International Journal of Information Management最新文献

Consumers increasingly rely on social media to obtain product information. The vlog, a new kind of social medium, has been adopted by sellers to connect with consumers. Through this platform, sellers can cooperate with vloggers to recommend products or services to consumers. Extending beyond the previous perspective that consumers’ perceptions and behaviors are influenced by vloggers’ attributes, we herein investigate the influence of recommendation content. Drawing on the means-end chain framework, this paper investigates how the attributes of recommendation content affect consumers’ intention to adopt (i.e., follow) the recommendation. Data collected from 513 respondents provides support for the proposed influences. The results indicate that source credibility, content diagnosticity, and content serendipity drive consumers’ recommendation adoption intention. This research contributes to the literature on rec-vlog marketing by clarifying the significant role of recommendation content. Implications are discussed regarding these findings.

Strategic alliances require mutual trust and collaboration between organizations. To increase alliance performance, organizations in a strategic alliance are more likely to interpret each other’s equivocal behaviors in a positive way to sustain the stability of the relationship. Different from traditional mechanisms to build interorganizational trust, blockchain facilitates trust among alliance partners via its technology advantages, for example, public ledger and distributed consensus. The decentralized and distributed nature of a blockchain-based system assures that no single organization can add information to the chain without an approval from the alliance, nor can it make unilateral changes in the system. Drawing from the Affordance Theory, we propose an exploratory research design to understand the structure of a blockchain-based system, as well as how this blockchain-based system influences interorganizational trust in a strategic alliance and how blockchain-enabled interorganizational trust influences alliance performance. The case studies of two eastern banks indicate that the technical features of blockchain can help reduce equivocal behaviors and improve interorganizational trust. We discuss the findings and conclude the paper with implications.

Digital transformation is profoundly transforming SMEs' business activities, bringing about comparative advantages and associated risks. Previous studies on digital transformation and SMEs focus on technology adoption, innovation, new value creation, and dynamic capabilities. However, it is unclear how digital technology affects SMEs' specific business activities. We study SMEs' customer access, increasing competition, external funding or access to finance, rising input costs, skilled labor shortages, exogenous shocks, global crises, and regulatory issues. This study aims to fill the literature gap by exploring the impact of digital technology, using digital economy and society index (DESI) as proxies for the SME issues. We use DESI and SME data from a survey on European enterprises’ access to finance. We find that digital transformation strengthens SMEs' ability and flexibility to address main business issues. Furthermore, findings reveal that digitally transformed SMEs have fewer concerns about access to new and traditional customers, competition changes, access to finance, increasing input costs, external shocks, and regulatory changes. However, digital transformation also brings risks, such as the shortage of skilled labor and experienced managers and loss of inherent competitiveness. The novelty of our work lies in supplying quantitative knowledge on the link between digital transformation and European SMEs' critical business concerns. These findings substantially increase our understanding of the impact of digital change on European SMEs' business activities.

Digital technologies play an important role for the delivery of many public services. However, selecting and adopting the ‘right’ digital technologies is often challenging, especially for federally structured governments. Universal factors for successful adoption are hard to establish, and the particularities of federalism, such as the separation of competencies, complicate technology selection. Nevertheless, blockchain technology seems to flourish in these environments. Through a single-case study on the blockchain project of Germany’s Federal Office for Migration and Refugees, we unpack one essential factor for this success: the fit between (cross-)organizational task structure and technological properties. This fit earns the Federal Office’s project considerable credit and traction with stakeholders and partner authorities – not least because it supports the argument that the digitalization of federal systems is possible without ‘digital centralization’ and redistribution of competencies. Our task-technology fit analysis contributes to a better understanding of the adoption of blockchain in the public sector. It also provides the foundation for an extended task-technology fit theory for federally structured, cross-organizational contexts.

This study extends the post-acceptance model of information systems (IS) continuance, which is widely used to explain users’ satisfaction and IS continuance intentions. The extended model includes additional variables such as perceived ease of use (PEOU), attitude, trust, and enjoyment. The proposed model was tested using meta-analytic structural equation modeling (MASEM). The analysis included 1,056 observations on fifteen relationships from 214 independent studies with a combined sample of 84,343. The results confirm the significance of all the relationships proposed in the original model. Furthermore, the findings indicate that PEOU directly influences perceived usefulness, satisfaction, and attitude. Trust and enjoyment both have a positive impact on users’ satisfaction and IS continuance, wherein the effect of enjoyment was higher than trust. post-consumption satisfaction resulted in a favorable attitude toward technology, which further affected IS continuance. From a theoretical perspective, the current study acknowledges the shift in users’ attitude toward technology and emphasizes the hedonic value of IS usage as users report a higher degree of satisfaction toward responsive, easy to use, and enjoyable technologies. Marketers should focus on the enjoyment and gratifications derived from technology to increase potential IS usage.

