Journal of Information Technology Management
Volume:12 Issue: 4, Autumn 2020

Organizations nowadays focus on, not implementing ERP systems, but also leveraging ERP systems as part of their digital strategy. They holistically address people, processes, and technology for a digital transformation. Meanwhile, higher education institutions (HEIs) are also facing an imperative need for the implementation of modern technologies to stay competitive and differentiate them as an innovation leader. Higher education management is challenged with maintaining high-level information systems. These systems can generate complex real-time reports for effective resource allocation and better decision making. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems can help HEIs manage their resources and operations effectively. A study of ERP among 112 HEIs in Egypt was conducted. This study originally investigates the Egyptian HEIs’ perception of the ERP system as a new integrating tool for its value. The results showed that Egyptian HEIs are still at the embryonic level as the majority have not adopted these systems yet. However, ERP value has been undoubtedly perceived by HEIs’ managers. Therefore, the present study fruitfully reflected HEIs’ understanding of the imperative need of ERP systems as strategic systems for their competitiveness. Consequently, the study suggests that Egyptian HEIs and ERP vendors take steps to remove any barriers and accelerate the ERP adoption process. Also, this research contributes to the advancement of ERP concepts and characteristics from HEIs' standpoint and a grants practical verification to the higher education context. Overall, the study advances existing knowledge and research on ERP, strategic management systems, and HEIs.

The development of new technologies has confronted the entire domain of science and industry with issues of big data's scalability as well as its integration with the purpose of forecasting analytics in its life cycle. In predictive analytics, the forecast of near-future and recent past - or in other words, the now-casting - is the continuous study of real-time events and constantly updated where it considers eventuality. So, it is necessary to consider the highly data-driven technologies and to use new methods of analysis, like machine learning and visualization tools, with the ability of interaction and connection to different data resources with varieties of data regarding the type of big data aimed at reducing the risks of policy-making institution’s investment in the field of IT. The main scientific contribution of this article is presenting a new approach of policy-making for the now-casting of economic indicators in order to improve the performance of forecasting through the combination of deep nets and deep learning methods in the data and features representation. In this regard, a net under the title of P-V-L Deep: Predictive Variational Auto Encoders - Long Short-term Memory Deep Neural Network was designed in which the architecture of variational auto-encoder was used for unsupervised learning, data representation, and data reconstruction; moreover, long short-term memory was adopted in order to evaluate now-casting performance of deep nets in time-series of macro-econometric variations. Represented and reconstructed data in the generative network of variational auto-encoder to determine the performance of long-short-term memory in the forecasting of the economic indicators were compared to principal data of the net. The findings of the research argue that reconstructed data which are derived from variational auto-encoder embody shorter training time and outperform of prediction in long short-term memory compared to principal data.

The introduction of cloud computing techniques revolutionized the current of information processing and storing. Cloud computing as a competitive edge provides easy and automated access to the vast ocean of resources through standard network mechanisms to businesses and organizations. Due to the vast diversity of service providers and their respective variety of available services with different qualities, top managements often face difficulty for choosing the best available option. So, considering the growing significance of the mentioned issue, this study aims to identify and rank contributing factors in selection of cloud service providers. In that attempt, this research approaches its goal by going through three major phases. Firstly, in phase one, prior studies are reviewed for extracting related elements of selection. Secondly, by employing Fuzzy Delphi method and obtaining results by interviewing experts in this field such as IT managers and technicians, this study tries to finalize the list of contributing factors. Lastly, by utilizing Fuzzy best-worst multi-criteria decision-making method, which is one of the most recent techniques employed to statistically rank variables, this research introduces a list of vital factors for cloud service selection. Based on the findings of this study, there are five major categories involved in the selection process which are: performance, security, data management, personal data protection and environmental-organizational. The finalized result of ranking shows that, performance related factors such as accessibility, response time and capacity are the first priority. The runner-up is security with reliability and governance. Environmental-organizational variables lands in the third place by considering rental and network costs.

