Earticle

This study aims to identify factors affecting the purchase of Korean IT products in overseas markets. The empirical investigation on Chinese and Japanese, which are major overseas markets of Korean IT products and within Korean wave of influence, ascertains that they have had experiences in purchasing Korean IT products such as MP3, hand held phone, and digital camera. In addition, it was revealed that the country image of Korea and valuation of Korean IT products have been enhanced by Korean wave. The result of multiple regression analysis shows that the purchase of Korean IT products is dependent upon social influence, country image, product attributes, preference on Korean wave, and cultural influence. In the separated hypotheses test of China and Japan, the same factors are found to be significant variables affecting the purchase of Korean IT products but practicality, innovativeness, and norms of consumers are found to be significant only in Chinese market. These results imply what should be considered to expedite the export of Korean IT products. In particular, this study finds different factors affecting the purchase of Korean IT products in different countries.

The development of POS (Point of Sales) systems for small retailers according to their needs is considered to be important to improve their competitive advantages. However, their financial statuses hinder the adoption of the tailored POS systems. Viewing ASP as a viable solution to provide tailored POS systems for the small retailers, this study develops ASP POS service models for the small retailers. First, this study elicits ASP POS requirements of the small retailers in the following areas：merchandising, pricing, store design and display, customer service, advertising and promotion and personal selling. Then, the requirements are clustered and the clusters are analyzed based on the characteristics of the retailers. Then, ASP service models are proposed according to the needs and profiles of the retailers.

This study investigates the effects of business environment on the e-business strategy and performance of venture firms. The development of the research model is based on the empirical studies on the strategy literature. The data from the survey was analyzed using Partial Least Squares(PLS). For Daedeok Valley Venture Firms, product innovation differentiation strategy is affected by environmental uncertainty. And, cost leadership strategy tend to be influence by environmental uncertainty. Finally, venture firm"s performance is effected by cost leadership strategy and marketing differentiation strategy. However, for in Hsinchu Science Park Venture Firms, product innovation differentiation strategy is affected by environmental uncertainty and heterogeneity. And, marketing differentiation strategy is enhanced by environment uncertainty and industry growth. In addition, cost leadership strategy tend to be influence by environmental uncertainty and heterogeneity. Finally, venture firm"s performance is effected by cost leadership strategy and product innovation differentiation strategy.

Last decade, IT industry in Korea has been developed greatly. The game industry as an international leader has given good value added to its country. Game industry is one of the speedy improved one and it showed over 20% of growth rate from 2002. Most distressings in Game industry, there are no established costing system in spite that there should be in emerging market. In 2004, Game Contents Costing Model using Mission and Event was developed and also the study of Game Elements weight was done in 2005. The cost of Game Contents can be calculated by GEP and its unit price. The study of Game Contents Sizing Model was done in 2005. The costing of Game Contents by single Game Element which represents software which is one of 3 Game Elements-plan, graphic and software-and it is counted by mission and event. If the software element only can not well represent Game Contents volume, we can include plan and graphic elements for Game Contents costing. And we can say above two methods as a costing model of Game Contents. In this paper, these models were tested empirically and proved as usable.

Today"s competitive global market makes most enterprise endeavor to specialize their business areas, and co-operate with trading partners in supply chain by the forms of collaboration, information and business process sharing. However, even the supply chain plan generated by co-operation often fails to be executed successfully, because it was generated without capacities of suppliers and more over nested suppliers. To overcome this limitation, the supply chain plan of an enterprise should be generated truly integrated way. In this paper, we classify business patterns based on scenarios about quotation processing and supply chain planning in self-integrated environment. And we present business process models about four business patterns and describe them, which are classified by whether request for quotation includes information about price, required time periods, and quantity for each required time period and whether it is received from customer or sent to supplier. In addition, we describe the types of supply chain planning problem.

