Professor Caroline Chan

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of institutional forces in shaping the operations of halal meat supply chain in Australia, one of the world¿s largest producers and exporters of halal meat. This research examines how the halal meat production requirements are fulfilled and maintained throughout the supply chain in a non-Muslim-majority country. Design/methodology/approach: The research uses a single-case study approach and uses semi-structured interviews as the primary method of data collection. It considers the perspectives of various stakeholder groups in the Australian halal meat supply chain (AHMSC). In all, 31 participants have participated in this research. Findings: The findings show that institutional forces, especially which come through coercive forces, do affect and shape the overall operations of the AHMSC in particularly the way the stakeholders act within the supply chain, particularly in their role in ensuring the protection of halal status or halal integrity of the meat. Practical implications: This paper suggests that the integrity of halal meat supply chain management operations in a non-Muslim-majority environment can be protected with heavy involvement from the relevant authorities, i.e. the federal government agency and the halal certifiers. With the implementation of specific halal meat production policy, i.e. Australian Government Authorised Halal Program, all parties dealing with the halal meat production for export purpose are obliged to fulfil the religious and food safety requirements, thus providing the necessary assurance for halal meat consumers, especially from the Muslim communities. Originality/value: This paper is one of the first to provide insights of halal meat supply chain operations in a non-Muslim-majority environment. This paper also took in account various stakeholder groups that were involved directly with halal meat supply chain operations in Australia rather than focusing on a single stakeholder group which gives a better understanding of the whole supply chain operations.

The purpose of this study is to establish and examine the significance of a consumer acceptance and continuance model for location-based services (LBSs) through the integration of perceived entertainment gratification (PEG) and perceived application quality (PAQ) with the technology acceptance model (TAM). By arguing that behavioural intention (BI) does not automatically lead to actual use (AU), we investigated the moderating effect of facilitating conditions (FC) on the relationship between BI and AU. A quantitative study was conducted in Australia and Bangladesh; data were obtained from multiple sources by systematic sampling of the distribution of questionnaires. For data analysis we applied the partial least square (PLS) method. The results indicate that, in both Australia and Bangladesh, perceived usefulness (PU), PEG and PAQ have significant influence on user attitude (UA), which has a subsequent effect on BI. Interestingly, perceived ease of use (PEoU) does not have a direct effect on UA but indirectly influences it through PU-confirming the mediating effect of PU. Further, FC has a moderating effect between BI and AU. The implications of these findings and directions for future research directions are also discussed.

This paper reports on a qualitative study aimed at investigating whether Australian Information Systems (IS) students undertaking a team-based capstone subject with real clients believed the subject had enhanced their employability skills. This research is important because UK and Australian governments and industry are increasingly pressuring universities to focus more on developing employability skills. The paper makes a contribution to the literature since there are few empirical studies examining students' perceptions of capstone subjects and none, to our knowledge, focusing on employability skills. Our study suggests that students believed the capstone subject did improve a broad range of employability skills and it also demonstrates the interrelated nature of these skills. We conjecture that the team-based, real-client model of capstone is particularly useful, compared to other capstone models, because it is especially effective at integrating the range of employability skills such as teamwork, communication, problem solving and self-management.

Australia is among the leading countries that envisaged releasing unclassified public data under open license and reusable format with no further restriction on re/use. But, according to the Australian Information Commissioner John McMillan, Australia's progress on open data is ¿patchy' and ¿transitional'. He also evidenced that although a few agencies are proactive and have embraced the movements quite seriously, still there are ¿many obstacles that worked against effort to make government information and data discoverable and usable¿ (Hilvert 2013). Despondently, there is little empirical evidence that could explain what makes public departments not to release public data. Driven by the nature of the research, this study conducted an exploratory field study in Australia by interviewing eleven employees from six different government agencies. Applying content analysis technique, this study identifies six important antecedents to adoption of open data in public organisations, and proposes future research to test their relationships. As the main theoretical contribution, this study extends organisational behaviour toward technology diffusion. The findings of this study incite policymakers and managers to think about and prepare future strategies on open data developments.

