An Examination of Factors That Influence Students’ IT Career Decisions

A key challenge resulting from the rapid growth of the information technology (IT) industry is finding enough qualified workers to fill available positions. In this paper, Holland’s Theory of Occupational Themes, Social Cognitive Career Theory, and Career Construction Theory are used to investigate how job-related beliefs, career planning perceptions, and occupational congruence work together to influence students’ career decisions, major satisfaction, and academic performance. Using 210 student responses, we empirically test a theoretically derived research model. Our findings suggest that job security is a strong predictor of both IT career optimism and career planning ability. In addition, career optimism and career planning ability are important antecedents of students’ IT career commitment, which significantly influences satisfaction with academic major. A modest portion of academic performance was explained by the model. Most notably, occupational congruence was found to be a poor predictor of academic major satisfaction and performance.     

Managers’ and Employees’ Differing Responses to Security Approaches

ABSTRACT

Modern organizations face significant information security threats, to which they respond with various managerial techniques. It is widely believed that “one size does not fit all” for achieving employee information security policy compliance; nevertheless, it is yet to be determined which techniques work best to different organizational employees. We further this research stream by finding that different levels of users might be effectively motivated by different types of coercive and empowering techniques that are suitable to their level and position in the organizational chart. Our results suggest that participation in the ISP decision-making process might prove to be a more effective approach to motivate lower-level employees toward compliance and that enhancing the meaningfulness of policy compliance could be the preferred method among higher levels of management. Members within each level of the organization can be effectively influenced to comply with ISPs when such strategies are customized for their level.     

Impact of Users’ Security Awareness on Desktop Security Behavior: A Protection Motivation Theory Perspective

This article uses the protection motivation theory to study the impact of information security awareness on desktop security behavior. It contributes to the literature by examining the roles played by awareness, an important antecedent to the cognitive processes in the protection motivation theory. The findings indicate that security awareness significantly affects perceived severity, response efficacy, self-efficacy, and response cost. Constructs in the coping appraisal process (except response cost), in turn, significantly impact recommended security behavior.     

Cloud Computing: An Examination of Factors Impacting Users’ Adoption

With a rapid growth in technology, cloud computing has become increasingly popular among individual users and businesses around the world. This computing technology continues to attract attention in both academic and business settings. The popularity of cloud computing is due to its ability to provide faster on-demand infrastructure, self-service, and independent ability to contribute to, and access, resources. Despite many potential benefits of cloud computing usage, there are certain aspects that have prohibited some consumers to accept this technology and remain reserved toward its adoption. There are some crucial factors to consider before cloud computing can be accepted entirely by the individual, larger business, or academic groups. This study thus aims at investigating how cloud computing is perceived by potential users and which factors have a tendency to encourage or discourage them to adopt cloud computing.     

Corporate Security Intelligence: An Oxymoron?

Some commonly cited oxymorons are ‘military intelligence’ and ‘central intelligence’. While there are certainly times when the intelligence communities seem to get it wrong, today, we will be defending intelligence practices and expanding upon them in the area of corporate intelligence.     

Insiders’ Adaptations to Security-Based Demands in the Workplace: An Examination of Security Behavioral Complexity

Information Systems Frontiers - The protection of organizational information and information systems (IS) is a socio-technical issue and requires insiders take on a more proactive set of security...     

Factors Influencing Students’ Major and Career Selection in Systems Development: An Empirical Study

Systems development is an academic major in many information systems (IS) programs. Attracting students who are interested in systems development is important to increasing IS enrollment. The purpose of this study aims to empirically investigate which factors influence students’ decisions to select systems development as a major and future career. This research makes three contributions to IS research and education. First, the research findings extend previous research associating outcome expectations and job availability with attitudes toward systems development. IS educators can use these findings to create better recruiting strategies and to improve the IS curriculum. Second, the findings connect academic-major choice with career choice. The findings indicate that attitudes toward systems development and personal innovativeness in IT (PIIT) positively influence students’ intentions to pursue a career as a systems developer. Third, this research paves a foundation for further investigation into systems development behavior and performance in the workplace.     

Factors influencing consumers’ repurchase behavior on fresh food e-commerce platforms: An empirical study

The e-commerce of fresh commodities keeps being adaptive to the change of consumer consumption attitudes and behavior in the current era of global economy. In the fierce competition of the industry, how to attract and retain customers more efficiently and increase consumer repurchase behavior is a long-term concern for fresh food e-commerce platforms. This research aims to focus on how the fresh e-commerce platforms can reduce consumer conversion to other forms of purchase and increase consumer repurchase. In this paper a research model is constructed whereby a set of perceived value scales is generated to evaluate consumer repurchase behavior. Data from a sample of 515 consumers is collected through a web-based questionnaire, and structural equation modeling is used to test the research hypotheses and empirically investigate the factors and internal mechanisms influencing repurchase behavior on fresh e-commerce platforms. Results from the analysis show that the product quality and product price from the product-side, perceived ease of use, reliability, response speed and convenience from the service-side, and subjective norms of the consumer personal factors impose significant effects on consumer satisfaction. consumer satisfaction plays a key mediating role in consumer repurchase behavior. Guidance and suggestions for the operation processes of e-commerce platforms are developed based on these key factors to cultivate customer loyalty and attract potential customers more specifically. Moreover, the examination of the factors from the three dimensions promotes the e-commerce platforms to raise their service level by enhancing their supply chain as the bottom rocks of the platform enterprises.     