This study explores the impacts of e-learning system characteristics on learner committment and satisfaction by surveying the firms utilizing e-learning systems for learning. In the study, we have, first, drawn the key factors and instruments to measure e-learning system characteristics through intensive literature review. Second, we have investigated whether the characteristics contribute to increasing learner"s commitment and satisfaction. Finally, we have examined the mediating effect of learner"s commitment between the characteristics of e-learning system and learner satisfaction. We have conducted a survey on the employees having experience in using e-learning systems for learning, and collected a total of 93 responses. The results of a statistical analysis show the following: First, expression and interaction affect the learner"s commitment. The results indicate that a learner should engage in e-learning and ultimately be more committed on it when there is a coherence in design and organization of learning contents, and when the system offers various multimedia options including audio, sound, image, graphics, etc. Second, leaner"s commitment leads to higher learning satisfaction. Finally, our results show that the commitment plays a mediating role between learner characteristics (expression, control, and trust) and learner satisfaction.

Using the service innovation system model, the development of Korean online game industry is analyzed. The model proposed by Gallouj (2002) is modified in order to reflect IT service characteristics such as network externalities. Success factors and innovations patterns of Korean online game industry are examined. First, at the early stage of her growth, Korean online game industry was not supported or coordinated by any Government policies unlike DRAM, CDMA or TFT-LCD. Many parts of technical and service innovations were unintentionally initiated by online game developing ventures without predeterminde strategies. Second, the online game industry is basically a service industry so that users’ needs and technical and service characteristics are intertwined to produce innovation. The innovation system of the online game industry is quite different from conventional product technological innovation systems in a sense that there are no blueprints for innovation as well as major players in the system. Third, Government’s policies for promotion of IT industry such as the broadband infrastructure installation policy, the hi-tech venture promotion policy and the military exemption policy contributed greatly to development of the online game industry. However, these policy tools were not intended for online game industry but in the end gave a great impact on the service innovation system of the online game industry.

Recently organizations identify information security as one of essential means for gaining competitive advantage. However, they do not actively increase investment in this area because they consider spending for information security as a cost rather than an investment. This is because organizations don"t have a clear understanding of information security objectives which can be achieved through investment, and they don"t have criteria for alternatives which can be considered in information security investment decision-making. In this paper we propose to model the decision-making process of information security investment by the AHP (Analytic Hierarchy Process). The results will show that availability is the most important criterion for the decision of information security alternatives, and intrusion detection is the most important information security alternative. We hope that the results of this paper provide a guideline for clear decision-making in information security investment.

Cluster analysis according to the activities IS practitioners perform shows that IS practitioners can be broadly categorized into two groups, generalists and specialists：generalists allocate their work time relatively evenly across the activities while specialists allocate more time on some specific activities than on other activities. Empirical findings also show that generalists and specialists are required to possess different configurations of IS knowledge and skills respectively to do their work successfully and that they possess different configurations of IS knowledge and skills. Empirical findings reveal that specialists change the activities they do mainly as their carrier evolves while generalists do not.

The introduction of a ubiquitous environment has realized commercial ubiquitous services in various industrial fields and government area. The central and/or local governments are demanding an appropriate investment evaluation model for ubiquitous service. Thus, this study develops and suggests an evaluation model for ubiquitous service by reflecting its characteristic of promoting public good, as well as its broad ripple effect on people. The investment evaluation model for ubiquitous service suggested by this study is based on Cost Benefit Analysis Method. Especially, the ‘Benefit’ is analyzed in two aspects; ‘Economic Benefit’, which shows the benefit that ubiquitous service providers to the overall local economy, and; ‘Financial Benefit’, which shows the profit of individual investors participating in the introduction of ubiquitous service. The investment evaluation model for ubiquitous service suggested by this study can be used by the central and/or local government during their evaluation for investment before introducing a ubiquitous service. Also, when introducing a ubiquitous service in public field, the model can be used to support the decision making of private businesses for investment. Finally, it can be used to promote and inform the expected benefits of introducing a ubiquitous service to local residents.

