Celeste Ng

ABSTRACT This study attempts to investigate how culture plays a role in influencing peers’ online shopping intentions in social commerce, conducted in Facebook – a social network site in a cross-national settings. We are interested in studying the moderating effects of the culture factor on the relationship between social interaction and social commerce purchasing intention, and trust; and the mediating effect of trust on the relationship between social interaction and social commerce purchasing intention. In order to achieve this, social influence theory and social impact theory are investigated and used to explain how social interaction potentially causes the intention to purchase in a social commerce context. And, Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture are considered and the scores for the relevant dimensions of national culture are utilized to analyze the culture difference among the countries considered in this study. Online surveys are conducted. The expected main outputs from this research are: (1) better understanding of the impact of culture issue on social commerce user’s behavior, (2) better comprehension of the social commerce user characteristics and the impacts of social interaction on social commerce purchasing decision, and (3) a foundation for a better conception of social commerce model in the future.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) maintenance and upgrade activities are receiving much attention in ERP-using organizations. Annual maintenance costs approximate 25% of initial ERP implementation costs, and upgrade costs as much as 25-33% of the initial ERP implementation. Still, the area of ERP maintenance and upgrade is relatively new and understudied as compared to ERP implementation issues. Many organizations lack experience and expertise in managing ERP maintenance and upgrade effectively. This situation is not helped by the lack of a standard ERP maintenance model that could provide practitioners with guidelines on planning, implementing and upgrading an ERP. Although software maintenance model standards exist, they have been found in a recent study to be insufficient for ERP maintenance and upgrade processes. In order to bridge this gap in literature and practice, this study proposes a preliminary ERP maintenance model, reflecting fundamental ERP maintenance and upgrade act...

Abstract The worldwide installed base of Enterprise Re-source Planning (ERP) systems has increased rap-idly in size over the past 10 years now comprising tens of thousands of installations in large-and me-dium-sized organizations and millions of licensed users. Similar to ...

ABSTRACT This study attempts to investigate how culture plays a role in influencing peers’ online shopping intentions in social commerce, conducted in Facebook – a social network site in a cross-national settings. We are interested in studying the moderating effects of the culture factor on the relationship between social interaction and social commerce purchasing intention, and trust; and the mediating effect of trust on the relationship between social interaction and social commerce purchasing intention. In order to achieve this, social influence theory and social impact theory are investigated and used to explain how social interaction potentially causes the intention to purchase in a social commerce context. And, Hofstede’s dimensions of national culture are considered and the scores for the relevant dimensions of national culture are utilized to analyze the culture difference among the countries considered in this study. Online surveys are conducted. The expected main outputs from this research are: (1) better understanding of the impact of culture issue on social commerce user’s behavior, (2) better comprehension of the social commerce user characteristics and the impacts of social interaction on social commerce purchasing decision, and (3) a foundation for a better conception of social commerce model in the future.

Pharmacy is a specialized service industry, with unique inherent risks different from other industries. The biggest risk source of the pharmacy industry is “Medication Error”. As our community enters into an aging society and the policy of separation of prescribing and dispensing gradually matures, the importance of drug safety of the community pharmacy increases. This study applies the grounded theory

ABSTRACT Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are complete and complex information systems that consist of firms’ business best practices. This study examines an ERP custom-made add-on/bolt-on system of a medium-sized computer memory producer with global business units around the world, and investigates implications of the customized system from the perspectives of system fit, user attitude and acceptance, and subsequent maintenance and upgrade costs. The authors adopted a rich descriptive case study method and conduct a cost and benefit analysis prediction of subsequent maintenance and upgrade costs on the system. The empirical data indicates that although developing an add-on may create integration problems and/or compatibility problems with the ERP system, in overall, the system users accept the system better as the add-on helps in improving their job performance. Also, even though having a custom development does create additional costs in this case study, this does not necessarily cost more than not having it. Instead, having an idiosyncratic system may actually transfer a lot of benefits to the company. This is the first empirical study showing why custom development is favored by SMEs. These results and implications can be valuable to IT managers and top management when making ERP customization decisions.

Celeste See Pui Ng, ngc@fit.qut.edu.au, 617 3864 1922 Taizan Chan, taizan@fit.qut.edu.au , 617 3864 2533 ... Fax No: 617 3864 1969 Information System Management Research Centre Queensland University of Technology GPO Box 2434 Brisbane, QLD Australia 4001.

Celeste See Pui Ng, ngc@fit.qut.edu.au, 617 3864 1922 Taizan Chan, taizan@fit.qut.edu.au , 617 3864 2533 Robert Andrews, robert@fit.qut.edu.au, 617 3864 1656 ... Fax no: 3864 1969 Information System Management Research Centre Queensland University of Technology ...

