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IT Governance has become an increasingly important process in delivering business value from IT. A number of IT governance frameworks have been proposed as the MIT — CISR framework and COBIT. However, there is no proposal of a systematic methodology for IT Governance assessment and design, considering the possibility of joint usage of multiple frameworks. This paper presents a systematic methodology for IT governance assessment and design, specified through different phases, their activities and outcomes. This methodology is applied in a real case showing the practical benefit from its usage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is the aim of this paper to identify the most important factors that influence a retail company's expectations and motivations regarding RFID implementation at the point-of-sale based on empirical data. The data for our research was gathered by means of a questionnaire and analysed using a structural equation model. The results suggest that retailers which expect a high potential from RFID use intend to adopt early compared to the industry average. Interestingly, the current level of RFID capabilities does not seem to influence the expected timing of adopting RFID-based check-outs. However, our results show that companies which expect high potential benefits have significantly higher levels of RFID knowledge. Customer waiting time seems to be a main driver for companies to examine new technologies such as RFID-based check-out terminals. Retailers that recognize customer waiting time in front of the POS terminal as a problem expect higher benefits from RFID and are more innovative with regard to POS technology. Contrary to our expectations, pressure to save personnel costs did not have a significant impact on the assessment of expected benefits from RFID. This indicates that the main driver for companies to consider RFID for automating the check-out process is customer service rather than cost savings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The implementation of E-Government systems is a complex activity, due especially to the variety of the aspects involved (technological, organizational, normative). The difficulties are even major on the local level, where the task to implement E-Government systems is often entrusted to Small Local Government Organizations (SLGO): for them the management of the innovation can be a problem because of the lack of resources. In this paper, making a reference to a case study in Lombardy Region (Italy), we point out some critical aspects that can arise in the implementation of E-Government systems by SLGOs. The discussion of these elements is based on the data collected through a survey carried out at the end of 2005 on a sample of the 1546 Lombardy municipalities. The survey is based on the use of smart cards for the access to online services of the Local Public Administration, Thanks to some projects carried out in the last few years, in Lombardy already exist all the infrastructural and technological conditions necessary to guarantee a secure access to online services. From this point of view, the critical aspects which arose in the survey and which are discussed in this paper highlight the fact that for SLGOs the problems in the implementation of E-Government systems are not so much technological as actually organizational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledging the necessity of utilizing the new electronics, information and communication technologies the movement toward implementation of e-government in Iran has recently received the attention of the authorities and policy makers. Achieving this end needs first providing a clear definition for e-government in Iran, to encompass its specific cultural, social and political characteristics, and also its actual and potential grounds for science and technology. It is argued that Government to Government (G-to-G) as a major part of the e- government consists of various components including the Government Electronic Administration (GEA) which will provide foundation required to monitor and support G-to-G system in particular and to enhance the capacity of government policy making in general. This paper addresses the efforts made toward development and implementation of Iran's GEA, the experiences gained, and the visions and views on its future developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Academic researches, government reports, and international organization surveys have indicated that outcomes of many digital divide projects fail to accomplish their strategic goals, and so that more exertions of strategic management in the government project planning process are expected. In order to ensure the achievement of bridging digital divides, governments need to be aware of their absence and weakness in strategy formulation and implementation in addition to simply launching projects towards strategic visions and objectives. However, the literature shows little help for the governments to detect the shortcomings of their strategies and to identity gaps between strategic objectives and performance measures. The goal of this research is to propose generic strategic gaps models based on the balanced scorecard framework for identifying and analyzing the strategic gap situations. Both horizontal and vertical strategic gaps regarding project efforts for reducing digital divides will be determined and discussed. The proposed approach and analysis models are then applied to the case of Taiwan for demonstrating their feasibility and usefulness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scenario building is a technique to stimulate different perspectives and images on the future. This technique allows to better predict the evolution of a certain domain beyond short-term forecasting based on the scenarios developed. The EC co-funded project eGovRTD2020 aims to develop scenarios of e-government in 2020 and beyond. The vision is to transform the EC government landscape into a coherent community, which anticipates customer needs and leverages the potential of the diversity and innovativeness of public agencies. In this paper, we give an overview of the scenario building methodology and develop a first set of scenarios using trend analysis. Four scenarios are derived showing