The purpose of this study is to investigate the evaluation perspectives of IT business value and empirically analyze the differences of evaluation perspectives between ex ante evaluation and post implementation evaluation, and among various information system types. 4 evaluation perspectives which have been used in the previous studies and in the field of industry practices are financial, customer, internal process, and growth, which are based on the BSC model. Data of 98 information systems have been collected from 89 companies including manufacturers, banks, insurances, and stock trading companies. As results of multi-way MANOVA test, 3 out of 8 hypothesis have been accepted statistically. While the order of importance of 4 perspectives in ex ante evaluation is customer, financial, internal process, and growth, the order of post implementation evaluation appears to be much different：that is, internal process, customer, financial, and growth. These findings provide insights for both IT practitioners and researchers.

PM (Inconsistency Pattern Modeling) is a hybrid supervised learning technique using the inconsistence pattern of input variables in mining data sets. The IPM tries to improve prediction accuracy by combining more than two different supervised learning methods. The previous related studies have shown that the IPM was superior to the single usage of an existing supervised learning methods such as neural networks, decision tree induction, logistic regression and so on, and it was also superior to the existing combined model methods such as Bagging, Boosting, and Stacking. The objectives of this paper is explore the characteristics of the IPM. To understand characteristics of the IPM, three experiments were performed. In these experiments, there are high performance improvements when the prediction inconsistency ratio between two different supervised learning techniques is high and the distance among supervised learning methods on MDS (Multi-Dimensional Scaling) map is long.

To prevent low yields in the semiconductor industry is crucial to the success of that industry. However, to prevent low yields is difficult because of too many factors to affect yield variation and their complex relation in the semiconductor manufacturing process. This study presents a new efficient detection methodology for detecting abnormal yields including high and low yields, which can forecast the yield level of a production unit (namely a lot) based on yield-related feature variables" behaviors. In the methodology, we use C5.0 to identify the yield-related feature variables that are the combination of correlated process variables associated with yield, use SOM (Self-Organizing Map) neural networks to extract and classify significant patterns of past abnormal yield lots and finally use C5.0 to generate classification rules for detecting abnormal yield lot. We illustrate the effectiveness of our methodology using a semiconductor manufacturing company’s field data.

Wireless Mesh Networks (WMNs) have emerged as one of the new hot topics in wireless communications. WMNs have been suggested for use in situations in which some or all of the users are mobile or are located in inaccessible environments. Unconstrained transmission in a WMN may lead to the time overlap of two or more packet receptions, called collisions or interferences, resulting in damaged useless packets at the destination. There are two types of collisions; primary collision, due to the transmission of the stations which can hear each other, and hidden terminal collision, when stations outside the hearing range of each other transmit to the same receiving stations. For a WMN, direct collisions can be minimized by short propagation and carrier sense times. Thus, in this paper we only consider hidden terminal collision while neglecting direct collisions. To reduce or eliminate hidden terminal collision, code division multiple access (CDMA) protocols have been introduced. The collision-free property is guaranteed by the use of spread spectrum communication techniques and the proper assignment of orthogonal codes. Such codes share the fixed channel capacity allocated to the network in the design stage. Thus, it is very important to minimize the number of codes while achieving a proper transmission quality level in CDMA WMNs. In this paper, an efficient heuristic code assignment algorithm for eliminating hidden terminal collision in CDMA WMNs with general topology.

Database administrators are demanded to acquire much knowledges and take great efforts for keeping consistent performance in system. Various principles, methods, and tools have been proposed in many studies and commercial products in order to alleviate such burdens on database administrators, and it has resulted to the automation of DBMS which reduces the intervention of database administrator. This paper suggests a resource selection method that estimates the status of the database system based on the workload characteristics and that recommends tuneable resources. Our method tries to simplify selection information on DBMS status using data-mining techniques, enhance the accuracy of the selection model, and recommend tuneable resource. For evaluating the performance of our method, instances are collected in TPC-C and TPC-W workloads, and accuracy are calculated using 10 cross validation method. comparisons are made between our scheme and the method which uses only the classification procedure without any simplification of informations. It is shown that our method has over 90% accuracy and can perform tuneable resource selection.