Mary Tate

• PhD
• Professor (Associate) at Victoria University of Wellington

Ensuring organisations are safe from cyber-attacks requires the contribution of every staff member and this also applies to AI risk mitigation. Organisations must assess and implement strategies that ensure AI risk mitigation is not just the responsibility of the cybersecurity team (who are always in short supply), but the entire organisation from...

Digital leadership is essential for digital transformation and digital government success. Digital leadership is, however, not a single job role or a one-person responsibility. In practice, digital leadership responsibilities are distributed amongst different roles within the organisation and between agencies when it comes to scarce or technically...

In launching whole-of-government approaches such as the New Zealand Strategy for a Digital Public Service (SDPS) or agency's digital strategies, a critical success factor in digital strategy execution is ensuring that strategies and accountabilities across government agencies align with these key government initiatives. Alignment also needs to flow...

BizDevOps is an emerging trend that seeks to cut back the lag between product/service vision and implementation. However, so far this trend has been mainly unnoticed by research. This paper carries out a “grey literature” (non-academic) review on BizDevOps. Data is collected from reports, articles, webpages, and blog posts to capture the profession...

We propose conceptualizing design science education in the information systems (IS) discipline. While design science has become a robust research paradigm, well-recognized in solving practical problems, how design science should be taught is a question that IS scholars, academia, and practitioners are intrigued with. We address this question by con...

The popularity of Osterwalder's (2004) business model canvas has led researchers to develop analogous artifacts in a variety of domains. However, we still lack a conceptual foundation explaining the essential and common characteristics of the canvas, regarded as domain-independent artifact. In this study, we focus on how the canvas helps representi...

Purpose Many organizations struggle to achieve their desired levels of business process flexibility and support. However, these two capabilities conflict with each other and different tradeoffs have to be made. In this paper, the authors analyze different process conceptualizations and discuss their implications. The authors argue that the conceptu...

Organisations are having to implement rapid digital transformation programs in response to the impact of the global pandemic and the need to stay relevant in the ever-changing technology landscape. Leading digital transformation programs has become very challenging because business leaders are faced with a bewildering array of advice that is someti...

Chatbots are being used in an increasingly wide range of public services. Chatbots present several benefits for public service delivery (e.g. cost efficiency for public organizations and better service accessibility for service applicants). However, obtaining effective service outcomes from a chatbot-mediated service delivery requires designing a s...

Cognitive Computing Systems (CCSs) are increasing in prominence in the public sector. This paper develops a framework drawing on public value and information technology service management literature to guide the management of CCSs in the public sector. We draw on academic literature, gray literature, legislation and government reports, and examples...

Chatbots — computer programs designed to interactively engage with users, replicating humanlike conversational capabilities during service encounters — have been increasingly deployed across a wide range of Internet-based public services. While chatbots provide several advantages (e.g., improved user experience with reduced waiting times to service...

There are often gaps between the lived experiences of end users and the official version of processes as espoused by the organization. To understand and address these gaps, we propose and evaluate process stories, a method to capture knowledge from end users based on organizational storytelling and visual narrative theories. The method addresses tw...

Qualitative researchers in information management research often need to evaluate inter-coder reliability (ICR) to test the trustworthiness of their content analysis. A suitable method of evaluating ICR enables researchers to rigorously assess the degree of agreement among two or more independent qualitative coders. This allows researchers to ident...

Problems with digital services still occur at times, even for the most reliable services. Considering the consequences of these failures and their effects on the customer’s overall service quality perception and satisfaction, preventing these failures, and delivering reliable digital services, is a critical business competency. In addition, the fac...

We address the intractable problem of flexibility in business process management: how to deal with variations, unique cases and exceptions? We identify and characterise five conceptualisations of business process. We discuss the main elements and relationships, contracts, and existential and representational properties established by each conceptua...

Even the most reliable self-service technologies (SSTs) sometimes fail to meet the user’s expectations. This can occur due to technical errors, user service support staff or the user’s own mistakes. Although extensive research has been done on topics such as user complaining behaviors and the role of businesses in solving SST problems, little resea...

