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By developing an industrial structure change model, this paper investigates the role of the information technology in explaining the process of industrial structure optimization and upgrading in China from 2001 to 2019. Then, we put forward and discuss the substitution effect and the pervasiveness effect of information technology, and deduce the theoretical propositions from the model. We use the Malmquist index method to estimate the rate of information technology progress, and then choose the genetic algorithm to calibrate the parameters of the model. The research conclusions innovatively explain how the information technology can promote the industrial structure optimization and upgrading in China based on the substitution effect and the pervasiveness effect of information technology in detail. The results point out that when the contribution of information technology to total factor productivity of the tertiary industry is higher than that of the secondary industry, the pervasiveness effect of information technology can promote the upgrading of the industrial structure. Under the comprehensive effect of the pervasiveness effect and substitution effect of information technology, the industrial structure tends to be more optimized. The further heterogeneity analysis shows that the driving effect of information technology on the optimization and upgrading of industrial structure in regions with “servitization” characteristics is more significant. It highlights policy suggestions designed to adopt innovation-driven and technology development strategy, regional industrial structure transformation and economy development strategy.

With the change of social structure and management mode, emergency social security incidents have become the focus of social security management. In order to solve the problems of insufficient overall performance and low security in the practical application of cloud management mode in traditional social security emergencies. With the use of improved pick-KX load balancing algorithm and RSA encryption algorithm, this paper optimizes the cloud computing model and applies it to the cloud management mode of emergent social security events. Then the optimized cloud management model is simulated and evaluated by the multi-level fuzzy comprehensive evaluation model. The simulation results reflect that the proposed cloud management model in this paper is able to effectively improve the management effect of social security events.

Service functions are major component of every industry. The evolution of service functions have seen manually intensive tasks being replaced by a combination of mental and interactive tasks. As a part of this transformation, we have seen an increasing dependency on the high technology, actually information technology, mostly with computer-communications and the web. This high technology will finally replace the service functions by a combination of knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual tasks in the future. However, these knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual service functions could be enjoyable for the restricted person, due to the difficulties of the man (customers)-machine (PCs, web-server machines) interface and also the service providers are not able to obtain much more customer's individual and abstruse information for providing the customer's individual services, due to the customers' privacy problem. In this paper we focus on of knowledge intensive, interactive and customer's individual services in the future. We emphasize the importance of developing the mechanism of humanization for making these services enjoyable for anyone and the personalization for enjoyable the more individual services, and show some examples for these mechanisms in which humanization is realized by humanoid robots and personalization is realized by customers' privacy preserving scheme. We present a feedback system including the mechanism for humanization and personalization. By performing this feedback system, anyone who is not familiar to machines, can interact with machines like human-beings and can poll or report even though privacy related information anonymously to service providers. By periodically performing this feedback system, the customers' knowledge, information, suggestions and ideas can could be accumulated and the service providers could provide more individual services to customers, Once humanization and personalization mechanism are developed, by performing our feedback systems, we enhance customers' convenience and reduce the incidence of operation errors and thereby improve their productivity and quality of their life.

The failure ratio of new ventures across the globe pushes researchers towards finding solutions, but the response is not effective. This research project surveyed 297 new manufacturing enterprises from China to find factors that significantly contribute to the success of new ventures. The results indicated that intellectual capital significantly sustains performance and sustainable competitive advantage in new ventures. The relationship between intellectual capital and new venture performance is partially mediated by a sustainable competitive advantage. Information technology capabilities do not positively impact new venture performance and competitiveness. Entrepreneurial orientation has a significant influence on differentiation strategy and new venture performance. Sustainable competitive advantage does not mediate the path between entrepreneurial orientation and new venture performance, but it fully mediates the association between market orientation and new venture performance. This study recommends that new enterprises focus on intellectual capital, entrepreneurial orientation, and market orientation to acquire a sustainable position in the competitive market. New ventures should also evaluate their technological capabilities to understand why they do not play a vital role. Further implications have been stated.

Infosys Technologies Limited, the Bangalore-based information technology company, embarked on a global recruitment program in 2006. The first batch of recruits from U.S. universities were brought to the company's Mysore training facility in India and put through a rigorous 16-week training program. By November 2007, the third U.S. batch was on campus for training along with the first batch from the U.K. Each of these batches had around 125 recruits. The company's CEO had charged Infosys' Head of Administration and Human Resources Development, Mohandas Pai, to step up the recruiting to around 1,000 overseas recruits a year from countries such as the US, UK, continental Europe, and China as a way to globalize the workforce.