An Identification of Factors Motivating Individuals’ Use of Cloud-Based Services

The purpose of this study is to develop a better understanding of the factors motivating individuals who use cloud-based services despite the privacy and security risks associated with it. The authors developed a research model that incorporates the theory of planned behavior (TPB) and constructs from previous research to explain individuals’ intentions to use cloud-based services. Our analysis shows support for the relationships among predictor variables (attitude, subjective norm, perceived behavioral control, and information privacy) and the outcome variable (behavioral intention). Additionally, our analysis shows IT leadership and trust as moderating variables between the TPB predictor variables (attitude and perceived behavioral control), but not subjective norm. The results indicate that IT leadership support of cloud-based systems can have a positive effect on cloud adoption and individuals are likely to continue their use of cloud computing despite the privacy and security risks associated with it.     

Employees’ attitudes towards intelligent robots: a dilemma analysis

Information Systems and e-Business Management - With the increasing adoption of robotics in professional applications, the question arises of what impact robots with more cognitive skills will have...     

Students’ Understanding of Loops and Nested Loops in Computer Programming: An APOS Theory Perspective

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to explore students’ understanding of loops and nested loops concepts. Sixty-three mechanical engineering students attending an introductory programming course participated in the study. APOS (Action, Process, Object, Schema) is a constructivist theory developed originally for mathematics education. This study is the first attempt to use the APOS framework in the context of programming education. Results showed that APOS theory is a useful framework for examining engineering students’ understanding related to loops and nested loops. The results of this study have specific implications for researchers and practitioners when designing programming instruction.     

Critical Success Factors to Improve the Game Development Process from a Developer’s Perspective

The growth of the software game development industry is enormous and is gaining importance day by day. This growth imposes severe pressure and a number of issues and challenges on the game development community. Game development is a complex process, and one important game development choice is to consider the developer’s perspective to produce good-quality software games by improving the game development process. The objective of this study is to provide a better understanding of the developer’s dimension as a factor in software game success. It focuses mainly on an empirical investigation of the effect of key developer’s factors on the software game development process and eventually on the quality of the resulting game. A quantitative survey was developed and conducted to identify key developer’s factors for an enhanced game development process. For this study, the developed survey was used to test the research model and hypotheses. The results provide evidence that game development organizations must deal with multiple key factors to remain competitive and to handle high pressure in the software game industry. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate empirically the influence of key developer’s factors on the game development process.     

Critical Times for Organizations: What Should Be Done to Curb Workers’ Noncompliance With IS Security Policy Guidelines?

This study was designed to examine the impacts of employees’ cost–benefit analysis, deterrence considerations, and top management support and beliefs on information systems security policy compliance. Surveys of Canadian professionals’ perceptions were carried out. A research model was proposed and tested. The results confirmed that top management support and beliefs, sanction severity, and cost–benefit analysis significantly influenced employees’ information systems security policy compliance. The implications of the study findings are discussed, and conclusions are drawn.     

m-Government Security Response System: Predicting Citizens’ Adoption Behavior

The participation of mobile technology could be a massive development to ensure the citizen’s safety by linking various government agencies under the umbrella of the m-government (m-govt) security response system (SRS). Based on the novel phenomenon of m-govt SRS, this research provides a comprehensive theoretical model to discover citizens’ adoption intention. Our findings proved that transparency and trust mediate the influence of information quality characteristics and channel characteristics, while perceived usefulness mediate the influence of awareness on citizens’ intentions to use; which reduce uncertainty and enhance citizens’ willingness to adopt the m-govt SRS. This study proved that perceived response time is a key construct in the context of providing m-govt SRS to enhance citizens’ intention to use. The outcomes make a noteworthy contribution to theoretical literature and having practical implications regarding understanding various aspects of m-govt SRS adoption among citizens, which provide the broadest view to government agencies for successful implementation of these services.     

Employees’ proactiveness on enterprise social media and social consequences: An integrated perspective of social network and social exchange theories

This study delves into how employee proactiveness on enterprise social media can influence social outcomes at work, both positively and negatively. Drawing on social network and social exchange theories, we develop a model to understand how virtual proactiveness is perceived by leaders and coworkers. Using a round-robin design, we collected data from 281 respondents in 56 teams across three waves. The results show that affiliative and challenging proactiveness positively relate to leader-member and team-member exchanges. However, challenging proactiveness negatively affects team-member exchange, potentially leading to coworker envy. These findings shed light on the intricate social dynamics in remote working environments.     