different futures on e-government in 2020. The scenarios contain different aspects of integration, decentralization and centralization of power and governmental departments, democratizing systems and the role of individualisms and collectivism in society. The scenarios were used as a starting point for a series of regional scenario building workshops carried out across Europe. In a next stage, the scenarios will feed into a roadmapping exercise for e-government research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present a framework for e-government research that draws heavily on Iacono and Kling's work on computerization movements. They build on this work by appropriating cognate studies of organizational informatics by Kling and his colleagues, and socio-technical research in the UK. From this blend, they derive a construct, the ‘ideology-artefact complex'. Using empirical work (including recent case studies of their own), they indicate how this may inform e-government research. They discuss ways in which the construct may act as a bridge between two traditions of UK/European social informatics and US socio-technical research. They discuss a potential research agenda for computerization movements in e-government that focuses on three main problem areas: macro level social order, counter-movements and material realisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Neutral" electronic marketplaces fail because their structure and mode of operation does not allow for the effective accommodation of multiple business models that could serve the interests of a critical mass of adopters. We propose a fresh approach for the creation of economically viable "neutral" electronic marketplaces showing that this can be accomplished through the ability to transcend taxonomical classifications with a generic agent-mediated ontology and, simultaneously, through the provision of flexible and active decision support. Taxonomies may stifle innovation by imposing artificial boundaries through categorization schemes and levels of abstraction. The proposed architecture addresses this issue underlying a "liquid" e-hub that may mutate from one taxonomical classification to another. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The electronic order (e-Ordering) service as an e-business process allows the true business-to-business secure collaboration by giving the opportunity to salesmen and purchasers to execute trustful processes of electronic trading opening new markets. The W3C working draft "Web Service Architecture (WSA) Requirements" and a set of EU Directives impose several security and privacy requirements that the e-Ordering implementations have to satisfy in order to achieve a secure transaction. This paper presents a set of these requirements and describes an e-ordering system (TOES) that address them based on extensible Markup Language (XML), XML Cryptography, Public Key Infrastructure (PKI), Web Services Policy Language (WSPL) and Web Services. The proposed e-Ordering service TOES is open, secure, interoperable, and affordable respecting the EU legislation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electronic business models (e-business models) are a relatively new and growing research topic within Information Systems Science. The purpose of the paper is to combine critical success factors (CSFs) and life cycle model literature as ways to evaluate e-business models. The study draws empirical data from a survey among leading Finnish companies. In the survey, 104 respondents assessed 20 CSFs gathered from management literature as well as the importance of each CSF at different life cycle stages of an e-business model. Theoretically, the observations give evidence on the changing importance of various CSFs at different stages of an e-business model's life cycle. Primarily, the risk level and effectiveness of e-business model were recognized to distinguish CSFs in the life cycle model. In addition, the customer type (either B2B or B2C), the position in the value chain, and the service or product-orientation seem to affect which CSFs are essential at the various stages of e-business model's life cycle. Managerially, the different weightings of the importance of CSFs in the various stages of an e-business model's life cycle reflect the practical implications of the paper. The results also suggest that different CSFs are crucial at each stage of a life cycle. The results are likely to be useful for the venture capitalists and entrepreneurs in planning and making decisions regarding the long-term scenarios for e-business models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Accessibility means that the use of services should be open to all, to people of all kinds and in all situations. This study in barriers to Internet use for the elderly and unemployed is based on material gathered from persons attending a computer course run by the City Council at a residents' meeting room in Oulu, Northern Finland, through interviews carried out before and after the course and observations made during it. Half of the participants were making e-transactions regularly a year after the course, the most common types being the paying of bills and the sending of e-mails to relatives. It is evident that Web pages provide far too much information at one glance for the elderly to digest, that the basic concepts of the Internet and the metaphorical terms associated with the user interface are by no means obvious, and that the illogicalities of services can easily discourage elderly people from using them. The general accessibility instructions place emphasis on the problems of people with poor eyesight, but surprisingly, none of the people interviewed suffered from the small size of the print on Web pages and nobody complained that their eyesight was a hindrance. Another surprising observation was that using the Internet was mostly regarded as preferable to visiting an office. The elderly people were in their own opinion skilled at using a mouse and at moving rapidly between Web pages, but observations suggested that they had considerable problems with using a mouse and lacked the boldness to move back and forth between pages. The sites that they visited were predominantly Finnish ones. There were also great variations in the degree to which these people felt that they were a part of the