K nearest neighbor algorithm is one of the most frequently used techniques in data mining for its integrity and performance. Though the KNN algorithm is highly effective in many cases, it has some essential deficiencies, which affects the classification accuracy of the algorithm. First, the effectiveness of the algorithm is affected by redundant and irrelevant features. Furthermore, this algorithm does not consider the differences between samples, which led the algorithm to have inaccurate predictions. In this paper, we proposed a novel scheme for improving the accuracy of the KNN classification algorithm based on the new weighting technique and stepwise feature selection. First, we used a stepwise feature selection method to eliminate irrelevant features and select highly correlated features with the class category. Then a new weighting method was proposed to give authority value to each sample in train dataset based on neighbor categories and Euclidean distances. This weighting approach gives a higher preference to samples that have neighbors with close Euclidean distance while they are in the same category, which can effectively increase the classification accuracy of the algorithm. We evaluated the accuracy rate of the proposed method and analyzed it with the traditional KNN algorithm and some similar works with the use of five real-world UCI datasets. The experiment results determined that the proposed scheme (denoted by WAD-KNN) performed better than the traditional KNN algorithm and considered approaches with the improvement of approximately 10% accuracy.

Sentiment analysis is the process of analyzing a person’s perception or belief about a particular subject matter. However, finding correct opinion or interest from multi-facet sentiment data is a tedious task. In this paper, a method to improve the sentiment accuracy by utilizing the concept of categorized dictionary for sentiment classification and analysis is proposed.  A categorized dictionary is developed for the sentiment classification and further calculation of sentiment accuracy. The concept of categorized dictionary involves the creation of dictionaries for different categories making the comparisons specific. The categorized dictionary includes words defining the positive and negative sentiments related to the particular category. It is used by the mapper reducer algorithm for the classification of sentiments. The data is collected from social networking site and is pre-processed. Since the amount of data is enormous therefore a reliable open-source framework Hadoop is used for the implementation. Hadoop hosts various software utilities to inspect and process any type of big data. The comparative analysis presented in this paper proves the worthiness of the proposed method.

In the digital age, e-learning systems have been employed as new equipment in the higher education system in different universities. Consideringthe importance of optimization of this system, this research is aimed at providing a modelfor the effectiveness of e-learning at in higher education systems. The study is a descriptive survey study in terms of its data collection method.The population includes all the students of electronic courses at the University of Tehran. This population includes 1481 students of the University of Tehran in the academic year 2019-2020. Regarding the population size, 300 students were selectedbased onstratified sampling, using Cochran’s formula.Lisrel and Amos softwarewere used for data analysis. In the first step, byliterature review, and based on the collected information, 87 components were identified to be related toe-learning effectiveness. Then, based on the highest frequency of the identified components in one hand, and their significance from the experts’ viewpoints, on the other hand, 14 components were finally selected and classified in three major classes including;pedagogical, individual and technicalrelated factors.

This study aimed to investigate the impact of the hospital information system (HIS) on nurses' satisfaction in Iranian public hospitals and to examine the moderating effect of computer literacy. The study population consisted of nurses working in public hospitals in Iran. A sample of 385 Iranian public hospitals was surveyed and a total of 1912 questionnaires were collected over 9 months. The analytical method used to empirically test the proposed hypotheses was the SEM technique using SmartPLS3. Results showed that all four variables of nurses' attitude, system quality, information quality, and service quality had significant positive effects on nurses' satisfaction with HIS. The findings also indicated that the effects of nurses' attitude, system quality, and particularly service quality increased on nurses' satisfaction with HIS by rising computer literacy, and only the effect of (computer literacy × information quality) was not significant on satisfaction. The use of FIMIX, CTA, and permutation test analyses is the innovation of the analysis.

