the major deficiencies and weaknesses of the Eurozone structure. However, almost 10 years after the beginning of the crisis, the Eurozone is still dealing with its effects.The article discusses some of the reasons of the global crises since the 1980s and focuses on the role of the Credit Rating Agencies (“CRAs”) during the recent financial crisis. It presents the methodologies that are used in order to assess country risk, the relevant variables used in their evaluations, the problems they face and suggests possible ways to improve the process at a European level.The article is organized in five sections as follows: the concept of country risk, platforms for assessing country risk, the determinants of country risk, the reasons behind the recent financial crises and the role of CRAs in the latest financial crisis.

A market which provides an innovative way to allow customers to interact with each other called Customer-to-customer (C2C) market. In C2C communications, online communities play an important role in decision making to buy a product. This investigation develops a research model for online communities of Facebook commerce (F-Commerce) in Bangladesh region, which is based on Information Adoption Model (IAM). This study exhibits a model to influences of C2C communication on Bangladeshi consumers’ purchase decision in the online communities of F-Commerce. The proposed model used the Partial Least Squares (PLS) technique to test 120 effective survey data. This survey data has been taken from the Bangladesh Facebook users and strongly involved in product buy-sell at F-Commerce. The analyzed results show that Argument Quality (AQ), Source Credibility (SC) and Tie Strength (TS) positively influence Purchase Decision (PD) through Product Usefulness Evaluation (PUE). In addition, Tie Strength exhibits difference effect on Product Usefulness Evaluation between the contexts of consumers communicating with virtual consumers relationships. Theoretical and executive implications are discussed for constructing our proposed model.

Technology is turning into an augmentation of our memory and an invisible assistant in our daily lives. These issues arise many challenges but also opportunities for researchers, developers and even, final users. In this paper we present an example of this revolution, through an example of an Internet of Things (IoT) based smart shoe cabinet. Besides the assistance provided for different collectives with special needs, this prototype represent the new opportunities on data management and consumer profiling that these technologies already provide.

SMEs face a variety of challenges in their attempts to keep up with the cyber revolution, even though SMEs are a major part of the world economy. In a previous publication, the authors established that ‘B2C’ model does not accurately represent or support SMEs in M-Commerce. Instead, the authors reviewed SMEs and SME supporting apps from mobile app marketplaces and suggested a model called ‘B2i2C’. In this model, the ‘i’, in the form of intermediary business entity are playing a vital role in SMEs breakthrough into M-Commerce. Following on, this paper reviews business processes to generate a generic model adaptable to a variety of SME related products and services. This paper presents the case study of Talabat, one of the most successful GCC e-business models that supports SMEs to have come out from Kuwait. The information collected from online resources, student placements and feedback from operation managers attempt to emulate the business process model for a variety of ‘B2i2C’ business models. The generic model is then tested against three different scenarios to identify the level of similarity. The results demonstrate a high degree of adaptability of the model and a major opportunity to explore in the area of SME supporting app in M-Commerce.

This paper examines electronic financial disclosure in Islamic banking vs conventional banking in Gulf cooperation council (GCC). A checklist was adopted to measure the level of electronic financial disclosure in Islamic banking vs conventional banking in GCC. The sample size consisted of total 90 banks in GCC (44 Islamic and 46 conventional) for the year 2017. The statistical analysis indicated that the overall level of of electronic financial disclosure (EFD) was 73%, and 78.6% by Islamic banks and conventional banks respectively. The results also report a significant and positive relationship with firm size, and an insignificant relationship with profitability, and age. This paper should be particularly relevant to central banking authorities considering in banking sector in GCC for strategizing policies in the future of EFD as well as to serve as a guide for academic EFD in banking sector in GCC.

Continuously achieving and maintaining competitive advantage is the critical survival factor for software-intensive product development companies undergoing digitalization transformation. These companies remain uncertain if investments in business modeling is sufficient to cope with rapidly changing business models, technology, and customer demands. We conducted a Systematic Literature Review using the snowballing methodology to explore the effects of business modeling on business flexibility and variability in the realization. Our results confirm a research gap regarding translating desired strategic flexibility into business options that can efficiently and effectively be implemented using software-based variability in the realization. We conclude that more research is needed consolidating business model innovation, experimentation, and operationalization. Building on theories for learning and knowledge creation, we propose a framework for describing change and analyzing strategic, tactical and operational choices in business model experimentation.