Pai was concerned that this ambitious recruitment program would strain the company's training function. His concern stemmed from the fact that the trainers had to deal with cultural differences and varied learning styles of overseas recruits. The trainers had done a commendable job of making adjustments while training was ongoing, but Pai wondered if the same adjustments could be made when the scale of recruits increased dramatically. This case is useful for examining the issues of training capacity and cross-cultural training.

This case study focuses on how a Korean software firm, CCMedia, executed a successful global strategy by merging with its technology partner to gain access to international markets. The case study also reviews the key challenges CCMedia faced after the merger. Intangible assets, such as IT technology, could allow CCMedia to earn overseas capital investment through the merger. With capital and human resources backup from IT Inspire Inc., its former technology partner, CCMedia could enter foreign markets. This case examines the transformation of a strategic technology alliance to a hierarchical structure as a result of a merger. It shows that technology-related alliances could play an important role in possible takeover activities. It provides insights into strategies that technology-based small businesses in Korea could follow to enter international markets.

The article is an overview of bioinformatics in Asia Pacific.

In this paper, we discuss how information technology (IT) affects and influences people to make decisions. We first introduce human behavior mechanism and habitual domains — the software that drive the behaviors. Then we discuss the impacts of IT on decision elements and environment, and then IT's impacts on a variety of decision problems including routine problems, mixed routine problems, fuzzy problems and challenging problems. IT is useful in solving routine problems but not as obvious in solving fuzzy and challenging problems. To solve fuzzy and challenging problems, an effective concept and model of competence set analysis is introduced. Finally, we describe three types of competence set analysis and show how IT can help in these three types of problems.

Knowledge Technology (KT) is an important new development, extending and ultimately replacing IT. Meaningful and substantial Knowledge Management (KM) is crucially dependent on a useful and operational definition of knowledge. Such notion of knowledge must be clearly differentiated from so called "explicit (or codified) knowledge", i.e. from information. Information, in any form or shape, is not knowledge. While information is a symbolic description of action, knowledge is action itself. The understanding that knowing is doing and doing is knowing comes from the Western philosophical tradition of pragmatism, exemplified by Dewey, Lewis and Polanyi. In this paper, we look at knowledge as a manifest ability of purposeful coordination of action and redefine the purpose of knowledge management as turning information (description) into knowledge (action) and not vice versa. While there can be an information overload, there is never any "knowledge overload".

This article investigates the market reaction to a sample of announcements of business service outsourcing arrangements made by UK quoted companies between 1991 and 1997. Event study methodology is applied to daily stock returns to measure the reaction, in the form of excess returns, immediately prior to and at the date of an outsourcing contract announcement. The conclusion is that initial announcements tend to enjoy positive and significant reaction and that the larger companies in the sample show a more positive reaction than smaller companies. Overall outsourcing announcements appear to be associated with excess returns but the absence of any recognized basis for disclosure prevents a complete analysis of such events.

The primary purposes of this special issue are two-fold. First, this issue provides an arena for telecommunications' subject matter experts and scholars to present their research. Second, we aim to inform the journal readers of the new technologies, concepts, applications, innovations, and scientific breakthroughs in the field.

Electronic Business (EB) on the Internet is an attractive technology for traditional business organizations to improve their financial performance. The Web-based economic model is supposedly more efficient at the transaction cost level. It also provides cost-effective marketing, global market access, and a disintermediation of costly distribution channels. The current paper uses super-efficiency data envelopment analysis (DEA) model to evaluate the financial performance of e-business initiatives in the retail industry. Because of the possible infeasibility of the super-efficiency DEA model, the use of super-efficiency DEA model has been restricted. This paper demonstrates that if super-efficiency is interpreted as input saving or output surplus achieved by a specific efficient DMU, infeasibility does not necessary indicate the best performance. A new approach is applied to correctly characterize and rank the performance of a set of EB companies and non-EB companies in the retail industry. This analysis indicates that the EB companies perform better in some areas than their non-EB counterpart.

This paper examines the extent of end-user satisfaction on the service delivery process by the Royal Malaysian Customs (RMC) as the agency moves toward implementing electronic government (e-government) initiatives. The RMC has in fact been identified as one of the prominent and technology-pioneering government agencies in the country and therefore suitable for delivering electronic public services. Data were collected in mid-2009 from two types of customers, i.e., internal (Customs officers) and external (forwarding agents, importers, and bonded warehouse licensees) who use the Customs Information Systems (CIS) C8 form for transshipment of goods. Overall, the findings suggest that both types of customers are either indecisive and/or doubtful with the performance of the CIS. These findings are then extended to the broader context of information technology. It is of paramount importance that the RMC takes appropriate measures to satisfy both its internal and external customers by provision of improving its service delivery process through its CIS to produce desirable results.

