Artificial intelligence (AI) represents a new area in digital technologies and is already changing the operations of businesses. Small businesses generally make up 99% of businesses and employ around half of the workforce in western countries, so it is important to examine the impact of AI on them. Despite this, AI adoption in small businesses remains under-researched. This chapter provides a high-level exploration of the adoption, and challenges associated with the use of AI by small businesses through a scoping review of the literature across relevant social sectors. The chapter highlights the effect of the COVID pandemic and considers whether this will lead to broader AI adoption. Barriers such as resource limitations, cybersecurity, and knowledge gaps are discussed. The chapter concludes with strategies to support AI adoption, emphasizing tailored tools and improved training to overcome these barriers, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and innovation in small businesses.

Enterprises use Business Analytics (BA) to achieve business value. Although Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) significantly contribute to economic development and constitute a large proportion of enterprises, research into BA has been mostly conducted in large enterprises. In recent years, the interest in technological resources has rapidly expanded, as technological resources are essential in achieving strategic business objectives for SMEs. BA is one type of technological resource that has gained increasing importance. However, there is a lack of understanding of the role BA can play in obtaining competitive advantage in the SME context. This research explores SMEs’ BA resources in 12 SME case studies using Resource-Base View as a theoretical underpinning concept. It provides a richer understanding of how SMEs utilise BA resources, and the findings reveal that the purpose of using BA differs between micro and small-sized SMEs and medium-sized SMEs. Hence, this research provides an in-depth understanding of the role BA plays in different sizes of SMEs.

Over the last decades, Business Analytics (BA) has gained increasing importance. Research into BA has shown how BA contributes to business value (e.g., competitive advantage) and performance, but the research predominantly was conducted in large organizations. Although Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute a significant proportion of enterprises globally, the studies of how SMEs engage with BA and gain competitive advantage from BA is scarce. This research addresses this gap, explore and better understand the role of BA capabilities in enabling SMEs to create competitive advantage. It employs Resource-Based View (RBV) as a theoretical underpinning and uses a qualitative case study approach. Finally, this paper concludes by presenting BA capabilities categorised based on SMEs’ perspectives. It also highlights the importance of having a better understanding of BA capabilities, and how this deep understanding can help academic researchers and industry practitioners in enabling competitive advantage from their use of BA.

Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) are locomotives of economic development. They constitute an important proportion of enterprises globally, including in Australia. Hence, the Australian government recognises the importance of enabling the competitiveness of SMEs as a driving force of the economy of Australia. In recent years, there has been a rapid expansion of technological resources which are essential in enabling competitive advantage for SMEs. One type of technical resource that has gained increasing importance over the last decade is Business Analytics (BA). Research into BA, predominantly in the context of large organisations, has shown how BA contributes to business value and business performance. However, there’s a lack of understanding of the role BA resources can play in obtaining competitive advantage in the SME context. By employing Resource-Based View (RBV) as theoretical underpinning, this research explores this gap and aims to provide a richer understanding of the role of BA capabilities and BA assets in enabling SMEs to create competitive advantage as well as an insight into how SMEs utilise BA resources to that end.

Organisations that are less digitally capable are more vulnerable to the impacts of change. It is argued that organisations must enhance Dynamic Capabilities (DCs) and embrace Digital Business Transformation (DBT). However, whilst technology disruption and global competition impact both developed, and developing countries, most theories and implementations of DBT are derived from experiences in developed countries. Implementation of DBT in less developed countries requires an understanding of the current status of DBT, influencing factors and what adaptations are needed, in those contexts. The paper presents the conceptual foundations for ongoing research into how concepts of DCs and DBT are applicable to Indonesia’s Creative Industry Sector (CIS). The work has particular importance for Indonesia’s economy. Specifically, the paper provides a conceptual foundation for further research synthesized from extant DCs and DBT models. This current research suggests the importance of investigating how to bring theories of DCs and DBT into developing countries.