information society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recently developed policies the electronic exchange of data with governmental organisations is seen as a means to help reduce the administrative burden for businesses. Even laws have become active to enforce electronic data filing. However, we do not know whether these eGovemment applications do help reduce the administrative burden, so we do not know whether this new legislation is effective either, Although many business-to-government systems are currently being implemented, the adoption of these data interchange systems in a governmental context has not yet been studied extensively. In the study reported in this paper we investigate data exchange related adoption strategies in order to be able to address (in)effective strategies for the reduction of the administrative burden. We present an analysis of adoption factors that influence adoption decisions of SME companies in this context. Based on a representative survey we found some factors that seem to be relevant for the (non)adoption of business-to-government data exchange systems. We found that especially small companies tend to outsource eGovernment related data exchange processes. Therefore we conclude that it is very unlikely that the governments' aims to reduce administrative burden are met using current implementation strategies. We suggest an adapted strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This works describes a new metaphor to make a contents search in an image database and to recover the results obtained using an automatically selected bandwidth. The increasing use of electronic commerce and the consequent publication of image catalogues through internet make evident the necessity to incorporate alternative mechanisms to the traditional search by key-words. Our work explores the scope of image-content access of databases. We use textual description, shapes, patterns and color similarities. At a later stage and due to the cost of the transmission of high quality images, we analyze the available bandwidth and we adapt the size of the resulting images to cope with the user requirements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper is an overview of the project that is being carried out at the Warsaw University of Technology. The project strives to create a Wikipedia — like system, that will allow people to collaboratively create and edit vector data, especially city maps and plans (instead of text, as in traditional wiki systems, such as Wikipedia) in order to provide communities and businesses an accurate and cheap geospatial information. Contrary to other systems that have been created towards this purpose, and which could be potentially integrated into Wikipedia, the system which has been described assumes that geospatial accuracy is not achievable for ordinary users and thus provides built-in mechanisms for dealing with data uncertainty and inaccuracy. Additionally a collaboration infrastructure essential for Wikipedia-like growth (version control, possibility to discuss and revert changes, reliance on conceptual objects — such as crossroads — instead of absolute geospatial coordinates etc.) is also provided. Finally the system prototype is designed in such a way, that no external software (such as Java VM), apart from ordinary web browser, will be required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Products and services are increasingly offered by value webs, rather than by a single enterprise. Typically, value webs need inter-organizational controls to prevent fraudulent behaviour of actors. To design and analyze controls, we developed the economic value-based methodology e3-control, which so far has been applied mainly in commercial environments, which are regulated by contractual arrangements. In this paper, we use e3control in a highly regulated environment, which contains public-private partnerships, namely the healthcare sector in The Netherlands. Lessons learned include that the notion of economic reciprocity — as present in a commercial setting — is not always apparent in highly regulated environments; and that a highly regulated environment requires artefacts like evidence objects, which can be dealt with as if they were value objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new Electronic Activity Interchange EAI approach is proposed to support inter-business cooperation. This idea is based on using tele-activities, being pre-programmed piece of software that may be moved to certain locations and executed there. In contrast to traditional approaches, e.g., Electronic Data Interchange EDI, we consider both program and data flow rather than the information flow only. We propose a reasonable trade-off between a need for remote execution of activities owned and controlled by different business partners, and overall system security and efficiency. Our approach is based on imperative programming of activity code, and two basic activity classes: private, "untrusted" activities, executed with special care and with certain security restrictions, and public activities, being "trusted" code from the point of view of the local environment the activity is executed in. A balance between private and public activities may be defined by the business partners according to the specific situation and the business case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a cross-industrial research project, we describe the different business model scenarios for the introduction of remote management technologies at the end-customer's premises. While remote management is introduced to aid the digital convergence between previously dissociated islands of end-user devices, and new service opportunities are created, several dominant industry trends run counter to this attempt at centralization. We offer a critical appraisal of the business challenges posed to the existing business models. Four business model scenarios are proposed that describe the most feasible evolutions in the coming years. Strategic business requirements are identified to appreciate the viability of each business scenario. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, a large amount of content is delivered to users by content delivery services through broad-band networks. The necessity for the service which guarantees quality is increasing in the Internet, because users' requirements are diversified. Differentiated services, which have multiple classes using priority control, are being introduced. The limited network resources can be used effectively by applying priority control in content delivery services. In such services, it is important to predict users' requirements and to provide the services that suit users. In this paper, the user's behaviour in content delivery services with priority control was modeled by using willingness to pay, while the total users' benefit and the provider's revenue in two different content delivery models are maximized. One model is the content delivery service using only streaming, and the other model offers streaming and download services. In this paper, it is proved that optimal pricing for users and that for providers are different. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

