The impact of organizational contexts on EDI controls

The growing popularity of electronic data interchange (EDI) in business operations has led to a growing recognition of the need to implement proper control procedures. The requirements for control systems vary according to organizational context. A research model proposes that the organization, technological, and task characteristics as well as partner attributes affect formal, informal, and automated controls, each of which can be categorized as internal and external controls. Data were gathered from 110 companies that had adopted EDI. IS sophistication and task routineness were significantly associated with the use of formal and automated — both internal and external — controls. Decentralization and partner trust affected the use of internal and external informal controls. The results of this study could help EDI managers or auditors decide the necessary mode of controls for a certain organizational context. In addition, this study would be of interest to EDI practitioners in designing control systems.     

Hybrid knowledge integration using the fuzzy genetic algorithm: prediction of the Korea stock price index

This paper proposes the hybrid knowledge integration mechanism using the fuzzy genetic algorithm for the optimized integration of knowledge from several sources such as machine knowledge, expert knowledge and user knowledge. This mechanism is applied to the prediction of the Korea stock price index. Machine knowledge is generated by applying neural networks to technical indicators, while expert knowledge and user knowledge are generated from the evaluations of external factors that affect the stock market. Cooperative knowledge is generated from the weighted sum of these sources using a genetic algorithm. Experimental results show that the hybrid mechanism can provide more accurate and less ambiguous results. It means that this mechanism is useful in integrating knowledge from multiple sources for an unstructured environment such as the stock market. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Risk analysis for electronic commerce using case-based reasoning

Electronic commerce (EC) appears to be essential for an organization’s survival and growth. Then the security of the EC systems, which ensures authorized and correct transaction processing, becomes one of the most critical issues in implementing the systems. The analysis of risk that a system faces is the core part of security management since risk analysis can identify the principal assets, the threats and the vulnerabilities of those assets, and the risks confronting the assets. This study intends to develop a risk analysis system in an EC environment using the case-based reasoning (CBR) technique. The process of the proposed system is composed of four steps: initial data collection, asset evaluation, threat and vulnerability evaluation, and result generation of risk analysis. This process follows the traditional risk analysis process. This system employs the casebase of past analyses and security accidents. Although some studies introduced several case-based systems for risk analysis of traditional information system, none of them is under an EC environment. The proposed system is the first to apply the CBR technique for risk analysis of an EC system. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.