Information Systems Research in Vietnam

Information Systems (IS) have been widely applied in Vietnam, and the IS advent has received much attention from Vietnamese practitioners and researchers. However, a shared account of IS knowledge in Vietnam is still lacking. Addressing this gap, we need a shared understanding of what we know and what we are doing, which can help coordinate our future actions. This introductory chapter sets a background for this shared understanding by reviewing the main themes of IS research in Vietnam. The chapter then updates the progress of the field by introducing nine current IS studies that are based in Vietnam. As a result, it contributes a contemporary reference and outlines future research directions for IS research in Vietnam.

Optimising business processes (BP) is the essential task of any business organisation. However, it is not easy for managers to adjust limited organisational resources to achieve a specific business goal with the desired level of efficiency and effectiveness. Multi-method modelling, combined between discrete event and agent-based modelling, is used to illustrate how it helps simulate real situations emphasising limitations in resources to optimise business processes for the fashion e-retailing to satisfy their customers through omnichannel. Customer support centre (CSC) plays a crucial role in serving e-consumers by high volumes of service and support requests, common questions related to products, fulfilment, and returns with fast response to different communication channels (e.g., phone, email, live-chat, social media) (Ilk et al in Decis Support Syst 105:13–23, 2018, [1]). Allocating and assigning service workforces across channels with different skill requirements (e.g., talking over the phone, text-based messaging, social media monitoring) is a complex task to optimise human resources. In this study, multi-method modelling is applied to design and optimise a customer support centre for a fashion omnichannel e-retailing to deal with customer requests. Several scenarios are established to adjust the number of workers as organisational resources and analyse the efficiency and effectiveness based on lost calls and utilisation in fulfilling customers’ requests. Multiple scenarios are analysed for normal conditions and promotional events using the software AnyLogic. The results of these scenarios are discussed, compared, and contrasted to identify the model’s outcomes in each scenario and to suggest many practical recommendations for managers in designing and optimising business processes. BP can contribute to overall business performance by satisfying and attracting customers while maintaining efficient and effective organisational resources. Also, the role of CSC in fashion omnichannel e-retailing is highlighted in fulfilling customer requests. Finally, through the study, multi-method modelling shows its strengths and limitations in facilitating managers in designing business processes and optimising the company resources to maximise efficiency and effectiveness in the dynamic fashion business environment.

The start-up ecosystems have emerged in different countries and areas all over the world since the 2000s, including key facilitators and essential capabilities that gravitate toward growth ventures. These ecosystems focus on particular disciplines, present a variety of features and dynamics, and have their own variety of evolution over time. Since Vietnam has pushed strategies and incentives to take advantage of digital technology in order for the country’s start-up sector and supporting technical adaptation to grow, the high-tech sector has been dominating the start-up ecosystem in Vietnam. This chapter sheds light on the dynamics of the high-tech start-up ecosystem in Vietnam by taking the Quang Trung Software City (QTSC) as a critical case. By adopting a qualitative research inquiry based on interview data collected from managers in QTSC, and start-ups operating and located in QTSC, this chapter highlights several facilitators that QTSC has delivered to digital start-ups. Our chapter contributes to the emerging literature on the development of the high-tech start-up ecosystem and our case ecosystem also contributes highly to improving the maturity of Vietnam tech start-ups.

Enterprise architecture (EA) adoption initiates broad changes in organizations and organizational functions. However, the existing literature on how and what factors influence the changes in EA adoption remains limited. Our study aims to fill in this gap. We study how the EA-initiated changes occur and what are the factors influencing it. Our process-oriented perspective, our data from a qualitative case study, and the lens of organizational change illustrate how the changes occur in organizations, what the factors are, and how especially managers and their activities influence the change. We show that the change is both sociotechnical and punctuated, oscillating between different organizational levels.

Blockchain-enabled traceability has been widely touted as having a great potential for improving food supply chains. Proposed benefits include: outbreak tracing, verifying ingredient origins, monitoring environmental compliance and automating payments. Blockchain-enabled food supply chains have not been widely studied in developing countries. Therefore, a comprehensive evaluation of blockchain-enabled traceability in food supply chains was conducted to gain a deeper understanding of the potential impacts on food supply chain sustainability. A case study of a pork supply chain in Vietnam was analysed to understand the context in a developing country. The analysis was conducted through the lens of a triple-bottom-line blockchain framework for supply chains.