P2P services made music sharing popular. Users got used to get the songs they want for free, and use it freely, without restrictions. With some years of delay, online music retailers started to sell legal digital song files, mainly with DRM protection. Recent studies shows that P2P networks continue to grow, attracting more and more users. In this scenario, this work is dedicated to find out some evidences about what can be done to convince users to migrate from the P2P services to legal online music stores. The main question that rises is: How to convince users to start paying for what they already find for free? The empirical research was conducted in two phases: First, interviews with 7 specialists from the music and internet businesses (recording companies, music sites, legal online music stores) were done. With the identified practices and insights about the problem, it was created an online survey that was answered by a sample of 10.123 Brazilian online music users. Using a factorial analysis, 3 dimensions (website attributes, competitive differentiation and anti-piracy) were identified. Results indicate that in order to convince users of P2P services for buying music, the music industry must implement several integrated tactics. In general, website attributes and competitive differentiation are perceived as more important than anti-piracy actions. For occasional users, this process seems to be easier, and might be done with less tactics. The more frequent the P2P usage is, weaker the anti-piracy dimension was perceived as important. These findings can indicate that different managerial and marketing approaches are needed to address the migration of users for online legal music stores. Reward programs and exclusive contents seem to be good options in this direction. At last, limitations and suggestions for further studies are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was initially created to be a simple model to explain specific technology behavior in information systems. Over the last 18 years, due to its popularity, the TAM has been augmented by including various context-specific constructs to explain phenomenon in e-commerce, e-learning, e-banking, and wireless technologies besides information systems. This study, in the context of e-commerce, or more specifically the online purchase behavior, attempts to consolidate a cohort of existing constructs using the emerging tenets of Customer Value-based Theory and reinstate the parsimonious intentions of TAM. A total of 1730 questionnaires were collected from Internet users who owned a credit card. The respondents came from all the State capitals in Malaysia, including Cyberjaya, which is the smart city of the Multimedia Super Corridor in Malaysia. Out of 1730 questionnaires, 1440 formed the sample for further data analysis. Bivariate, partial correlations and stepwise multiple regression were used in this study to determine the impact of customer value. The results have shown that Perceived Customer Value is an important determinant of Online Transactions Behavior. With the presence of Perceived Customer Value, only Behavioral Intention is a significant predictor on Online Purchase Behavior. Hence, the Customer Value-Based Model is proposed to obtain a parsimonious conceptualization in predicting consumer acceptance of e-commerce transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

E-Government, today, is being regarded as the panacea for many of the conventional government ills, such as rampant corruption in developing countries to costly service deliveries in the developed countries. This paper provides a quick introduction to the e-government and proceeds on to describe a new framework developed for the transition of a government into an e-government — more specific to the environment of a developing country like that of Pakistan. This model draws parallel to a jigsaw, thus has been called the Jigsaw Model. The fundamental strength of this model lies in the fact that it has acknowledged the society as a foundation pillar in the e-government model and the entire economy progresses with the coalescence of all four parties included. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, a new approach is proposed for the personalization of the access to different information sources (servers, Web pages, services, etc.) distributed across the Internet. In contrast to the traditional approaches, with personalization software owned and controlled by the owner of the information source, we propose to use the software that is prepared and controlled directly by the end-users. Our approach is based on software agent technology and imperative programming of agent code. The main goal of using personalization agents is twofold. First, such agents act as information brokers, adjusting both contents and format of the information to individual user requirements, restrictions imposed by the end-user hardware and communication means, current situation, etc. Second, the agents are used as autonomous monitors, individually informing agent owners about "important" (from the particular owner point of view) information changes. The fact of using source-independent personalization agents makes it possible to personalize access to such traditionally closed and fixed (i.e., unmanageable from the end-user point of view) information sources and systems, as e-banks, public Web portals and information servers, etc. Due to the fact the agents are