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This study investigates the moderating effect of culture and the mediating effect of trust in a social network community on the relationship between social interactions and purchasing intention. Trust transference theory, social interactions, and Hofstede’s cultural dimensions are considered. The findings from the research support the moderating effect of culture and the mediating role of trust in a social network community on the relationship between social interactions (in terms of closeness and familiarity) and intention to purchase in social commerce environments. In addition, the mediating effect of trust in a social network community is conditional on culture. They also suggest that trust in a social network community can be attributed to the closeness and familiarity developed among its members resulting from social interactions. The results presented herein are in line with the trust transference theory. Empirical study results also suggest that social commerce market penetration in East Asia may have relatively fewer barriers to overcome and be more likely to succeed than in the Latin America region.

For many organizations, maintaining and upgrading enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems (large packaged application software) is often far more costly than the initial implementation. Systematic planning and knowledge of the fundamental maintenance processes and maintenance-related management data are required in order to effectively and efficiently administer maintenance activities. This paper reports a revelatory case study of Government Services Provider (GSP), a high-performing ERP service provider to government agencies in Australia. GSP ERP maintenance-process and maintenance-data standards are compared with the IEEE/EIA 12207 software engineering standard for custom software, also drawing upon published research, to identify how practices in the ERP context diverge from the IEEE standard. While the results show that many best practices reflected in the IEEE standard have broad relevance to software generally, divergent practices in the ERP context necessitate a shift in management focus, additional responsibilities, and different maintenance decision criteria. Study findings may provide useful guidance to practitioners, as well as input to the IEEE and other related standards.

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) system success is of paramount importance for almost all organizations, as it is a prerequisite for improved and continuous benefit-realization. This study investigates the impact of ERP business dynamics (i.e. system customization required), system fitness (i.e. process fit, data fit and user interface fit) and functional area operational characteristics on ERP system success, user satisfaction and system use. We draw on relevant theoretical background information to construct the research model. Surveys are administered to 91 ERP system users within a multinational food company; in-depth interviews are also conducted with some system users. Empirical results indicate that the amount of ERP system customizations and/or modifications does not have any substantial impact on ERP system use or user satisfaction. In terms of ERP system fitness, these systems are found to be more suitable for complex, functional-area operational environments. The results show that only user interface fit positively affects ERP system use, while only process fit positively influences ERP system user satisfaction. In addition, different degrees of information quality, system quality and service quality have diverse effects on some of the relationships investigated. Finally, the perceived net benefit from an ERP system depends on how the ERP system is used, rather than the management level of the users.

Maintenance to in-house applications is often done by modifying source code; however, packaged applications also enable certain maintenance to be done through changes to configurational parameters rather than through changes to the source code. This research presents preliminary evidence from the field to fill this gap in the empirical understanding of ERP maintenance. Using data from 503 ERP maintenance requests, the author’s results suggest that relative maintenance effort distributions for all maintenance categories and tailoring options are not normal distributions but heavy-tailed positively skewed distributions. Comparing ERP systems to in-house developed software, the author found a large proportion of corrective maintenance requests than adaptive requests. Enhancement and corrective task categories that use the programming tailoring option show a trend of increment in relative maintenance effort per request moving median over time. In contrast, enhancement and adaptive task categories that use the configuration tailoring option show a trend of reduction in relative maintenance effort per request moving median over time. The number of maintenance requests for all tailoring options and task categories were increasingly high four months after the introduction of a new module. Comparatively, under the same period, there was relatively higher number of maintenance requests for enhancement task category than other task categories, indicating that unique or orthogonal requirements were not available in the ERP system.

The worldwide installed base of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has increased rapidly over the past 10 years now comprising tens of thousands of installations in large- and medium-sized organizations and millions of licensed users. Similar to traditional information systems (IS), ERP systems must be maintained and upgraded. It is therefore not surprising that ERP maintenance activities have become the largest budget provision in the IS departments of many ERP-using organizations. Yet, there has been limited study of ERP maintenance activities. Are they simply instances of traditional software maintenance activities to which traditional software maintenance research findings can be generalized? Or are they fundamentally different, such that new research, specific to ERP maintenance, is required to help alleviate the ERP maintenance burden? This paper reports a case study of a large organization that implemented ERP (an SAP system) more than three years ago. From the case study and data collected, we observe the following distinctions of ERP maintenance: (1) the ERP-using organization, in addition to addressing internally originated change-requests, also implements maintenance introduced by the vendor; (2) requests for user-support concerning the ERP system behavior, function and training constitute a main part of ERP maintenance activity; and (3) similar to the in-house software environment, enhancement is the major maintenance activity in the ERP environment, encompassing almost 64% of the total change-request effort. In light of these and other findings, we ultimately: (1) propose a clear and precise definition of ERP maintenance; (2) conclude that ERP maintenance cannot be sufficiently described by existing software maintenance taxonomies; and (3) propose a benefits-oriented taxonomy, that better represents ERP maintenance activities. Three salient dimensions (for characterizing requests) incorporated in the proposed ERP maintenance taxonomy are: (1) who is the maintenance source? (2) why is it important to service the request? and (3) what––whether there is any impact of implementing the request on the installed module(s)?