While prior research has examined the cognitive factors that influenced the information security behaviors of remote workers, little was known about the impact of the different work environments on these behaviors. Moreover, organizations and employees were abruptly forced to embrace working from home due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, which created unprecedented problems and inconvenience in how employees perform daily work at home that could jeopardize organizational information security. This study adapts the technology-organization-environment (TOE) framework to investigate the factors that influence how employees in Vietnam protect organizational information security while working from home during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our qualitative findings drawn from in-depth interviews with 20 respondents reveal several factors that influence the employee protection of organizational InfoSec at home, such as the use of secure software for remote work, the flexible yet distracting work environment at home, and the lack of social interactions with colleagues that could demotivate personal information security efforts. We offer practical recommendations for organizations to prepare for flexible and secure workplaces in the future, especially to meet the continuing demand for working from home after the COVID-19 pandemic. In terms of theoretical implications, future studies are encouraged to focus on exploring the contextual and situational factors that influence employee information security behaviors.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how the adaptability to telework has become the key to resilience for businesses and workers. In this chapter, we study how organizations can implement telework effectively to both enhance organizational resilience and improve workers’ productivity and welfare. To that end, we conducted a self-administered survey in Vietnam with five-hundred and fifty-four employees across 52 companies based in Ho Chi Minh City and Ha Noi. The quantitative analysis is further supported by informal interviews with by mid-level managers and senior executives in the University of Hawaii—Shidler Vietnam EMBA program. We identify workers’ technology readiness as an important driver for the productivity telework in that technology readiness has a positive and statistically significant impact on working from home productivity. Furthermore, adequate equipment and training positively and significantly influenced working from home productivity. This increase in productivity leads to higher individual performance expectations and company performance. Given strong evidence presented in this study supporting telework, senior management and executives participated in the survey recommend digital transformation strategy to cope with the new normal must consider the following tasks: (1) Technical capacity enhancement; (2) Categorize employees into different groups; (3) Change the management mindset; (4) Build a corporate culture for telework; and (5) Organize periodic virtual events such as team building, and open forum.

Thanks to the prevalence of mobile applications (mobile apps), consumer behavior is shifting from conventional to online. Globally, mobile commerce has taken precedence over other forms of transaction due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic except for Generation X (Gen X) customers. They have restricted access to modern technologies and are critically impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Hence, this chapter applied the Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology model (UTAUT), and Task-technology fit models (TTF) to determine how the pandemic and Gen X characteristics affect buying behaviors in the electronic marketplace. The primary research method was the quantitative approach, in which data was collected from 467 respondents through a structured questionnaire. The findings indicate that Gen X consumers’ mobile commerce buying intentions are influenced favorably by mobile shopping (m-shopping) efficiency, effort expectancy, and the perceived severity of COVID-19. Generation X’s shopping behavior in the e-marketplace through mobile apps was also affected by the usability of mobile applications and their desire to purchase online. Additionally, the Gen X consumers’ expectation of effort was negatively impacted by the usability of mobile apps.

The study investigates the factors influencing customers’ intention to use the GoFood application in Vietnam. The research model adopts the components of The Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). The sample size includes 295 respondents who are frequent customers of the GoFood application. The results show that 5 factors positively impact the intention to use the GoFood application: Subjective Norms (SN), Perceived Usefulness (PU), Perceived Ease of Use (PEU), Service Performance (SP) and Perceived Price Fairness (PPF). Subjective Norms (SN) are the most significant factor affecting the intention to use the GoFood application among Vietnamese consumers. The findings also provide some managerial implications for GoFood and other food delivery applications (FDAs) to serve customers efficiently in Vietnam.

In dealing with the global pandemic, many sectors have extensive crisis management research to lean on but education has been virtually overlooked. With the recent global pandemic, the role of Internet of Things has been greater than ever before as most of economic activities have moved to online platforms. Education sector is one of the most heavily impacted where the immediate effect of lockdowns has been closure of schools, universities, colleges. Lockdowns sprung on everyone and everything, not just mode of studies, but also wellbeing, course effectiveness, student tuition, teacher’s income. Despite the ever-presiding change resistance in academia, digitization of education took place almost instantaneously. The COVID-19 pandemic acted as an accelerator for education digital transformation utilizing a wide variety of digital solutions to facilitate classroom teaching and learning. Through a survey of 913 Vietnamese students, this study seeks to explore the digitization of education in Vietnam and its implications on Vietnamese students. The author expects to explore the students’ readiness for digital transformation and their utilization of IoT in higher education through a quantitative regression analysis. Results show that students’ readiness for digital transformation is positively correlated with all four independent factors and in the following respective order of importance: COVID-19, self-study ability, perceived ease of use, perceived usefulness and attitude.