Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and farmers’ decision-making across the agricultural supply chain

Using a case study of the Indian Tobacco Company's (ITC) e-Choupal initiative, the paper empirically analyses the role of information delivery through information and communication technology (ICT) in enhancing decision-making capabilities of Indian farmers. Users of e-Choupal show significantly better decision-making aptitudes, as compared to non-users, on various agricultural practices across the agricultural supply chain. Further, socio-demographic background's of the users such as education levels, the social category they belong to, income level's, and landholding size also play a significant role in impacting decision-making aptitudes. The impact is particularly prominent in production planning and post-harvest and marketing related decisions. Policy implications of these findings are discussed. The study emphasizes the importance of designing ICT enabled information systems to suit the socio-demographic profile of the user groups.     

Understanding the dynamics of users’ belief in software application adoption

Research has identified numerous factors that influence initial technology adoption decisions. However, extant studies consider beliefs to be static rather than dynamic over the adoption time-span. Various models have been employed to identify adoption behavior, pre- and post-adoption, however, there is little research on the dynamics of users’ belief structures over time and the inter-relationships among them. This study aims to investigate the dynamic nature of users’ beliefs and the relationships among their dynamics, i.e., rates of change. We test our research model based on data obtained at three time-windows using a parallel-growth process model. The results reveal that self-efficacy, usefulness and intention to use are likely to be dynamic, and increase with time. The rate of change in self-efficacy influences the rate of change in usefulness, which in turn affects the rate of change in intention to use. This study theoretically contributes to expanding the extant cross-sectional TAM research to include time-phased TAM studies, and highlights the role of self-efficacy as an important determinant of the dynamics.     

Exploring the usability of web portals: A Croatian case study

Web portals act as a single point of access to information and services relevant to person's work or personal interests. Market research findings related to Croatian web context report that nowadays horizontal information portals are the most visited sites. Whether they reach their aim of facilitating users’ access to diverse resources and to which extent, remains an open question. In this paper, this issue is addressed by two case studies conducted for summative assessment of Croatian horizontal information portals. Approach assembled expert inspection and user assessment that integrated a number of empirical methods into laboratory-based testing. We report that the results of inspection method were not in agreement with the ones obtained from user test methods. Although differences of this kind have been reported elsewhere, these were not as evident as in these studies. What is very interesting and represents a main contribution of the research is that in both rounds of evaluations this outcome is very sharp and clear. This suggests that we should conduct both kinds of assessments as they seem to be complementary. Evaluation provided some general findings and know-how from the experience and we believe that many readers, both practitioners and researchers, can learn from it.     

Persistence of the middle mile problem for rural local exchange carriers

Cost of middle mile bandwidth is declining, but the bandwidth required to meet the needs of broadband subscribers is increasing. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has set a Broadband Availability Target of 4 Mbps downstream speed, but average speeds provided to customers in rural areas fall short of this target, indicating a need for more investment in bandwidth capacity. The cost of these upgrades will be substantial and may prove to be a barrier to providing greater speeds to subscribers. We also find that higher capacity and packet technology provide cost savings for the middle mile connections. Population density and geography alone do not explain differences in middle mile costs.     

Exploiting indoor location and mobile information for context-awareness service

Personal mobile devices such as cellular phones, smart phones and PMPs have advanced incredibly in the past decade. The mobile technologies make research on the life log and user-context awareness feasible. In other words, sensors in mobile devices can collect the variety of user’s information, and various works have been conducted using that information. Most of works used a user’s location information as the most useful clue to recognize the user context. However, the location information in the conventional works usually depends on a GPS receiver that has limited function, because it cannot localize a person in a building and thus lowers the performance of the user-context awareness. This paper develops a system to solve such problems and to infer a user’s hidden information more accurately using Bayesian network and indoor-location information. Also, this paper presents a new technique for localization in a building using a decision tree and signals for the Wireless LAN because the decision tree has many advantages which outweigh other localization techniques.     