Innovation in the public sector plays an important role in improving the quality of public services and addressing economic and societal challenges. Most of the previous research on innovations has focused on the private sector. How organizations may achieve ambidexterity for innovations in the public sector characterized by unique constraints has been largely underexplored. Platforms have emerged as key components in organizations’ approaches to innovation. Using an empirical study in a public sector organization, this study identifies a platform-based approach that can be used to achieve ambidexterity in balancing exploitative and exploratory innovations in the public sector. Organizations facing constraints pertaining to structure, risk, and value may benefit from considering their product/service development, process management, and value formulation through this approach. This study also identifies practices in platform development, appropriation, and control that contributed to the success of the platform-based approach.

Video conferencing (VC) applications (apps) have surged in popularity as an alternative to face-to-face communications. Although VC apps offer myriad benefits, it has caught much media attention owing to concerns of privacy infringements. This study examines the key determinants of professionals’ attitude and intentions to use VC apps in the backdrop of this conflicting duality. A conceptual research model is proposed based on theoretical foundations of privacy calculus and extended with conceptualizations of mobile users’ information privacy concerns (MUIPC), trust, technicality, ubiquity, as well as theoretical underpinnings of social presence theory. Structural equation modeling is used to empirically test the model using data collected from 484 professionals. The study offers insights regarding the trade-offs that professionals are willing to make in the face of information privacy concerns associated with VC apps. Based on the findings, the study emphasizes the promotion of privacy protection at the organizational level, control mechanisms that motivate employees to actively engage in privacy protection behavior, and a multi-faceted approach for data transparency within the VC app platforms.

Despite significant business opportunities made possible through advancements in technology, readily available digital technologies are often overlooked and not used by new ventures. To address this knowledge gap, this paper looks at the relationships between readily available digital technologies and born-digital new venture capabilities. We use an affordance lens to explore conditions in which born-digital new ventures interact with digital technologies to actualize digital affordances that facilitate the development of important capabilities. First, using the existing literature, we present a research model and its key elements. Then, using data on new ventures in a Canadian university incubator, we conduct fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) and develop seven configurational research propositions as pathways to develop information technology-enabled organizational capabilities in new ventures. Using this retroductive approach, this research builds a context-specific middle-range theory that explains complex interactions between readily available digital technologies and new venture characteristics, where resources are provided by incubators in dynamic environments, to facilitate the development of ITOCs in the new ventures. We close by describing the study’s theoretical and practical implications.

This paper examines how personal investment influence the use of multi-factor authentication (MFA) for securing online accounts. We draw from the Protection Motivation Theory (PMT) that accounts for intrapersonal factors that increase one’s understanding of their threat and coping mechanisms and, subsequently, their motivation to protect such investments. We integrate size of investment – the amount of time, effort, and other personal resources that an individual has put into their online account. Based on PMT’s framework, we develop a research model that examines the influence of investment size as an information source that initiates and builds threat and coping appraisals. The model is tested with a survey of 263 responses, and the result shows that investment size influences threat and coping appraisals, which in turn increases MFA protection motivation and use. These results highlight the importance of eliciting individuals’ personal investments in order to improve their protective security behaviors.

Data-driven innovation has received increasing attention, which explores big data technologies to gain more insights and advantages for product design. In user experience (UX) based design innovation, user-generated data and archived design documents are two valuable resources for various design activities such as identifying opportunities and generating design ideas. However, these two resources are usually isolated in different systems. Additionally, design information typically represented based on functional aspects is limited for UX-oriented design. To facilitate experience-oriented design activities, we propose a twin data-driven approach to integrate UX data and archived design documents. In particular, we aim to extract UX concepts from product reviews and design concepts from patents respectively and to discover associations between the extracted concepts. First, a UX-integrated design information representation model is proposed to associate capabilities with key elements of UX at the concept, category, and aspect levels of information. Based on this model, a twin data-driven approach is developed to bridge experience information and design information. It contains three steps: experience aspect identification using an attention-based LSTM (Long short-term memory) network, design information categorization based on topic clustering using BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and LAD (Latent Dirichlet allocation) model, and experience needs and design information integration by leveraging word embedding techniques to measure concept similarity. A case study using healthcare-related experience and design information has demonstrated the feasibility and effectiveness of this approach.