The existence of conflict of interests (COI) within different firms’ level of management is often cited as the reason for the relationship for low information quality and ineffective decision making. We reveal how COI affects negatively decision making through low information quality longer time to produce information quality, shrinking optimal information quantity, and increasing in the information cost. Although, COI has been studied extensively by different organizational studies, there is no research showing how to measure the effect of COI on information quality from mathematical modeling perspective. Since effective and efficient management decisions closely depend on information quality, this paper provides the solutions to this problem.

Producing relevant and reliable accounting information is the main responsibility of accounting profession. Reliability and relevance of accounting information heavily depend on a sound internal control system as well as management and employees ethical and integrity characteristics. This paper shows how Artificial Intelligence innovatively works with the internal controls systems to help managers to produce high-quality accounting information by reducing information risk. Despite many types of research proposed using Artificial Intelligence in accounting and auditing, but none of them directly showed how to reduce information risk using Artificial Intelligence. The research benefits companies cut many costs and losses of failing to produce reliable accounting information, help managers to make a better decision and in overall improve entities performances. This paper proposes a general model to be applied by all type of business entities how practically use Artificial Intelligence to automate removing the weakness of internal control systems. This, in turn, reduces control risk, detection risk and increase audit quality by reducing accounting information risk.

This study tries to address the literature gap of what blockchain can offer to businesses in relation to consumers (B2C), businesses (B2B) and governments (B2G) through systematic literature review on blockchain. The review covers 40 articles from business, management and accounting peer review journals recognized by Scopus database. The review highlights how blockchain will facilitate instant payments, trusted interfaces and traceability of goods for the consumers. Businesses can use blockchain for snapshot sharing, machine-to-machine transactions, accounting, business process management and provenance traceability. Blockchain technology creating new business opportunities in government sector such as digital storage, authentication and maintenance of records; smart trust codification; new market for digital payment services and global commerce.

With technology and globalization, supply chain expanded and therefore supporting software is required in order to ensure prompt decisions are appropriately made. The emphasis of this paper is on the transportation management system (TPS) that supports the decision making process within the supply chain management framework. Our hypothesis focuses on the routing and mapping module within TPS. To support the hypothesis, questionnaires were distributed to the managers of small scale businesses in Al-Shuwaikh commercial district in Kuwait and the results obtained helped rank the importance of four carefully selected modules embraced by transportation management systems. A methodical regression analysis approach was used to substantiate the findings as elucidated in the study presented here.

Social media is believed to play an essential role in entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. However, little is known about the exact nature of the relationship between the capability of social media and entrepreneurial opportunity recognition. Addressing this gap in literature, we interviewed eleven Nigerian entrepreneurs to investigate how opportunity can be recognised via their engagement with social media platforms. It was found that, via Social Media, entrepreneurs recognise opportunities regarding introducing new products, entering new markets, better customer relations and participating in entrepreneurial events. We also identified that opportunity recognition is driven by five capabilities of social media: networking, searching, observation, experimenting, and social media data analytics. Implications of our findings and limitations are discussed.

Entrepreneurs are increasingly using social media in running their businesses. This phenomenon is remarkable especially in developing countries where entrepreneurs now exploit business opportunities by using cheaper platforms. Prior studies claim that social media plays a crucial role in establishing a business and ensuring its survival through effective marketing. However, from the context of developing countries, limited research has sought to understand the role of social media in motivating entrepreneurs to start and market their businesses. This current study seeks to investigate this issue through a field study comprising interviews with Nigerian entrepreneurs. The research explores how social media shapes Nigerian entrepreneurs’ motivation to start a business and how they market their businesses via social media. It was found that most of the entrepreneurs interviewed were opportunity-driven rather than necessitydriven due to opportunities afforded by SM. Furthermore, entrepreneurs devised several social media marketing approaches across different platforms to reach their audiences.

