The growth of the global service economy has led to a dramatic increase in our daily interactions with highly specialized service systems. Service (or value-cocreation) interactions are both frequent and diverse, and may include retail, financial, healthcare, education, on-line, communications,...

The Internet is transforming the way nonprofits have been disseminating information about themselves, interacting with potential donors, and fundraising. In this article, the authors focus on a special type of online service providers for nonprofits (OSPNs) that bring donors and nonprofits...

The continuing development and growth of the Internet imply that business and customers perceive that the Internet provides them with some kind of value. The Internet has also seen an increasing importance of user-generated content and utilisation of the Internet as a social medium. In this...

XML documents usually contain private information that cannot be shared by every user communities. It is widely used in web environment. XML database is becoming increasingly important since it consists of XML documents. Several applications for supporting selective access to data are available...

Historically, information systems (IS) programs have taught two of the three areas of information technology (IT) management: strategy and management, and applications development. Academic programs have ignored the third area, IT operations. IT operations management is becoming increasingly...

This special section contains extended versions of selected papers from the 10th International Conference for Global Business and Development: Creativity & Innovation: Imperatives for Global Business and Development, Kyoto, Japan, August 8-11, 2007. The set includes two articles with both...

This article presents some new conceptual and interpretative paradigms concerning offshoring Information Technology services, in the light of the most recent market trends. In the current competitive scenario, IT structures are increasingly asked to “participate†in the development and...

This study compares consumer perceived risk between five e-service delivery systems and their traditional (non-Internet) counterparts over each stage of the buying cycle. Using a survey methodology, the authors find that in general consumers perceive e-services as riskier than traditional...

This study compares the online services currently delivered by the official National Tourism Organizations (NTO) portals of the 25 European Union states, to assess their capability in evolving into powerful marketing communication tools. A conceptual framework that identifies 129 online service...

Many IT service departments are adopting IT service management best practice frameworks such as the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) to improve the quality of service to customers. This study reports on recent surveys and case studies of organizations which have embarked on IT service management...