Purpose This paper aims to extend the theory relating to knowledge sharing barriers and enablers in the public sector information and communication technology (ICT) project context. Design/methodology/approach A case study method was used whereby project managers from each of the seven departments of the Victorian Public Sector in Australia were interviewed about their knowledge sharing practice. A semi-structured interview instrument based on Riege's (2005) barrier framework was used to explore the barriers to knowledge sharing that they experienced as part of their work. Findings The study found that many of Riege's (2005) barriers did not apply in the public sector ICT project environment, demonstrating that context matters. In addition, five enablers were identified, resulting in a new model of enablers and barriers to knowledge sharing in public sector ICT projects. Research limitations/implications This study focuses on a single case, the Victorian Public Sector, and consequently the results are not generalisable. Future research should explore the applicability of the model in other public sector ICT project contexts. Practical implications The study highlights the relationship between knowledge sharing and the project manager and the role it plays in project delivery. The model presented provides a starting point for public sector practitioners to develop their knowledge sharing practice, potentially enhancing project outcomes in the process. Originality/value This study examines barriers to knowledge sharing in an under-researched context, that of the public sector ICT project environment. It builds on current theory and provides insights for practitioners in the public sector.

The Australian Financial sector is the largest contributor to Australian GDP and represents the 4th largest pool of investible wealth in the world and the largest in Asia. Traditional businesses in the sector are under pressure from direct competitors and under potential threat from powerful global technologybased platforms. However, the rate of adoption of innovative Financial Technology by the Financial sector has been saliently low and has potentially serious adverse impacts on the sector, individual Australians and Australia’s country competitive advantage. Despite the sector’s importance, there is a paucity of Australian-specific research into Board decision making in the Financial sector regarding adoption of innovative technology. The purpose of this Research-in-Progress paper is to explore and establish, using a mixed methods research methodology, what are the barriers to adoption of Financial Technology by public entities in the Australian Financial sector.

The aim of this research is to examine how organisational culture moderates the relationships between IT governance performance measurement systems (ITG-PMS) usage and three organisational outcomes (i.e., organisational learning orientation, information systems (IS) strategic alignment and organisational performance). While the IS literature has been informative about various mechanisms of ITG, very few empirical insights are available on how various usage patterns of ITG-PMS influence organisational outcomes moderated by organisational culture in the financial services industry. Different organisational culture types lean towards different strategic outcomes and may lead to different usage patterns of ITG-PMS to enhance organisational learning orientation. This could in turn influence IS strategic alignment and overall organisational performance. This study will develop hypotheses that will be tested via surveys.

The future cities of our societies need to integrate their citizens into a value-co-creation process in order to transform to smart cities with an increased quality of life for their citizens. Therefore, administrations need to radically improve the delivery of public services, providing them citizen- and user-centric. In this context, online portals represent a cost effective front-end to deliver services and engage customers and new organizational approaches as back-ends which decouple the service interface from the departmental structures emerged. The research presented in this book chapter makes two main contributions: Firstly, the findings of a usability study comparing the online presences of the Queensland Government, the UK Government and the South Australian Government are reported and discussed. Secondly, the findings are reflected in regard to a broader “Transformational Government” approach and current smart city research and developments. Service bundling and modularization are suggested as innovative solutions to further improve online service delivery.

Organisations use Enterprise Architecture (EA) to reduce organisational complexity, improve communication, align business and information technology (IT), and drive organisational change. Due to the dynamic nature of environmental and organisational factors, EA descriptions need to change over time to keep providing value for its stakeholders. Emerging business and IT trends, such as Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), may impact EA frameworks, methodologies, governance and tools. However, the phenomenon of EA evolution is still poorly understood. Using Archer's morphogenetic theory as a foundation, this research conceptualises three analytical phases of EA evolution in organisations, namely conditioning, interaction and elaboration. Based on a case study with a government agency, this paper provides new empirically and theoretically grounded insights into EA evolution, in particular in relation to the introduction of SOA, and describes relevant generative mechanisms affecting EA evolution. By doing so, it builds a foundation to further examine the impact of other IT trends such as mobile or cloud-based solutions on EA evolution. At a practical level, the research delivers a model that can be used to guide professionals to manage EA and continually evolve it.