The objectives of this research is to give a clear view of the electronic auditing environment in companies, to determine the main benefits and challenges of Computer Assisted Audit Techniques (CAATs) and to review the opinions of researchers on Generalized Audit Software (GAS). The study also sheds the light on the reality of electronic auditing in Kingdom of Bahrain. The descriptive approach was used, where the previous studies were surveyed, discussed accurately, and then the results of the study were reached. The results showed the benefits and challenges of evolving from traditional audit techniques to CAATs. This research provides more detailed information about the use of GAS in the different sectors of companies. It also provides academic contribution not only in auditing area but also in information technology, especially in Bahrain. At the end of the study, there are suggestions for future research, which may help to get a qualitative achievement in the use of electronic audit and CAATs in Bahrain.

Internet and mobile banking is becoming more important worldwide. New technologies have huge impact for the introduction of new functionalities in both internet and mobile banking. Growth of Internet users and smartphones also has an impact on this growth. The Czech Republic was using internet banking above the European Union average in 2017. In the European Union 51% of individuals used internet banking and 57% of individuals in the Czech Republic. The main aim of the article is to analyze the situation in the use of internet banking in the Czech Republic by the number and percentage of individuals and by age, gender and education. The second part of the article is focused on the analysis of ten banks with the largest number of clients in the Czech Republic, where they analyze the latest and most needed features of their mobile banking from the client and expert juries perspective. The article uses primary and secondary data.

Financial literacy now appears to be a key component of a successful national economy and successful personal finance and budgeting. Financial education, financial consumer protection and financial inclusion are the goal of top country policies. For this reason, it is necessary to assess the levels of financial literacy in each country. There are several solutions for education in this field. The aim of the article is to state selected solutions that will support financial literacy of pupils at secondary school in the Czech Republic. Paper is starting point to this issue for future analysis. Digital dementia is one of the issues solved in the article. Advanced technologies and their use are some presented solutions as are web portals, learning management systems, PC and Internet games, social networks, blogs or other possibilities. Three web portals that can be used for getting higher competencies in financial literacy will be presented and evaluated at the end of the article. Primary and secondary sources were used in the processing of the article.

Governments are releasing their data to the public to accomplish benefits like the creation of transparency, accountability, citizen engagement and to enable business innovation. At the same time, decision-makers are reluctant to open their data due to some potential risks like misuse, sensitivity, ownership, and inaccuracy of the data. The goal of the study presented in this paper is to develop a Fuzzy Multi-Criteria Decision Making (FMCDM) approach to analyze the risks and benefits to determine the decision to open a dataset. FMCDM is chosen due to its capability to measure and weight the relative importance of the criteria. FMCDM need the weighting of criteria as input. For this Fuzzy Analytical Hierarchy Process (FAHP) is utilized by collecting input from experts’ knowledge and expertise. The scores for each criterion are summed up to rank the importance of the alternatives. Four main criteria are used, e.g. data sensitivity and data ownership representing risks criteria, and data availability and data trustworthy as benefits criteria. For each criterion, there were two sub-criteria identified. Four types of decisions to open data can be made: completely open, maintain suppression, provide limited access, and remain closed. A health patient record dataset is used to illustrate the approach. In further research, we recommend to develop automated approaches that take a dataset as an input and can provide an advice.

Forty-six banks and foreign bank branches were operating in the Czech Republic in May 2018. The banking market in the Czech Republic is characterized by high fees for account management and information asymmetries. For this reason, there are number of fees accounts comparators on the market. One of these is the Bank Charge Calculator, which allows clients to run their current account expenditures by their set criteria. The aim of the article is to analyze the current state of the banking sector for individuals. Based on data from the Bank Charge Calculator, a Client Index is calculated to allow respondents to calculate the average monthly cost of running their current account according to defined criteria and service requirements. The value of this Client Index was used to propose a pay-off function in the game theory model. Client Index values serve to express the price level on the RCBS market.

