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An “IT mindset” significantly influences public sector information technology (IT) adoption in least developed countries (LDCs). The purpose of this paper is to explore the IT mindset concept and its relationship with IT knowledge and intention to explore IT in the workplace.

The research used a mixed-methods approach in two phases. Qualitative work was conducted to formulate the conceptual framework and hypotheses, followed by a survey of 228 public sector officials in Bangladesh to test the hypotheses.

The study showed that an IT mindset can be conceptualised as comprising personal innovativeness with IT and IT beliefs. The IT mindset was significantly related to intention to explore IT use in the workplace and its components were influenced by an individual’s IT skills and IT awareness.

Future research could further explore the IT mindset concept and its antecedents and consequences in LDCs, where it is often related to successful IT adoption, and also in public and private organisations elsewhere.

The study furthers understanding of barriers to IT adoption in LDCs’ public sectors. Building IT knowledge through IT skills and awareness is required to orient mindsets to IT adoption.

Improved efficiency, productivity and transparency in the public sector through IT use have flow-on societal and economic benefits. The paper provides insights into greater facilitation of e-government and IT in the public sector.

The study is theoretically significant because the IT mindset concept has lacked in-depth study and requires clarification of its nature and role.

In organizations, individual user’s compliance with business processes is important from a regulatory and efficiency point of view. The restriction of users’ choices by implementing a restrictive information system is a typical approach in many organizations. However, restrictions and mandated compliance may affect employees’ performance negatively. Especially when users need a certain degree of flexibility in completing their work activity. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of directive explanations (DEs). DEs provide context-dependent feedback to users, but do not force users to comply.

The experimental study used in this paper aims at investigating how DEs influence users’ process compliance. The authors used a laboratory experiment to test the proposed hypotheses. Every participant underwent four trials for which business process compliance was measured. Two trial blocks were used to cluster the four trials. Diagrammatic DEs were provided in one of the trial blocks, while textual DEs were provided in the other. Trial blocks were counterbalanced.

The results of the experiment show that DEs influence a user’s compliance, but the effect varies for different types of DEs. The authors believe this study is significant as it empirically examines design characteristics of explanations from knowledge-based systems in the context of business processes.

This study is certainly not without limitations. The sample used for this study was drawn from undergraduate information systems management students. The sample is thus not representative of the general population of organizations’ IT users. However, a student sample adequately represents novice IT users, who are not very familiar with a business process. They are particularly suitable to study how users react to first-time contact with a DE.

The findings of this study are important to designers and implementers of systems that guide users to follow business processes. As the authors have illustrated with a real-world scenario, an ERP system’s explanation can lack details on how a user can resolve a blocked activity. In situations in which users bypass restricted systems, DEs can guide them to comply with a business process. Particularly diagrammatic explanations, which depict actors, activities, and constraints for a business process, have been found to increase the probability that users’ behavior is business process compliant. Less time may be needed to resolve a situation, which can result in very efficient user-system cooperation.

This study makes several important contributions to research on explanations, which are provided by knowledge-based systems. First, the authors conceptualized, designed, and investigated a novel type of explanations, namely, DEs. The results of this study show how dramatic the difference in process compliance performance is when exposed to certain types of DEs (in one group from 57 percent on the initial trial to 82 percent on the fourth trial). This insight is important to derive design guidelines for DE, particularly when multimedia material is used.

Members of an Australian beef producer group have become users of electronic communication as a precursor to fuller engagement in electronic commerce. The research team’s immediate aim was to assist this group to become effective users of the Internet. In addition, using interpretive methods of enquiry, aims to provide a basis from which subsequent wider usage of the Internet in the red meat industry could be enabled. Presents data from the project using diffusion theory as a framework, with rich description to allow for further interpretation of the views of all parties. The apparent success of the project suggests it can be used or adapted for other members of the beef industry, having regard for their particular circumstances.

Drawing on established alignment and architectural theory, this paper seeks to present the argument that an organisation's enterprise architecture can enable the alignment of business strategy and information systems and technology (IS/IT).

The paper presents a detailed case study of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), where a high degree of alignment and international recognition of excellence in business and enabling IS/IT performance are documented.

The ABS enterprise architecture was developed in 1999‐2001 and describes the organisation's physical business and IS/IT elements, and the connective relationships that inform the alignment condition. The ABS architecture is robustly holistic in form, and is characterised by a strong and equal focus on business operations, the deliberate inclusion of an IS/IT governance framework, the structuring and hosting of corporate information for business delivery, and the efficient reuse of IS/IT components.

