Journal of Information Technology

Among many leading organizations, in all sectors of industry, commerce and government, there is considerable evidence of e-business being deployed to achieve strategic goals. Where this deployment has been most successful, there is a strong case that the organization has taken an integrated approach that both builds on the organization's strengths and pays careful attention to the process of change within the organization. However, in the literature most empirical work has either studied e-business strategy and performance from the perspective of strategy content – which highlights positioning and/or unique bundles of resources – or from the perspective of strategy process – which captures human influence and e-business implementation. In this study, we integrate these two perspectives to develop a more holistic understanding of the underlying drivers of e-business performance. Further, latent class modeling techniques are used to show that the variables in our study are heavily influenced by the unobservable heterogeneity across firms. Four distinct types of firms populate our data, and the relationship between performance and its underlying determinants varies greatly between them. The implication is that a single model cannot explain the relationship between environment, structure, feasibility, managerial beliefs and performance. This is critical to our understanding of e-business as it implies that there is far less homogeneity at the individual firm level than is normally assumed in the literature.

Trust is a complex phenomenon that pervades human relations. It is essential for the success of business-to-consumer electronic commerce, where many of the tools that can be used in its absence (contracts, advance payments, insurance, etc.) may not be available. However, research as to how consumer trust can be built in an online environment is limited and varies considerably in terms of the dimensions of the problem that are examined. Consequently, much of our understanding of the antecedents of trust in online shopping context remains fragmented. This study uses a previously validated measurement instrument to investigate, in an Irish context, the existence and importance of specific perceptions and factors that are thought to predict the generation of consumer trust in Internet shopping. The research results provide evidence that Irish consumers’ perception of vendor trustworthiness is the result of specific factors that it is possible for vendors to manage. A modified model that addresses the key dimensions of consumer trust in Internet shopping in Ireland is proposed.

The e-marketplace, or broker-managed online market, is one of today's most profitable e-business models. In these marketplaces, buyers routinely engage with businesses and individual sellers with whom they have had little or no prior interaction, making trust one of the most important issues in the e-marketplaces. Therefore, a clear understanding of the trust building process in the e-marketplace is important for the success in the market. In this study, we analyze the process by which e-marketplace customers develop trust in both a market-maker and sellers. Additionally, this analysis provides a theoretical framework to identify the antecedents of trust. In the framework, we suggest that the impact of trust on transaction intention is moderated by the customer's previous experiences in the e-marketplace. The theoretical model presented here was tested on survey and transaction data collected from 692 respondents. The results indicate that customers value the importance of trust in the market-maker and sellers differentially by the level of transaction experience. It is also shown that market-maker's characteristics (reputation, website's usability and security) and seller's characteristics (expertise) play an important role in the formation and development of trust toward a market-maker and sellers, respectively.

This paper is concerned with managing e-learning communities. It reports on the process and methods adopted in an EU project called MEDFORIST. The challenges of managing this project were considerable because there was significant social diversity amongst the e-leaning community members. The paper outlines some key principles derived from teleology (or, the ‘study of purpose’) that were used to structure some key aspects of the management of the e-learning group processes. These principles were developed and used, in order to structure enquiring activities to inform the design, monitoring and evaluation activities in the provision of e-learning group processes. The paper outlines the use of such enquiry as a foundation for the continued development of the application of e-learning in contexts in which divergent human groups come together in unstructured, non-prescriptive human learning activities. As such, the paper outlines some key methodological requirements for managing e-learning group processes.

This paper develops the utilization-based information technology (IT) success model by integrating key variables from IT acceptance and IT success literatures, and empirically validates it. The model shows relations among IT utilization, performance expectancy, social influence, and user satisfaction. A field study was undertaken to evaluate and test the relationships via structural equation modeling using LISREL. The path from performance expectancy and user satisfaction to IT utilization was positive and significant. While the path from implicit social influence to IT utilization was found to be significant, explicit social influence had no significant influence on users’ IT utilization. Implications and future research directions are drawn.

Component-based development (CBD) can be an appealing proposition to globally distributed software development teams because of the almost endless possibilities to recombine and reuse components in new products. In particular, it has been suggested that CBD will improve globally distributed software development practices by allowing each site to take ownership of particular components, resulting in reduced inter-site communication and coordination activities. Such an approach may indeed overcome breakdowns in inter-site coordination efforts; however, it may also lessen opportunities to share knowledge between sites and may hamper opportunities to reuse existing components. A case study approach, exploratory in nature, was adopted to explore knowledge aspects in global component-based software development. Evidence collected at several globally distributed CBD projects suggests that the true potential of CBD, which mainly relates to reusing components, can also be achieved when components are developed in a joint manner (i.e. by several sites) by accessing and utilizing expertise regardless of its geographical location. To improve the rate of component reuse, the studied teams developed capabilities in three particular areas: inter-site coordination, communications, and knowledge management. The paper concludes by discussing the links between component reuse, CBD principles and organizational capabilities, and offers managers and engineers some guidelines to consider in their CBD projects.

Personality traits were examined in relation to job satisfaction and career satisfaction for 1059 information technology (IT) professionals. As hypothesized, eight traits were significantly related to both job and career satisfaction: Assertiveness, Emotional Resilience, Extraversion, Openness, Teamwork Disposition, Customer Service Orientation, Optimism, and Work Drive. Regression analyses indicated that sets of three and four traits accounted for 17 and 25%, respectively, of job and career satisfaction variance. As expected, career satisfaction correlations were of generally higher magnitude than corresponding job satisfaction correlations. Results were interpreted in terms of IT research and theorizing. The findings that Extraversion and Teamwork Disposition were related to job and career satisfaction contravenes job descriptions and career planning advice, suggesting that independent introverts are better suited for IT work. Given that adult personality is antecedent to work experiences, it was suggested that future research proposing to show the effects of work-related factors such as pay and challenge on job or career satisfaction should first control for personality traits. Other practical and theoretical implications were noted.

This paper aims to highlight the relevance of a cultivation approach with the goal of exploring the concrete implications it may have for public administrations (PA) involved in projects of organisational change. We suggest that adopting an approach to change that reflects the cultivation perspective is an unavoidable choice for PA, much more so than it is for the corporate world. The claim is that public-sector organisations design and implement organisational solutions that find it hard to move away from the ‘maintenance’ logic of legacy systems. Compared with the rational perspective, which is geared entirely to establishing optimal relations between means and ends, the cultivation approach enables us to make valuable advances at the interpretive level. We argue that the value of the processual and incremental perspective can be useful in creating a more realistic and less illusory reconstruction of the relationship between technological change and organisational change. In this paper, we discuss how combining policy studies with ICT social studies can help empower the cultivation logic, originating new tools for analysing and evaluating e-government results.