Over the last few years, online social networks have experienced exponential growth in both profile registrations and social interactions. They are widely used in the personal life but also in the business. The goal of the article is to state the most often used accounting software and their producers in the connection with use of social networks by producers of accounting software in the Czech Republic. The sub-goal is to present records gained from Socialbakers focused on the evolution of fans on Facebook and how a company decides on the use of the optimal mix of platforms. Classification of social networks, social media and accounting software are solved and shortly described at the first theoretical part. Main producers of accounting software and analysis of social networks that are used by producers of accounting software are presented in the main part of the article. It is also analyzed whether producers of accounting software have direct links from web pages on the selected social networks. The last part is devoted to selected social networks and how to use it in the companies producing accounting software. Selected topic is up-to-date and it is not often solved in the literature. The topic is important to the professional public. It was founded that most often used social network by producers of accounting software are Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. The links from web pages are often used also in the connection with Google+. All companies do not put links on the used social networks.

The well-known Syria crisis has made it very challenging for thousands of Syrian children to have access to education. In this paper, we propose digital education platform to allow displaced Syrian kids as well as kids in the refugee camps in bordering countries, to have access to education. The proposed platform consists of four pillars: Hardware, Software, Curriculum, and Support services. We start by looking at the efforts performed in the field of education in war situations, and we extract from them the lessons learned and recommendations. We provide four main characteristics of war impacting kids’ education: (1) insecurity, (2) instability, (3) lack of resources, and (4) lack of adults’ supervision. We then use these four characteristics along with the extracted recommendations, as the grounds for drafting three design considerations for the implementation of a digital education platform. The three design considerations are supervised self-directed learning method, context-aware education, and kids-oriented design. Finally, we use these design considerations to provide design recommendations for the four pillars of the platform. We conclude our work by discussing the validity of the platform, its implementation feasibility, and challenges facing the implementation.

This study set out to link two fundamental topics of corporate governance: Information technology governance (ITG) and the level of electronic financial disclosure (EFD). The paper aimed to examine the extent of ITG in the UAE listed firms, the level of EFD by UAE listed firms and the association between the two variables. The researchers collected data from a sample of 103 firms listed in the financial stock markets of the UAE for the years 2016–2017. A regression analysis was used to test the relationship between the dependent and independent variables. Consequently, the study found a positive and significant relationship between ITG and EFD. From a practical perspective, this paper is aimed at the board of directors and executive managers, as IT governance is their responsibility. Furthermore, from a theoretical perspective, this paper offers a unique point of view, which adds to the literature review discussing IT governance mechanisms, and EFD. The study would also be of interest to the international investment community, regulators, policy makers and governments in the UAE, the Middle East as well as the other GCC countries.

Health organizations worldwide express a considerable attention to utilize Mobile technology applications to provide a better health services to their people. One of the most emerging apps in this regard is Mobile health (M-health). Large amount of efforts, money, and time have been invested to provide such innovative technology. Yet, the adoption rate of these systems is still low. Additionally, such system has never been examined over the Jordanian context. Thus, this study aims to test the most important factors that could shape the intention of Jordanian people to use Mhealth. Four factors: perceived usefulness, social influence, awareness, and innovativeness were proposed as key predictor of behavioural intention. Data was collected using convenience sample size of 365 and was analyzed using structural equation modelling. The main statistical findings supported the role of perceived usefulness, social influence, and innovativeness. More discussion will also be provided regarding the current study practical and theoretical implications.

Going beyond traditional ‘adoption’, this study examines the determinants of the ‘use’ of radio frequency identification (RFID) technology and identifies the perceived benefits of such use. From extant literature, we developed a research model from organizational setting (i.e., hospitals), which we validated using survey data from 142 healthcare organizations. The collected data were analyzed by partial-least-squares (PLS) methods. The results show that a hospital’s RFID use is influenced by the following technological organizational-environmental (TOE) factors: information privacy (technology), absorptive capacity and resource readiness (organization), and coercive pressure (environment). RFID use, in turn, impacts both economic and operational benefits. Additionally, size of hospital found to be an important control variable to RFID use. Therefore we further investigated the combined effect of hospital size and RFID use on perceived benefits (i.e., the moderation effect). The results showed that hospital size has moderating effect on the relationship between RFID use and economic benefits, but not between RFID use and operational benefits. The implications, particularly from the perspective of a healthcare setting, have been discussed.

