Employee Attitudes towards Business-to-Employee (B2E) Portals Use

B2E portals represent a state of the art technology for organisations (businesses) to deal with employees using electronic communication, access and data management. B2E portals enable reduced operation costs for organisations and satisfied employees by offering them convenience, flexibility and agility. However, adoption, continued use, and eventual success of portals depend to a large extent on employees’ attitudes towards portal use, which generally impinges on demographic characteristics of employees. To establish the influence of demographic characteristics on employee attitudes towards portal use, this chapter reports a study on B2E portal use and employee attitudes from a large Australian university. This chapter highlights that employees’ attitudes towards portal use is only somewhat positive, and not overwhelmingly favourable. Although not statistically significant, attitudes of employee varied based on age and educational background. Senior management of organisations should thus formulate strategies to develop positive attitudes for portal use to accelerate its diffusion among employee communities. Such strategies should take into consideration of the possible effect of employees’ age and educational characteristics. E-commerce researchers could undertake further research to find out whether demographic characteristics become more significant once the portals are in use for sometime.

Knowledge Management Approach as Business Model

Knowledge management (KM) has been sprouting as one of the outstanding conversant factor strongly in trust, and trust is a critical precondition to knowledge learning and sharing management concepts (Mathew, 2008). The chapter intended to bring forward various KM strategies specially framed for the service industries looking forward for the global market and need to create advantage in providing customer satisfaction and enhancing the growth prospects, applications in organizations, indicate how to improve knowledge based performance and act a base for the service industry for developing innovation, creating global opportunities for better service. The case study highlighting knowledge strategies is designed to achieve the required knowledge sharing and output. Open-ended and closed-ended strategies plays a significant role in collaborative learning, development, building the potential and providing the knowledge creation and sharing capacities needed for strategic formulation and decision making to create competitiveness.

Validity and Reliability Evidence of a New Version of the Internet Self-Efficacy Scale

The purpose of the research was designed to bridge the gap and to update the Internet self-efficacy scale. Based on a sample of 1123 college students with 10 different majors in the northern, central, and southern portions of Taiwan, a new Internet self-efficacy scale based on 26 items was developed and validated statistically. The new version of the Internet self- efficacy scale was composed of five domains including blogs, auction, video sharing, photo albums, and wiki. Detailed evidence of the reliability and factorial analytic work were presented and suggestions for the future research were also discussed.

Assessing Empirical Relations of Music Piracy Behaviors with Lifestyle and Internet Self-Efficacy of Taiwan’s Web Users

Unlike past research on online music piracy with a focus on the economic or the legal perspective, the present study was designed to evaluate Web users’ behaviors related to the music piracy empirically. In light of the newly ratified Copyright Law in Taiwan, the behavioral intentions of Web users towards the music downloading and/or P2P file sharing were studied using a sample of 317 Taiwan’s Internet users. Results indicated that Web users were likely to reduce or modify their behaviors in order not to be in conflict with the new law. Results also showed that methods of music piracy used by respondents had nothing to do with lifestyle, but were more correlated to the Internet self-efficacy. Findings and their implications are discussed and suggestions for future work are offered in this chapter.

Role of Small and Medium Sized Enterprises in E-Supply Chain Management

This chapter studies the role that small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play in the e-supply chain management. It has two objectives: (1) it explores how a SME embraces and implements electronic supply chain management (e-SCM) and the challenges facing it, and (2) it develops strategy to deal with the challenges. The chapter draws upon a case study of IFC Global Logistics (IFC), a small-to-medium-sized third party logistics provider. The case study illustrates how the SME embraces enabling technologies, the Internet, and modern business practices to integrate its supply chain management processes and to create for itself differentiation and a competitive advantage in the tough logistics industry. Based upon a literature review and the case study, the chapter explores effective strategy for SMEs in e-supply chain management.

