Earticle

Web information systems have been utilized extensively over the past decade. The Internet allows for the entire sales cycle to be conducted on one medium, nearly instantaneously. From making the consumer aware of the product to providing additional information to transacting the final purchase, the Internet can accomplish them all. The Internet is like one big point-of-sales display, with easy access to products and the ability for impulse shopping. Here, we point out different aspects of information technology (IT) in marketing. Consequently, we propose two frameworks as decision aids in web-based marketing environment.

The majority of graphs and visuals made publicly available by Thai listed companies tend to be disjointed and minimal. Only a little over fifty percent of the total 478 companies included graphic representations of their business operations and performance in the form of two or three dimensional spreadsheet based graphs in their annual reports, investor relations documents, websites and so on. For novice users, these visual representations are unlikely to give the big picture of what is the company’s financial position and performance. Neither will they tell where the company stands in its own operating environment. The existing graphics and visuals, in very rare cases, can provide a sense of the company’s future outlook. For boundary users such as audit committees whose duty is to promote good governance through transparency and disclosure, preliminary interview results show that there is some doubt as to whether the inclusion of big-picture visuals can really be of use to minority shareholders. These boundary users expect to see more insightful visuals beyond those produced by traditional spreadsheets which will enable them to learn to cope with the on-going turbulence in today’s business environment more quickly. However, the debate is still going on as to where to draw the line between internal or external reporting visuals.

Why does e-Learning service for individuals remain in the early development stage? To find the answers of this question, we adopted usefulness and intention to continued use as dependent variables based on technology acceptance model and inferred convenience, cost-effectiveness, social presence, interactivity, concentration, and procrastination as independent variables based on literature review and interview with e-Learning users. Convenience and cost-effectiveness of e-Learning tend to enhance usefulness and/or intention to continued use, while lack of social presence, interactivity, and concentration of e-Learning and academic procrastination tend to hinder usefulness and/or intention to continued use. To prove this research model, we used a data set collected from the survey. The respondents of survey were the undergraduate students who used voluntarily e-Learning. Data analysis was conducted using 275 respondents by partial least square. The analysis result of causal relation indicated that convenience and cost-effectiveness influenced both usefulness and intention to continued use, and that cost-effectiveness and concentration influenced only intention to continued use. But, interactivity and procrastination did not influence usefulness and intention to continued use.

ASP service users’ needs for flexible and customized services to deal with changes in business environments and user contexts seems to be appealing due to the progress of technology and IT paradigm such as ubiquitous computing and web 2.0. Through the lens of expectancy confirmation and flexibility, we explored factors that influence users’ repurchase intent and organizational benefit in ASP services. With an empirical study, we examined information quality, service quality, flexibility, customization, user satisfaction, trust in ASP services can contribute to the repurchase intent and organizational benefit. In addition to, business type and company size are added to the research model as control variables for user satisfaction, trust, and repurchase intent. Our findings suggested that the service quality and flexibility significantly were cruicial determinant of user satisfaction in ASP services. Furthermore, user satisfaction significantly influenceS repurchase intent, and organization benefits were affected by repurchase intent. This study has important implications for academic researchers and practitioners who seek to understand factors that affect ASP service users’ repurchase intent and organization benefits.

The competence of enterprise for managing information is evaluated not by the amount of information but by the quality of information such as response time, data consistency, and data correctness. The degradation of data quality is usually caused by the inappropriate process of managing the structure and value of stored data. According to the recent survey on the actual condition of data quality management, the correctness and consistency of data appeared to be the most problematic area among the six criteria of data quality management such as correctness, consistency, availability, timeliness, accessibility, and security. Moreover, the problem was more serious in case of small and medium-sized companies than large enterprises. In this paper, therefore, we attempt to propose a new data quality control methodology for small and medium-sized companies that can improve the correctness and consistency of data without consuming too much time and cost. To adopt the proposed methodology to real application immediately, we provided some scripts for as-is analysis and devised automation tools for managing naming rules of vocabulary, terminology, and data code. Additionally, we performed case study on the distribution service of a small-sized company to estimate the applicability of our tool and methodology.

The purpose of this research is to identify the critical factors influencing on the continuous use of video telephony service for mobile devices. An empirical analysis has been performed by using service quality, brand image, price, fun as influencing factors, and satisfaction and commitment as mediating factors. The partial least squares(PLS) methodology with 228 questionnaires has been conducted. The results indicated that brand image, price, and fun were mediated by satisfaction and commitment to have a statistically significant influence on continuous use of video telephony service. Service quality showed a significant effect on continuous use mediated by satisfaction while it did not show any influence through commitment. Based on the results, companies in the communication service industry should consider and focus on the improved brand image, appropriate fees, and individual preferences for fun for the successful marketing activities, and should also maintain amicable relations with their customers.

Customer behavior pattern discovery is the fundament for conducting customer oriented services and the services management. But, the composition, need, interest and experience of customers may be continuously changing, thereof lead to the difficulty in refining a stable description of their consistent behavior pattern. This paper presented a new method for the behavior pattern discovery from a changing collection of customers. It was originally inspired from the swarm intelligence of ant colony. By the adaptive clustering, some typical behavior patterns which reflect the characteristics of related customer clusters can extracted dynamically and adaptively.

We develop an intelligent information system in a multilayer electronic supply chain network. Using the internet for supply chain management (SCM) is a key interest for contemporary managers and researchers. It has been realized that the internet can facilitate SCM by making real time information available and enabling collaboration between trading partners. Here, we propose a multi-agent system to analyze the performance of the elements of a supply network based on the attributes of the information flow. Each layer consists of elements which are differentiated by their performance throughout the supply network. The proposed agents measure and record the performance flow of elements considering their web interactions for a dynamic route selection. A dynamic programming approach is applied to determine the optimal route for a customer in the end-user layer.