prepared by (or at least for) particular users, the expenses related with the development of the agent code are in the major part incurred by these users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most CRM systems include the text base response function through the Web, which apply the text mining technology. However, there is the critical problem of bad performance of the mining system; low hit rate of expected answers at the beginning stage. The problem is caused by limited knowledge in the system due to the lack of corpus and documents accumulated. Another cause is that the vocabulary is sometimes poor in the customer's short questionnaire. The main purpose of this study is to improve the performance of mining systems by tuning from the user's standpoint, not from the system provider. We experimented with a mining system. We populated corpus to the system and put some questions into the system repeatedly while changing corpus quantity and the effect of keywords. The results suggest that when the corpus quantity is not large enough, the system can be improved by repeating to input the same corpus several times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a multidisciplinary methodology for developing public eProcurement (eProc.) projects in countries whose economy are either emerging, developing or in transition. The focus is on the first part of the methodology, namely eReadiness. Our aim is to bring out a number of issues, which are currently challenging many eGovemment projects through an integrated approach by encompassing sociological, economic, organizational, legal and technological factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personalization is an interdisciplinary topic that has been discussed in the literature of marketing and information systems as well as in other research areas. In this paper we present findings from a longitudinal research project on personalization of e-commerce systems. The findings were taken from interviews and software development projects with company partners (action research). The main contribution described in this paper is the Personalization Map. The map provides an extensive overview on personalization functions that can be used to individualize and improve human-computer-interaction both in B2C and B2B e-commerce environments. In a first step, the functions are classified according to their order of appearance in the buying process. In a second step they are grouped into subcategories. There is no single strategy for selecting successful personalization functions as the suitability varies depending on the industry and the goods sold. Most definitions of personalization are closely connected to the recommendation of items based on user preferences. The Personalization Map shows that recommender systems are an interesting but rather small part of the universe of personalization functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors present a study of e-participation within a public sector agency (PSA), where a number of knowledge management initiatives have been introduced since the inception of the UK ‘Modernising government' programme of 1999. The agency has attempted to set up an internal participatory infrastructure to manage ‘knowledge' across the network of local enterprise companies through which agency policy is operationalised. The trajectory of knowledge management versions in PSA is thus a rich indicator of power-plays in the organisation, and the discussion uses discourse analysis to explore the document base (field notes, textual data paper and electronic, formal and informal) that was produced at three historical moments. The aim is to understand patterns of participation and resistance in a number of e-initiatives within the agency. The authors highlight the choices relating to the stimulating, fostering, encouraging, embracing, contesting, ignoring, and perhaps rejecting of this e-participation project. Such insights are important to our understanding of the influences upon e-governmental initiatives, an area of UK public spending that is littered with IT project failures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to develop a conceptual model that is inherently suitable for analyzing the complexity of B2B e-market and transaction performance in China. The case study of CCEC.com provides an insight on how one excellent B2B e-market has executed a successful strategy utilizing the existing source within the current business climate of China. The data from the case research illustrate e-commerce strategies and crucial business activities. Further, the B2B E-Market Model is proposed for studying the critical strategy component of value creation in e-markets of China. The Model involves with two variables: the e-commerce process and the controlling complexity. Building on process insight, the e-commerce process can be modelled by separating main business activities into four phases designed to exploit value creation opportunity. Controlling complexity refers to supervising and controlling the transactional processes for security, trust and efficient transaction environment. The Model illustrates the relationship between the business components required to support the e-commerce processes with the value creation factor and the controlling complexity. Using the model in comparisons of B2B e-markets in USA and in China, we find unique characteristics in transactional processes - the information, negotiation, payment and delivery phases. It offers an effective approach to studying dynamic structure of transactional process and a high performance e-commerce strategy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Information systems have developed along the supply chain to support logistics management in all types of industries. Most of this effort has been focused at reducing the levels of working capital by increasing the efficiency of information flow from market to raw materials suppliers. Similar developments have also occurred to support other business processes, for example connecting together new product design and marketing databases to create virtual corporations. Electronic commerce and associated technologies such as EDI are the norm in advanced supply chains and it is common for their use to be mandatory when trading with large companies. The manufacturing of a product