Mobile content contribution and retrieval: An exploratory study using the uses and gratifications paradigm

Using the uses and gratifications (UnG) theory, this paper explores the gratification factors for which people contribute and retrieve mobile content. Through the deployment of MobiTOP, a mobile content sharing application, it was found that perceived gratification factors for mobile content contribution were different from those for mobile content retrieval. In particular, factors which had significant positive effects on content contribution stemmed from leisure/entertainment and easy access. Factors fuelling content retrieval included the efficient provision of information resources/services and the need for high quality information, both of which tend to be information-centric. Interestingly, gratification factors for mobile content contribution were also found to have significant effects on mobile content retrieval intention and vice versa. Specifically, the access gratification factor had a significant positive effect on content retrieval intention while the self-gratification factor for content contribution had a significant negative effect on content retrieval intention.     

Locking the virtual filing cabinet: A researcher's guide to Internet data security

As the Internet has grown in popularity, the opportunity it provides for conducting research has also become too large for researchers to ignore. Thus many have flocked to put surveys, experiments, and other data collection measures online in an attempt to gather empirical evidence in a variety of fields. While some choose a commercial provider to host surveys or experiments, others require the additional flexibility that comes with creating and maintaining a custom server. Herein lies a crucial problem: Most researchers lack the skills necessary to design, implement, and manage a server end-to-end. To overcome this limitation, they often hire programmers and administrators, who while usually competent, are not ultimately accountable to granting agencies funding research or Institutional Review Boards overseeing the research. This puts the researcher in a position of accountability in data security, confidentiality, and privacy concerns. The goal of the present paper is to outline a typical server setup, and highlight issues pertaining to data security in language accessible to researcher. This paper also presents data collected and analyzed from an anonymous distributed survey asking researchers questions assessing their management of research data. Our findings from the responses confirmed the legitimacy of our concerns by demonstrating the evident need for stricter security measures in research settings. By reading this paper, we hope that researchers will be cognizant of the optimal security practices which can be equipped to avoid the extreme consequences of data security breaches and gain a deeper understanding of the software they use to collect research data.     

DNA-like linguistic secret sharing for strategic information systems

The development of DNA cryptography has contributed to the ability of solving many computationally difficult problems by offering the capability of executing calculations in parallel. This capability is used particularly in solving NP-complete problems or implementing cryptography and steganography solutions. Biological computation models based on bonds between nitrogen bases in nucleic acid chains that make up DNA structures can also be used to develop new solutions for smart information management. This study discusses new secret splitting techniques based on mathematical linguistic methods and designed for intelligently managing secret data within hierarchical structures. These techniques make use of information coding models found in the coding of DNA sequences.     

Critical issues pertaining to the planning and implementation of E-Government initiatives

E-Government initiatives of varying scope and complexity have been implemented at the municipal and other levels of government throughout the world. These projects have been chronicled in both academic and practitioner journals and the proceedings of various E-Government conferences. As a consequence of this growing body of data, it is now possible to look across the experiences of numerous governments to understand if there are common issues that may impact the probability of success of E-Government programs. This paper examines the literature to search for critical planning and implementation issues that have had significant effects upon the success of E-Government initiatives. A conceptual framework is proposed which contributes to the theoretical understanding of E-Government initiative planning and implementation, and may inform practitioner success with new E-Government initiatives.     

Information governance,records management,and freedom of information: A study of local government authorities in England

In many democratic states political rhetoric gives weight to increasing public participation in and understanding of the political process; (re)-establishing public trust in government decision making; increasing transparency, openness, and accountability of public authorities; and, ultimately, improving government decision-making on behalf of citizens. Access to the public record and freedom of information (FOI) are mechanisms which help to facilitate the accountability of public authorities. Many jurisdictions have introduced legislation related to these mechanisms, and the UK government is no exception with its enactment of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 2000. University College London (UCL) ran a research project over 12 months in 2008–2009, funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council. The research project examined what the impact of the UK FOIA had been on records management services in public authorities, especially local government. This article reports on some of the findings of the study. It considers how FOI compliance and records management functions are organized in local government and the role of information governance which is emerging as an umbrella for such functions. It draws some conclusions about the contributions that records management services make to the ability of local authorities to comply with the FOIA and identifies some ways in which user experience may be affected by the management of records.