When online shopping increases, the number of risks and complaints associated with online transactions will also rise. The importance of maintaining and improving Business-To-Consumer (B2C) e-business competitiveness by adequately addressing consumers' complaints has been acknowledged. Yet the issue of how the complaint handling procedures are used to influence consumers' decisions to shop online has yet to be adequately understood. This study focuses on the influence of complaint handling procedures on consumers' decisions to shop online from both the online consumer and merchant perspectives. The authors found that complaint handling procedures have more impact on consumer confidence and trust and therefore affect their decision to shop online, especially when accessible and responsive complaint handling procedures are required.

Consumers receive food-related information from various sources and strive to make informed food choices regarding their health, lifestyle and belief. To be effective and reliable, the information consumers receive needs to be from a credible source and delivered to them in a way they trust. The aim of this study was to investigate the sources and media channels of that information consumer trust. An online and hardcopy survey of 298 consumers currently living in Australia was carried out. Many consumers believe that the source of food product information is important (87%). As a source of general and nutritional information, Health Professionals, Scientists and Government sources are the most trusted sources, with at least 80% of participants confident of the information coming from these sources. Retailer advertising and social media are the least trusted sources with just 29% and 11%, respectively, confident of these sources. As a delivery medium, printed food labels (67%) and printed brochures or fact sheets (56%) remain the most trusted delivery media compared with electronic media, such as mobile phone or the Internet.

In recent years, Cloud computing has revolutionalized the IT industry by introducing a whole new concept and platform of enterprise systems (ES). The traditional ES seem to be too clunky, expensive and complex for most organizations to implement and use. To improve such situation Cloud ES concept was recently introduced to offer competitive advantage to organizations through flexibility, scalability and independence in IT infrastructure and capabilities. Today, this area has not been fully explored in the academia due to little available literature but it has attracted tremendous interest from the general practitioners. This study seeks to contribute to IS literature by conceptualising Cloud ES from a pragmatic understanding between practitioners and academic. It further elaborates the advantages and challenges of Cloud ES and discusses the potential of Cloud ES as an attractive option to SME in solving the problems of high investments in IT infrastructures and IT resources.

A network ethnography methodology was developed to understand and explain the influence of social capital on social network structures. This approach was applied to an inter-organizational technology cooperation group to identify causes of low group participation and engagement and opportunities to increase those factors. A cluster of key actors at the core of the group was found to hold the majority of the social capital, which is viewed as both a current constraint and a future opportunity. The methodology is evaluated with a view continuing its development. © 2011 IEEE.

Stages-of-growth has been the most popular approach used for strategy development and implementation. The major stages of growth models such as Gibson and Nolan have been widely discussed and are particularly useful in understanding the implementation of IS in organisations. These models might be more representative of e-commerce implementation, however, if they took into account more recent IS developments such as B2B e-commerce. Using a case study research undertaken in Australia, this study proposes a model of stages of growth based on the use of B2B e-commerce technologies and applications in Australian organisations. Four stages of growth proposed for B2B e-commerce implementation are (i) initial e-commerce; (ii) centralised e-commerce; (iii) looking inward for benefits; and (iv) global e-commerce.

Until recently, little research had been undertaken into the process of e-commerce implementation, especially in relation to the implementation of business-to-business (B2B) relationships. Given the complexity of this process, we endeavour to contribute to what we perceive as a gap in the body of theory surrounding the implementation process in the extant business-to-business literature. We describe the findings of a series of multiple case studies comprising ten major Australian e-commerce initiators. In addition to confirming our earlier finding of the importance of nontechnical factors for the success of the implementation process, we also present, through our case studies, the various management and business issues associated with the success or otherwise of B2B e-commerce implementation.