This study examined the assimilation of business intelligence (BI) systems in firms. Based on the innovation assimilation concepts from information systems (IS) studies and considering the resource-based theory (RBT) as the theoretical underpinning, an initial research model was developed. The model was then validated with survey data that we collected from 153 managers and executives from Malaysia. The collected data were analyzed by partialleast-squares (PLS) methods. The results show that the assimilation stages (i.e., implementation and routinization) are not sequential (in other words, successful implementation does not ensure routinized use of BI systems); rather, implementation of BI systems enhances organizational knowledge culture, which in turn drives routinized use of BI systems. Data analyses also find that implementation of BI systems is dependent on three factors: quality of the BI system itself, quality of its users, and the governance of BI systems in firms. Our results offer new insights to theory and practice.

This study examined the relationship between Audit committee (AC) characteristics and the level of sustainability report disclosure in gulf countries (GCC). We examined 59 listed banks listed during the period from 2013 to 2017. The results showed that AC size, independency of AC members and AC meetings have significant and positive impact on sustainability report disclosure. However, AC member’s financial expertise has negative and significant impact on the sustainability disclosure. The study provides insights about the level of sustainability reporting in GCC countries and how this kind of non-financial disclosure could improve through governance practices especially AC, which might be utilized by banks to explore how AC can and does play a role in contributing towards achievement of the sustainability disclosure.

Today’s financial service organizations have a data deluge. A number of V’s are often used to characterize big data, whereas traditional data quality is characterized by a number of dimensions. Our objective is to investigate the complex relationship between big data and data quality. We do this by comparing the big data characteristics with data quality dimensions. Data quality has been researched for decades and there are well-defined dimensions which were adopted, whereas big data characteristics represented by eleven V’s were used to characterize big data. Literature review and ten cases in financial service organizations were invested to analyze the relationship between data quality and big data. Whereas the big data characteristics and data quality have been viewed as separated domain ours findings show that these domains are intertwined and closely related. Findings from this study suggest that variety is the most dominant big data characteristic relating with most data quality dimensions, such as accuracy, objectivity, believability, understandability, interpretability, consistent representation, accessibility, ease of operations, relevance, completeness, timeliness, and value-added. Not surprisingly, the most dominant data quality dimension is value-added which relates with variety, validity, visibility, and vast resources. The most mentioned pair of big data characteristic and data quality dimension is Velocity-Timeliness. Our findings suggest that term ‘big data’ is misleading as that mostly volume (‘big’) was not an issue and variety, validity and veracity were found to be more important.

Big data is said to provide many benefits. However, as data originates from multiple sources with different quality, big data is not easy to use. Representational quality refers to the concise and consistent representation of data to allow ease of understanding of the data and interpretability. In this paper, we investigate the challenges in creating representational quality of big data. Two case studies are investigated to understand the challenges emerging from big data. Our findings suggest that the veracity and velocity of big data makes interpretation more difficult. Our findings also suggest that decisions are made ad-hoc and decision-makers often are not able to understand the ins and outs. Sense-making is one of the main challenges in big data. Taking a naturalistic decision-making view can be used to understand the challenges of big data processing, interpretation and use in decision-making better. We recommend that big data research should focus more on easy interpretation of the data.

The enterprise resource planning (ERP) adoption and use phenomenon has attracted much of the attention of production researchers over the last two to three decades. Through a systematic literature review, the purpose of this paper is to conduct a detailed examination of the investigation of ERP adoption and use in production research, more specifically. The paper provides a synthetic view of the various research approaches and designs having been used and presents an overview of the studied: vendors/systems, ERP deployment types, implementation outcomes, benefits, critical success factors, risk factors and effects based on identified 61 articles. Further research directions are proposed including the urgent need for researchers to examine ERP implementation with regards to IoT, big data analytics, machine learning and blockchain. The contribution of this study lies in the provided taxonomy, the detailed description of classifications, the adopted methodology, and the identification of research gaps.