is now seen as a whole process across the supply chain rather than a series of separate operations managed and controlled by different organisations. The management of logistics has been fundamentally re-engineered and designed to focus on quality and time-based strategies. However developments in the handling of financial information between functions within companies and across organisational boundaries have lagged far behind the developments in logistics management. This paper explores the potential benefits of cooperative relationships in the financial supply chain to reduce the time delays and increase the level of certainty regarding financial transactions between separate organisations. The financial benefits are estimated using published data to provide a potential saving of 3.8% of the value of the transaction. An organizational model is presented of likely future developments and steps that can be taken by the financial service industry to benefit as integrated providers of financial services to supply chains and the areas for initial implementation are outlined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Significance of inter-organizational information systems (IOSs) in inter-organizational relationship (IOR) has been highlighted recently. IOSs are not only technical solutions to enhance communication across organizations, but they are also supporters and enablers of cooperation as well as symbols of formal IORs. The success or failure of these systems can have severe effects on cooperative relationships. In this conceptual-analytical research based on existing literature the role of different factors influencing to success of IOSs are considered. When considering implementing an IOS the role of these factors should be asserted to be able to enhance cooperation in IORs on one hand and successfully implement IOSs on the other hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ability to realize the potential of innovations is important for societies to be successful. The core of the concept of Plug and Play Business is an integrated set of ICT-tools that support innovators in turning their ideas into businesses by forming virtual enterprises for inter-organizational and interoperable collaboration. In this paper, we analyze the concept of Plug and Play Business and present a formalization of relevant aspects, such as the different tasks involved in virtual enterprise formation and collaboration. We explore the functional requirements of Plug and Play Business software, and make an assessment of the usefulness of existing technologies for its implementation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing ERP systems provide an IT solution to the management of enterprise resources based on the function-oriented management approach. With an increasingly wide adoption of the project-oriented management, new models are needed for ERP systems to support the management of enterprise resources in a project-oriented manner. This paper presents an architecture of an ERP system supporting project-oriented management. Two characteristics of the project-oriented management are integrated in the proposed architecture: first, social protocols are used to model interactions between actors (humans or software agents) within a given group. Second, the concept of group actions is detailed as a way to integrate group dynamics to social protocols. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Credit card payment system is the most popular way to make a purchase on electronic commerce. The main problem about using it is that the customer gives his personal information and credit card number to merchant or payment service provider when he makes a purchase in Internet. The result of this action is the lost of customer's anonymity and privacy in both the real world and Internet. We propose a new electronic currency scheme which guarantees customer anonymity and privacy. Also, we integrate our scheme with PayPal system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The confidence level of citizens, as far as the ability of the organizers to provide security is concerned, is a factor directly impacting their attendance in athletic events. This paper, proposes a system called BioAthletics that implements strong access control, enhancing the safety feeling of event spectators. BioAthletics integrates intelligent biometric access control systems and smart cards for authenticating participants. A pilot version of BioAthletics was deployed and tested in terms of acceptability, information security and performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today the Internet is a playground for the young. Tomorrow the elderly people will use the same technology and emerging forms of new media in their everyday life. The elderly people of tomorrow have to rely more and more on their technological skills in order to cope with their every day activities, and to contact their relatives, authorities and different service providers. In the near future, technology-orientation will be one of the key requirements for uncompelled and independent life at home for the elderly people. This emerging and increasingly more utilized service channel also raises questions about the user integrity and safety. What kinds of risks and threats the elderly people can encounter when using these electronic service models and what kind of measures must be taken in order to ensure that the integrity and safety of the elderly people is guaranteed in the ever-changing digital world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to information systems across corporate boundaries with high demands to privacy and trust result into ambitious research and development targets. This study provides motivation and a roadmap for approaching integrated security management solutions in a business network of partners with heterogeneous ICT and security infrastructures. We aim at describing specifics of identity and access management in inter-organizational collaboration, and a vision and arguments for identity and access management in a business network. A case study with Metso Paper, Inc., the leading manufacturer of paper machinery and related services, validates the results, thus providing a motivating example of the possibilities of e-services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]