Newcomers’ Barriers. . . Is That All? An Analysis of Mentors’ and Newcomers’ Barriers in OSS Projects

Newcomers’ seamless onboarding is important for open collaboration communities, particularly those that leverage outsiders’ contributions to remain sustainable. Nevertheless, previous work shows that OSS newcomers often face several barriers to contribute, which lead them to lose motivation and even give up on contributing. A well-known way to help newcomers overcome initial contribution barriers is mentoring. This strategy has proven effective in offline and online communities, and to some extent has been employed in OSS projects. Studying mentors’ perspectives on the barriers that newcomers face play a vital role in improving onboarding processes; yet, OSS mentors face their own barriers, which hinder the effectiveness of the strategy. Since little is known about the barriers mentors face, in this paper, we investigate the barriers that affect mentors and their newcomer mentees. We interviewed mentors from OSS projects and qualitatively analyzed their answers. We found 44 barriers: 19 that affect mentors; and 34 that affect newcomers (9 affect both newcomers and mentors). Interestingly, most of the barriers we identified (66%) have a social nature. Additionally, we identified 10 strategies that mentors indicated to potentially alleviate some of the barriers. Since gender-related challenges emerged in our analysis, we conducted nine follow-up structured interviews to further explore this perspective. The contributions of this paper include: identifying the barriers mentors face; bringing the unique perspective of mentors on barriers faced by newcomers; unveiling strategies that can be used by mentors to support newcomers; and investigating gender-specific challenges in OSS mentorship. Mentors, newcomers, online communities, and educators can leverage this knowledge to foster new contributors to OSS projects.     

The Computer Virus — From There to Here.: An Historical Perspective.

I was sitting at my desk in the Computer Centre of University College, Dublin, checking my E-mail. Suddenly, from the corner of my right eye, I detected an arm swooping down towards my keyboard, like an axe about to fell a tree. This was an arm with a mission. It removed my hand, which was just about to press ‘receive’ on an interesting looking E-mail involving a Christmas tree greeting. Of course, my better-informed colleague knew that this was the Christma Exec virus, and that I would not be doing myself, or anyone else, any favours by accepting and executing it. It was December 1987, and my very first introduction to the computer virus. My love affair with the subject has continued over the past thirteen years (although I do not claim to have a copy of The Little Black Book of Computer Viruses sitting on my bookshelf!), and like myself, the computer virus has evolved into a more complex and sophisticated entity.     

Analysis of Factors that Influence Customers’ Willingness to Leave Big Data Digital Footprints on Social Media: A Systematic Review of Literature

Big data has been discussed extensively in existing scholarly works but scant consideration is given to customers’ willingness to generate and leave big data digital footprints on social media, especially in the light of the profusely debated issue of privacy and security. The current paper endeavours to address this gap in the literature by developing a conceptual framework. In doing so, this paper conducts a systematic review of extant literature from 2002 to 2017 to identify and analyse the underlying factors that influence customers’ willingness to leave digital footprints on social media. The findings of this review reveal that personal behaviour (intrinsic psychological dispositions), technological factors (relative advantage and convenience), social influence (social interaction, social ties and social support) and privacy and security (risk, control and trust) are the key factors that influence customers’ willingness to generate and leave big data digital footprints on social media. The conceptual framework presented in this paper advances the scholarship of technology adoption and use and provides useful direction for future empirical research for both academics and practitioners.     

Digital Piracy: Factors that Influence the Intention to Pirate – A Structural Equation Model Approach

Faster Internet connections are breaking most of the geographic barriers. At the same time, the huge digital content that have been generated in last years is motivating new forms of digital piracy. We know that piracy of copyrighted digital material has a huge impact on countries’ economy, being a major issue for the whole society and not only for content creators. The purpose of this paper is to investigate digital piracy intention. For that purpose, we have expanded the framework of the theory of planned behavior using the utility theory, the deterrence theory and other relevant constructs. Using data from students of a Portuguese university and high school, a sample of 590 questionnaires has been collected. Two models were developed and analyzed using structural equation modeling. The first considers the full sample (Full Model), while the second considers only those who had pirated (Pirate Model). The pirate model confirmed the existence of a significant and strong relation between past behavior and intention toward digital piracy.     

Information Security Assessment: Procedures and Methodology: When investing in technology isn’t enough

It very often happens while setting up or renovating company IT infrastructure that most of the investment goes into purchasing new products. In particular, this may occur in the area of security, which is often not given the attention it deserves. The worst error one can commit is that of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on perimeter protection products (firewalls, content filtering, etc.) and rearguard products (intrusion detection systems) without having assessed vulnerabilities and assets, and developed a post-implementation security management program.