Emerging Business Models

This chapter, therefore, develops in scientific literature, the concept of e-Business 2.0 where e-Business companies are actively using Web 2.0 to create and appropriate value from, for, and with stakeholders. This research also makes a distinction between an internal and external focus. This research looks at e-Business 2.0 and has an external focus. E-Business 2.0 pure players depend on Web 2.0 to create and appropriate value with a focus to external customers, instead of internal organisations. There is a new wave of business communication tools including blogs, wikis and group messaging. There are new digital platforms for generating, sharing and refining information that are already popular on the Internet. These platforms are collectively labeled Web 2.0 technologies. The term ‘Enterprise 2.0’ focuses only on those platforms in which companies can buy or build in order to make the practices and outputs of their knowledgeable workers visible. Enterprise 2.0 looks at Web 2.0 technologies and practices within organisations and businesses and is therefore, referred to as internal focus. Enterprise 2.0 is the term used to describe how a Web 2.0 approach can be used to work more collaboratively together in business. Enterprise 2.0 is the use of emergent social software platforms within companies or between companies and their partner or customers. However Enterprise 2.0 is much more than just ’Web 2.0 for business’. Moreover, the study proposed a case study of Enterprise 2.0 to demonstrate by a detailed KPI analysis, how collaboration platforms (and related HR management) can drastically improve the global performance of an international group. Furthermore, the study was to further propose another case study of e-gov 2.0. Enterprise 2.0 is an evolutionary step forward releasing employees from the constraints and limitations of the legacy communication and productivity tools. The study concludes the challenges of the Enterprise 2.0: ten facts and Six Enterprise 2.0 - Myths. Enterprise 2.0, being more a philosophy than a technology, can truly create huge added value for organizations in any sector and it is often remarkable to see in what way the Enterprise 2.0 methods are used to solve specific problems.

Rethinking Business Process Reengineering

The purpose of this chapter is to introduce a new approach–Empirical Modelling–to computing and business modelling. Today most business processes rely on informal knowledge and social behaviour but these are areas which have not, so far, been well suited for modelling with computer-based techniques. For this, Empirical Modelling is introduced to modelling with computers, which has natural application to business process modelling. This chapter will suggest a way of applying this approach to integrated system development with BPR. A framework using this approach, SPORE (situated process of requirements engineering), is extended to encompass applications to participative BPR (i.e. supporting many users in a distributed environment). An outline of an application of our methods to a warehouse management system is included.

Taiwan’s Corporate Governance

This chapter discusses the meaning and internal and external mechanisms of Taiwan’s corporate governance, explains why this kind of mechanism cannot prevent the agency problem, and demonstrates the importance of business ethics by looking at the flaws in Taiwan’s corporate governance. Other questions addressed in this study include what limitations are in the internal and external mechanisms of Taiwan’s corporate governance, what makes the agency problem seem inevitable, and whether business ethics may compensate for the shortcomings in Taiwan’s corporate governance. In this chapter, the correlation between business ethics and corporate governance is reviewed and organized in order to demonstrate how this topic was viewed by previous scholars along with a proposal of how these two topics can be joined together. The question of how the agency problem in corporate governance emerges is then examined, followed by a literature review of past studies on the influences of introducing business ethics on the agency problem as well as their relationship. The findings of the new business model are discussed in the section V.

The CSFs Methodology and Modified DEA Approach to Construct a New Business Model to Evaluate Operational Performance of all International Tourist Hotels in Taiwan

This chapter evaluates the operational performance of International Tourist Hotels in Taiwan, and explores the critical success factors that contribute to good performance. This research initially adopted data envelopment analysis (DEA) to measure the relative operational efficiency of 57 international tourist hotels in Taiwan. However, the DEA approach can only determine relative operational efficiency but does not identify the factors that give rise to inefficiency or lead to efficiency. Furthermore, DEA only calls attention to those hotels in which efficiency and inefficiency exist, but cannot provide suggestions on how to improve operational efficiency. A qualitative approach is a good way to address this limitation of DEA. Thus, after using DEA to evaluate hotel’s operational efficiency, this research used a qualitative approach to further explore the critical success factors that contribute to hotels having good performance in Taiwan. Through determination of these factors, this research provides hotel managers with a list of advice and recommendations to develop effective strategies to meet a highly competitive environment.

Adopting Web 2.0 in English Writing Course

In this chapter, the authors present a Web 2.0 collaborative learning approach that facilitates the English learning process for universities in Taiwan. In traditional English writing course, the lack of intensive interactions between students and teacher may not provide sufficient information for students to improve their writing content. In order to understand how web 2.0 and collaborative peer group facilitate English learning, the authors elaborate the collaborative learning process in both micro view and macro view. The micro view focuses on individual students’ viewpoint and their learning stages in web 2.0 collaborative learning. The macro view of learning approach focuses overall interactions between students, teacher and student peer groups. The proposed web 2.0 learning model allows learners to access abundant learning materials from their peer groups. Students can learn though peer interactions and enhance the learning motivation in the collaborative learning environment. By peer learning and competition, students can benefit from various learning resources by adopt web 2.0 concept in the collaborative English writing course.