In the current era of digitization and the rise of e-commerce sector over the past decade, it becomes essential to identify and address issues surrounding e-commerce logistics. The current study addresses the problem of location based inventory routing for delivery from warehouse to various destinations. The study uses a dynamic meta-heuristic approach, Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), to solve this problem in e-commerce. A sensitivity analysis is done to identify the coefficient values to be fixed for the ACO Engine. The longitude and latitude coordinates from Google Maps are mapped to distance metrics between the warehouse and the delivery destinations for orders to be delivered on a particular day. The analysis is conducted for a total of 346 locations and the total distance to be travelled came out to be 690.29 km using the proposed approach. Findings of the study can be applicable in multiple domains of e-commerce logistics and other graph based routing problems.

Social Media platforms play a major role in spreading information. Twitter, is one such platform which is used by millions of people to share information every day. Twitter with the recent introduction of a feature that helps its users to attach images to a tweet has changed the dynamics of tweeting. Many people now prefer to tweet with images. This study tries to analyse and predict the popularity of such tweets. This study uses learning mechanisms like decision tree, neural networks and random forests to learn the tweets posted by people with a higher number of followers. Image parameters, network variables, transactional, and historical variables of a tweet are identified and are trained for predicting the test data. This study can help businesses to build better social media tools, which allows customers to tweet data at the right time. This study also identifies the contribution of various parameters that may help a tweet to go viral.

The purpose of this paper is to review the literature on empirical research examined Small and Medium size Enterprises (SMEs) from selected journals. This has been achieved by reviewing the most examined constructs to identify the key significant factors in the literature. The selected research papers for reviewing are accessed from only high-ranking journals. The review addressed technology adoption in the context of SMEs. The paper attempts to review the studies based on technology-organisation-environment (TOE) framework to identify the relevant set of variables for technology adoption in SMEs. The most significant factors found to be relative advantage and compatibility from the technological context, top management support and size from the organizational context, and external pressure from the Environmental context. This review intended to guide future researchers to improve the predictive power of their examined models.

The article explores how social network sites (SNSs) are used in travel and tourism. Another objective is to find out and summarize whether or not SNSs are beneficial for the travel and tourism industry. This study was based on literature review that was employed to determine the most popular SNSs in travel and tourism. Then, selected widely used SNSs were compared and evaluated. The advent of Web 2.0 brought about significant changes in tourism. There are currently a lot of platforms that can be utilized in travel and tourism for various purposes. Some of these platforms focus on providing solely travel related content. However, the most popular SNSs used in tourism are still Facebook and Twitter, which do not specialize in tourism. The findings suggest that the tourism related SNSs provide their users predominantly with travel information and/or facilitate contacts. Advantages include an easy access to various content twenty four hours seven days a week regardless the time zone. Among their drawbacks belong a lack of lower control over content and difficulties with sorting the valuable from the worthless among loads of various platforms and messages.

Fake news has been spreading in greater numbers and has generated more and more misinformation, one of the clearest examples being the United States presidential elections of 2016, for which a lot of false information was circulated before the votes that improved the image of Donald Trump overs Hilary’s Clinton (Singh et al. n.d.). Because fake news is too much, it becomes necessary to use computational tools to detect them; this is why the use of algorithms of Machine Learning like “CountVectorizer”, “TfidfVectorizer”, a Naive Bayes Model and natural language processing for the identification of false news in public data sets is proposed.

Skin cancer is one of the most important challenges in modern medicine, especially skin melanoma, being the main causer of deaths for this disease. Images analysis is one of the most transcendental techniques for Melanoma early detection as a prevention method. Artificial neural networks are one of the many developed techniques for images digital processing and characteristic similarities detection. In this work a graphic processing unit (GPU) is developed for clinical skin images analysis getting through an artificial neural networks system for similar patterns detection through processing in a collection of modules tasked of silhouette detection of the object to analyze into the image, and tasked to study borders or contour to determinate a final diagnostic, the dataset used for the training of the artificial neural network designed is gotten from the MED-NODE project and project of international skin images collaboration (ISIC) with 730 images of positive and negative cases as full, the proposed system presents finally an accuracy level of 76.67%, with a level of success of 78.79% in melanoma specific cases, and 74.07% in benign lesions cases.