The ABS case study also examined empirically the social aspects and formal mechanisms of organisational alignment, and shows how a formal enterprise architecture mechanism can integrate into a successful alignment process.

Despite much research on information technology (IT)-enabled organizational transformation (OT), there are still many issues to be addressed. The purpose of this paper is to fill this gap by proposing an integrative model that includes specific transformation resources, capabilities, and outcomes pertaining to the success of IT-enabled OT.

Using the resource-based view, organizational learning theory, and business process reengineering, the authors developed an integrative model of IT-enabled OT. To validate this model, the authors conducted in-depth case studies of five firms that reported successful IT-enabled OT and five others that reported less successful.

This study offers three important findings. First, flexible IT and policies were found to be key transformation resources. Second, training, teamwork, leadership, and project ownership were identified as key transformation capabilities. Third, strategic outcomes such as responsiveness, customer satisfaction, and business scope were suggested as key transformation outcomes. The benefits realized by the less successful group tended to be limited to the operational level. Overall, the findings provide evidence that strategic benefits from the success of IT-enabled OT can be obtained by combining specific transformation resources and capabilities.

The results of this study make three contributions to the literature on IT-enabled OT. First, the authors shed light on the underlying mechanism by which specific transformation resources and capabilities lead to the improvement of specific outcomes. Second, IT-enabled OT has been conceptualized from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Third, the authors brought together the diverse literature on IT-enabled OT, presenting an empirically validated integrative model of IT-enabled OT.

The institution of food and cookery exhibitions and the dissemination of practical knowledge with respect to cookery by means of lectures and demonstrations are excellent things in their way. But while it is important that better and more scientific attention should be generally given to the preparation of food for the table, it must be admitted to be at least equally important to insure that the food before it comes into the hands of the expert cook shall be free from adulteration, and as far as possible from impurity,—that it should be, in fact, of the quality expected. Protection up to a certain point and in certain directions is afforded to the consumer by penal enactments, and hitherto the general public have been disposed to believe that those enactments are in their nature and in their application such as to guarantee a fairly general supply of articles of tolerable quality. The adulteration laws, however, while absolutely necessary for the purpose of holding many forms of fraud in check, and particularly for keeping them within certain bounds, cannot afford any guarantees of superior, or even of good, quality. Except in rare instances, even those who control the supply of articles of food to large public and private establishments fail to take steps to assure themselves that the nature and quality of the goods supplied to them are what they are represented to be. The sophisticator and adulterator are always with us. The temptations to undersell and to misrepresent seem to be so strong that firms and individuals from whom far better things might reasonably be expected fall away from the right path with deplorable facility, and seek to save themselves, should they by chance be brought to book, by forms of quibbling and wriggling which are in themselves sufficient to show the moral rottenness which can be brought about by an insatiable lust for gain. There is, unfortunately, cheating to be met with at every turn, and it behoves at least those who control the purchase and the cooking of food on the large scale to do what they can to insure the supply to them of articles which have not been tampered with, and which are in all respects of proper quality, both by insisting on being furnished with sufficiently authoritative guarantees by the vendors, and by themselves causing the application of reasonably frequent scientific checks upon the quality of the goods.

While the dynamic capabilities perspective is the most cited strategic theory in the information systems field of research, little effort has been made to review and integrate the associate literature of this perspective in the field. Accordingly, this paper aims to systematically analyze the information systems literature on dynamic capabilities and provide a holistic understanding of the topical composition and trend of dynamic capabilities studies in information systems research.

Using latent Dirichlet allocation as the text analysis algorithm, the author conducted a topic modeling of the dynamic capabilities corpus in the information systems field of research to quantitatively review, summarize and classify the prior literature. The review covered 191 articles published on dynamic capabilities between 1998 and 2018 in pioneering information systems journals and conference proceedings.

In accordance with the topic modeling results, the topical composition of the dynamic capabilities corpus in information systems research dominantly includes seven themes titled T1. Information systems value, T2. Information systems change, T3. Digitalization, T4. Information systems agility, T5. Big data, T6. Information systems innovation and T7. Information systems alignment. Also, the overall and topical trend of dynamic capabilities studies in the information systems field of research were revealed. The trends indicated that the investigated domain and its prominent sub-domains have generally had positive productivity over the past years.

The current study contributes to the domain by developing knowledge and improving literature on dynamic capabilities in information systems research, discovering the main topics of interest for information systems researchers to deploying the dynamic capabilities perspective in their studies, and prioritizing the future information systems research on dynamic capabilities based on the identified trends of topics.