Projects are temporal organisation forms that are highly knowledge-intensive and play an important role in modern public (and private) sector organisations. The effective and efficient creation, dissemination, application and conservation of relevant knowledge are a critical success factor in the management of projects. Yet, project management (PM) and knowledge management (KM) are two distinct disciplines. This paper explores the relationship between PM and KM by analysing the literature at the intersection of those disciplines and presenting the empirical results of a case study of the Victorian Public Sector (VPS) in Australia. A series of 14 interviews were conducted to explore how ICT project managers manage project knowledge across the departments of the VPS. Findings show a strong preference among the participants for informal, face-to-face interactions and agile approaches to facilitate knowledge transfer and creation in ICT project environments.

Crowdsourcing markets, such as Amazon's Mechanical Turk, are designed for easy distribution of micro-tasks to an on-demand scalable workforce. Improving the quality of the submitted results is still one of the main challenges for quality control management in these markets. Although beneficial effects of synchronous collaboration on the quality of work are well-established in other domains, interaction and collaboration mechanisms are not yet supported by most crowdsourcing platforms, and thus, not considered as a means of ensuring high-quality processing of tasks. In this paper, we address this challenge and present a new method that extends majority vote, one of the most widely used quality assurance mechanisms, enabling workers to interact and communicate during task execution. We illustrate how to apply this method to the basic scenarios of task execution and present the enabling technology for the proposed real-time collaborative extension. We summarize its positive impacts on the quality of results and discuss its limitations.

The emergence of a broad variety of effective approaches under the umbrella term 'crowdsourcing', which involves the engagement of potentially large and open crowds of participants for the undertaking of a task, has become a phenomenon that businesses have increasingly taken interest in lately. Given the significant increase in mobile phone penetration and the expansion of existing mobile network capacity, e.g., based on heterogeneous networks (HetNets), new forms of crowdsourcing can be conceived that leverage the mobile and ubiquitous user base. This paper aims to explore some of the opportunities and challenges of new approaches to mobile and ubiquitous crowdsourcing solutions. In addition, we present the conceptual architecture of a context-aware mobile crowdsourcing platform that brings together 'crowdsourcers' as service requesters and 'mobile workers' as service providers.

This paper investigates how Enterprise Architecture (EA) evolves due to emerging trends. It specifically explores how EA integrates the Service-oriented Architecture (SOA). Archer's Morphogenetic theory is used as an analytical approach to distinguish the architectural conditions under which SOA is introduced, to study the relationships between these conditions and SOA introduction, and to reflect on EA evolution (elaborations) that then take place. The paper focuses on reasons for why EA evolution could take place, or not and what architectural changes could happen due to SOA integration. The research builds on sound theoretical foundations to discuss EA evolution in a field that often lacks a solid theoretical groundwork. Specifically, it proposes that critical realism, using the morphogenetic theory, can provide a useful theoretical foundation to study enterprise architecture (EA) evolution. The initial results of a literature review (a-priori model) were extended using explorative interviews. The findings of this study are threefold. First, there are five different levels of EA-SOA integration outcomes. Second, a mature EA, flexible and well-defined EA framework and comprehensive objectives of EA improve the integration outcomes. Third, the analytical separation using Archer's theory is helpful in order to understand how these different integration outcomes are generated.

The continuing need for governments to radically improve the delivery of public services has led to a new, holistic government reform strategy labeled "Transformational Government" that strongly emphasizes customer-centricity. Attention has turned to online portals as a cost effective front-end to deliver services and engage customers as well as to the corresponding organizational approaches for the back-end to decouple the service interface from the departmental structures. The research presented in this paper makes three contributions: Firstly, a systematic literature review of approaches to the evaluation of online portal models in the public sector is presented. Secondly, the findings of a usability study comparing the online presences of the Queensland Government, the UK Government and the South Australian Government are reported and the relative strengths and weaknesses of the different approaches are discussed. And thirdly, the limitations of the usability study in the context of a broader "Transformational Government" approach are identified and service bundling is suggested as an innovative solution to further improve online service delivery.

Service research in information systems (IS) has received attention over many years (e.g. Kettinger and Lee, 1994), but more recently has increased substantially in both diversity and volume (Rai and Sambamurthy, 2006). A service-oriented view of information technology (IT) is gradually taking hold in both academia and industry. This is concomitant with the growth of service-related phenomena and concepts (Lusch and Vargo, 2006), stimulating a global discourse about 'service science' as a new, cross-disciplinary field of research (Chesbrough and Spohrer, 2006).