Miltiadis D. Lytras’s research while affiliated with Athens University of Economics and Business and other places

This case study examines the Web Electronic Service framework for a University in Australia. The department is in the process of developing and implementing a Web-based e-service system. The user experience to use e-services requires insight into the attributes that shape the experience variable. The descriptive data about the attributes that form the experience variable is provided in this study.

In the spite of explosive growth of the Internet, information relevant to users is often unavailable even when using the latest browsers. At the same time, there is an ever-increasing number of documents that vary widely in content, format, and quality. The documents often change in content and location because they do not belong to any kind of centralized control. On the other hand, there is a huge number of unknown users with extremely diverse needs, skills, education, and cultural and language backgrounds. One of the solutions to these problems might be to use standard terms with meaning; this can be termed as controlled vocabulary (CV). Though there is no specific notion of CV, we can define it as a set of concepts or preferred terms and existing relations among them. These vocabularies play very important roles classifying the information. In this chapter, we focus the role of CV for publishing the web of data on the Web.

This chapter introduces the promotion of existing product scheme classifications to the Linked Open Data initiative in the context of the European Union and other official organizations such as United Nations. A common data model and an enclosed conversion method based on Semantic Web vocabularies such as SKOS are also presented to encode data and information following the W3C standards RDF and OWL. This work is applied to the e-procurement sector, more specifically, to enhance the access to the public procurement notices published in the European Union. Finally, an evaluation of the gain, in terms of expressivity, is reported with the objective of demonstrating the advantages of applying Linked Data to retrieve information resources.

There is very little knowledge about how different users learn on websites and retain that knowledge for doing tasks. Web-based systems characteristics may be an influencing factor that may positive or negatively impact user’s attitude. In this research, users’ experience with information explains how different users derive the knowledge to use the systems that forms the basis of interaction with the system.

For years, experts have recognized that medical errors exist and compromise healthcare quality. Much has been written worldwide about medical errors and improvements in their reporting and handling, with the proposals ranging from the implementation of nationwide mandatory reporting with public release of performance data to voluntary reporting and quality-assurance efforts that protect the confidentiality of error-related data. In the present chapter, the author first points out the lack of standardized nomenclature and a universal taxonomy-classification for adverse events and medical errors, which complicates the development of a response to these issues. The chapter also reviews a number of methods of and adverse events’ and medical errors’ knowledge management, each of which has evolved over time and been adapted to different contexts. Finally, the author assesses each of these methods, unveiling their particular strengths and advantages, and also weaknesses and limitations.

This chapter presents a tool that distinguishes selects and supplies, among all products with similar characteristics that appear in the catalogue of a company, the product that better adapts to the necessities of the users. In order to achieve this, it uses a search system based on fuzzy logic techniques, being able to handle vague information or of difficult specification and thus making possible to administer to the tool by means of rules of “common sense,” which talk about indefinite amounts. A fundamental aspect that provides great flexibility to the application is that the system can be modified and adjusted by the expert in real time. This allows changing quickly the output product set and without stopping the operation of the system based on the necessities of the company. The results are codified in XML format, facilitating the interoperability between systems and allowing the execution of the tool in multiple operative systems, as they only have to process the generated content. The possibility of displaying the clients the products that they are looking for, directly responding to their necessities, guiding and advising them in the purchase that are ready to make, is a competitive advantage that the company must not let escape.

The purpose of this chapter is to purport a set of alternative call center operational performance indicators, in order to enhance the relationship between call center performance and customer satisfaction. In order to do that, a methodological approach based on surveys, as well as stepwise multiple linear regressions, is developed from 6,616 cases collected during three months from the telecommunication industry. The general conclusion is that a set of alternative call center indicators covering three dimensions, namely the call center ability to resolve a problem, the call center responsiveness, and the prior customer satisfaction with the call center, together with traditional indicators, present a statistically significant relationship with customer satisfaction. The insights from this study can help managers to improve the customer satisfaction with call center, as well as to better sub-contract outsourcing call center operators.

Innovation in the service/retail sector has not been fully examined in the non-Western literature. This preliminary work presents a study that was conducted in Shanghai, China. Three sets of the literature are consulted: Porter’s Generic Strategies Model, Hunt’s Resource Advantage Theory (R-A), and previous studies in the service and retail sectors. Findings developed from six selected successful Chinese supermarket companies have identified three types of innovation adopted by Chinese retailers: Technology based, non-technology based, and resource based innovation. The study takes a qualitative approach by using the methods of documentation survey and in-depth interviews with a panel of ten supermarket experts. Some managerial implications are explicated, and the limitations of the study and directions for future studies are discussed.

This chapter introduces the concept of the “Intelligence Base,” developed in a study on the information requirement of the management of an (military) organization. The purpose of the study was to conceive, for each level of an organization, an appropriate Decision Support System (DSS) and/or Knowledge and Information System. All systems would eventually have been integrated in an overall Enterprise Architecture (EA). By discussing the OODA-cycle of John Boyd and the Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) the authors show that the concept of Intelligence Base can be a DSS for very demanding environments. Related topics are knowledge, culture, and real options (business example). The proposed framework is based on Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Cloud Computing, which will determine the configuration of the Information Technology (IT) systems.

Internet-based information, communication, and collaboration technologies are making it easier for organizations and knowledge workers to collaborate across organizational boundaries. However, it is necessary for organizations to monitor, regulate, and build appropriate security mechanisms in collaboration systems to prevent loss of strategic knowledge and competitive advantage. In this chapter, the authors synthesize literature on knowledge sharing and IS/IT risk assessment to present a risk assessment framework that can help organizations identify valuable knowledge assets exposed through collaboration technologies, and assess the risk of knowledge loss, intellectual property leakage, and the subsequent loss of competitive advantage so that appropriate security mechanism can be designed to prevent such a loss.