This paper empirically investigates a sample of research and development (R&D) projects in Taiwanese high-tech industry with a three-fold purpose. The first objective is to assess the associations among information technology (IT) application, knowledge management (KM), team process (TP), and R&D project performance. The second objective is to determine whether TP may mediate the effect of KM on R&D project performance. The third objective is to examine the moderating role of project characteristics in the relationship between TP and R&D project performance. The structural equation modeling (SEM) approach was used to validate the research model. These analyses suggest that TP may fully mediate the effects of KM on R&D project performance in terms of quality and development success and schedule and cost performance. The results also show that industry sector (IS) and team size (TS) have a moderating effect on the relationship between TP and R&D project performance.

This paper presents a multicriteria approach to the evaluation of information technology (IT) projects. In this paper, we present the steps of the model to evaluate IT project investments, including the identification of IT project investment, the construction of IT investment or IT project categories, the assessment of the importance of criteria and establishes final recommendations. The methodology proposes a framework, based on multicriteria analysis, that describes the importance of classifying and prioritizing IT projects investments before taking decisions. Decisions on IT investments should consider the different characteristics of each IT project and in each case evaluate the tangible and intangible benefits. However, measurements of intangible benefits are usually subjective and require a formal procedure to minimize the difficulty and consequence of this. Thus, the model enables us to handle this subjectiveness and it is exemplified with a numerical illustration, the data being drawn from a preview study.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the results obtained by the information technology (IT) governance committee (ITGC) of a company undergoing a strategic realignment in the sorting and prioritizing of its portfolio of IT investment projects (CAPEX). The establishment of committees is one of the best practices in corporate governance, and it is often associated with the sorting and prioritizing of project alternatives, a problem typical of multicriteria decision-making (MCDM) and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA). One of the aids to resolve this problem was the development of a methodology in steps, and a new hybrid multicriteria method consists of the analytic hierarchy process (AHP) and technique for order of preference by similarity to ideal solution-2 normalization (TOPSIS-2N) techniques. The application of the hybrid AHP–TOPSIS-2N model proved to be consistent and robust, generating two priority sorting possibilities aligned with the strategic situation of the organization and a range of improvements in terms of governance and processes for the ITGC of the company.

This paper had developed an effective information technology (IT) vendor selection model for banking & financial services industries (BFSI). For any business, profitability and growth depends on the right vendor selection in their purchase process. This paper identifies ten most influencing and important criteria with 43 sub-criteria to comprehend the vendor selection process. Furthermore, the authors developed a vendor selection score model using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) and Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP). This article intends to inform practice and conclude with practical recommendations to BFSI for vendor selection. The proposed composite technique identified the most eligible vendor to meet up with the buyer’s strategies. This article suggests the most desirable vendor for the required benefit. Vendor 1 (Silverlake) with a score of 44% promised to be the most recommended one that also performed consistently in the sensitivity test.

Even though that there has been increasing focus on the energy-efficient operation of vessels and that the knowledge of cost-effective improvements is widespread in the industry, energy-efficient operation is only a minor topic on board many working vessels. A significant reduction in fuel can be achieved through changes in the operational practices, but to establish a successful system for best practices within energy-management the installation of a decision support system is essential. This article presents a decision support system for working vessels to determine best practice for the reduction of fuel consumption. Requirements for the system are defined through interviews with crew and observations on board vessels. Case studies are used for illustrating the usefulness. The use of generators onboard is analyzed using the software. It is found that the generators are not running optimally, but the crew can use the software to re-organize and find the most fuel-efficient loading range for the generators on board.

Big data starts booming in 2013 and has multiple applications in all walks of life. In such an environment, big data for information technology (BDI) and decision making (BDD) have formed some hot topics in common. This paper reviews the body of BDI and BDD research studies from 1994 to 2020, using bibliometrics analysis. The aim of this paper is to explore the current status, the correlation between BDI and BDD, the future trends and challenges. From time and space dimensions, CiteSpace and VOS viewer are used to obtain the annual trends of documents, the distribution of countries and sources, the citations and the h-index of BDI and BDD. The top three productive countries are the USA, China and the UK. From the perspective of h-index, the USA and the UK are at the forefront of the world. The value of big data is realized through information acquisition, storage, analysis, expression transmission and service sharing technologies, and the decision-making techniques exist throughout the process of big data analysis. “Business” and “Information science library science” are the latest hotspots of BDI. The appliances in the organization, supply chain management, education, and the environment are recent themes of BDD. Big data technology processing capabilities and network security issues are the main challenges in the future. This study contributes to the body of knowledge on BDI and BDD, and hops to help in understanding the evolution of them in relevant fields.