Due to the huge amount of data published on the Web, the Web search process has become more difficult, and it is sometimes hard to get the expected results, especially when the users are less certain about their information needs. Several efforts have been proposed to support exploratory search on the web by using query expansion, faceted search, or supplementary information extracted from external knowledge resources. However, these solutions are not well explored for the general web search in an open-domain setting. In addition, they mostly focus on supporting search in content expressed in English and Latin based languages. In this research, we propose a fully automated approach that aims to support exploratory search over the Arabic web content. It exploits the Arabic version of Wikipedia to extract complementary information that supports visual representation and deeper exploration of the search engine's results. Key Wikipedia entities are extracted from the text snippets produced by the search engine in response to the user's query. Entities are then filtered and ranked by using a novel ranking algorithm that extends the conventional PageRank algorithm. Finally, a graph is built and presented to the user to visually represent highly ranked topics and their relationships. The proposed approach was realized by developing ArabXplore, a system that integrates with the web browser to support the web search process by executing our approach in query time. It was assessed over a dataset of 100 Arabic search queries covering different domains, and results were assessed and rated by human subjects. The underlying ranking algorithm was also compared with the conventional PageRank.

Nowadays, the tourism industry accounts for approximately 10% of the global GDP, while it only contributes 3% of the economy in Iran. Since the pressure of US sanctions increases day after day on the Iranian economy, the necessity of paying attention to this industry as a source of foreign currency is felt more than ever. The purpose of this research is to analyze the reviews of users of social commerce websites by using a combination of text mining and data mining techniques. For this purpose, the database of TripAdvisor website (TripAdvisor.com) was evaluated, and all profile information of users who commented on hotels in Iran was collected. These comments on all the content of the website, such as hotels, restaurants, and attractions, were then extracted and analyzed. The optimal number of clusters was considered four clusters by calculating the Davies-Bouldin index, namingly water therapy tourists, boutique hotels style and Iran urban tourists, travelholics and food tourists, business and health tourists. Every single cluster possesses unique attributes and features. Afterward, the association rules were further identified for each cluster according to the characteristics of each cluster and the information in the users' profiles. Finally, a solution is proposed to increase the participation of the users on the website, and targeted promotional plans are expressed in accordance with the well-known features of each cluster.

A logo epitomizes a brand and depicts the picture of a product; consequently, attention, as an initial step of the AIDA model, to the logo is a good-looking index to survey the cognitive processing during consumers’ decision-making. Eye tracker extracts the visual attention data. For these reasons and appreciated from fixation duration, in the present study, the process of visual attention to the logo of a brand during decision-making was studied. To analyze the effects of the popularity of a brand on consumers’ decision-making, visual attention of 53 undergraduate students was studied. The brands were selected from two categories of beverages: soft drinks and non-alcoholic beers. Prior to the test, the participants had declared their favorite categories. The results showed that 75% of the participants selected a popular brand of their unfavorite categories. On the other hand, the difference of fixation duration between logos of popular and unknown brands did not directly relate to the choices of the participants. Therefore, these results did not correspond with the AIDA model. Additionally, cognitive processing toward the unknown brands’ logos was more than the popular brands’ logos. Moreover, the consumers who changed their decision were subjected to more cognitive processing compared to the consumers who insisted on their selection. In contrast to the AIDA model which implies that decision-making is triggered by attention, the present study indicated that decision making can also be influenced by the popularity of the brand. This can be due to optimization of the working memory usage by the brain. Finally, these results could be helpful in creating a new brand. According to the AIDA model, the more attractive logo and package of the brand, the more chance for being selected by the customers. However, our findings emphasize the importance of the popularity of the brand.

Environmental pollution and rapid depletion are among the chief concerns about fossil fuels such as oil, gas, and coal. Renewable energy sources do not suffer from such limitations and are considered the best choice to replace fossil fuels. The present study develops a mathematical model for optimal allocation of regional renewable energy to meet a country-wide demand and its other essential aspects. The ultimate purpose is to minimize the total cost by planning, including power plant construction and maintenance costs and transmission costs. Minimum-cost flow equations are embedded in the model to determine how regions can supply energy to other regions or rely on them to fulfill annual demand. In order to verify the applicability of the model, it is applied to a real-world case study of Iran to determine the optimal renewable energy generation-transmission decisions for the next decade. Results indicate that the hydroelectric and solar power plants should generate the majority of the generated renewable electricity within the country, according to the optimal solution. Moreover, regarding the significant population growth and waste generation in the country’s large cities, biomass power plants can have the opportunity to satisfy a remarkable portion of electricity demand.