In this paper we suggest that storytelling theory can be used to analyze business processes in two behavioral dimensions, model and context, which concern predefined and improvised behavior, respectively. We develop a method to elicit stories about business processes from process participants. By applying the method in two cases, we provide some ev...

Despite the prominence of social media (SM) in global branding, no prior studies have evaluated an international brand's strategy of establishing market-based relational ties with SM users in local markets. This study draws from the resource-based theory to conceptualize SM ties as latent relational resources and evaluate an international brand's S...

Adopting new teaching practices, like the ‘flipped classroom’, disrupts organizational routines within the university. This paper examines flipped classroom implementation from the perspective of four stakeholder groups students, instructors, administrators, and managers), using an organizational routines lens. Disrupting established routines creat...

Qualitative researchers in business and management information systems fields often need to employ a method of inter-coder reliability to test the trustworthiness of the findings of their content analysis. A suitable method for checking the inter-coder reliability enables researchers to rigorously assess the degree of agreement among two or more in...

Bring-Your-Own-Device (BYOD) is an emerging phenomenon in businesses and schools. Despite accelerating adoption in schools, the factors that affect students’ use of BYOD are still not well articulated. We used a modified version of Taylor and Todd’s (1995) decomposed Theory of Planned Behaviour (D-TPB) to evaluate antecedents to behavioural intenti...

A significant part of information systems research studies people as a part of a system, organization, network, or community. Since this research focuses on data related to the interaction of individuals, focus groups can provide data that cannot be obtained through any other method. However, compared with the abundance of handbooks and guidelines...

A significant part of information systems research studies people as a part of a system, organization, network, or community. Since this research focuses on data related to the interaction of individuals, focus groups can provide data that cannot be obtained through any other method. However, compared with the abundance of handbooks and guidelines...

This case study of a flipped classroom initiative considers multiple stakeholder perspectives on themes of pedagogy, digitization, and organizational issues. We found that all the stakeholders were enthusiastic about flipped classrooms in principle. However, at a detailed level, there were tensions and differences between the groups with regard to...

Recently there has been a great deal of advice published for information systems researchers aiming to conduct standalone literature reviews, and this advice has been, at times, confusing, contradictory and contested. In this opinion paper, we harmonize and resolve some crucial elements of this debate. In our view, literature review articles need t...

Recently there has been a great deal of advice published for information systems researchers aiming to conduct standalone literature reviews, and this advice has been, at times, confusing, contradictory and contested. In this opinion paper, we harmonize and resolve some crucial elements of this debate. In our view, literature review articles need t...

A new phenomenon emerging within virtual communities is a blurring between the social and commercial activities and motivations of participants. This paper explores motivations for participating in social commerce at a micro-business level between members of a virtual community of Malay lifestyle bloggers. The selected community was observed in ord...

The extent to which enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems deliver value for organizations has been debated. In this study, we argue that the presence of appropriate organizational resources is essential for capturing the potential of ERP implementation. We investigate the relationship between ERP implementation and two organizational resources...

Many foreign companies see social media as a low cost marketing space for entering the vast Chinese market. This is fraught with complexity, requiring an understanding of social media behaviour, social media marketing, and the Chinese context. In this exploratory pilot study, we develop the notion of franding (online freinding of brands) as a unify...

The increasing use of online channels for service delivery raises new challenges in service failure prevention. This work-in-progress paper reports on the first phase of an action-design research project to develop a service failure prevention methodology. In this paper we review the literature on online services, failure prevention and failure rec...

Structural equation models are traditionally used for theory testing. With the increasing importance of predictive analytics, and the ability of structural equation models to maintain theoretical plausibility in the context of predictive modeling, identifying how best to predict from structural equation models is important. Recent calls for a refoc...

Theories of individual attitudes towards IT include Task technology Fit (TTF), Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), Cognitive Fit, Expectation Disconfirmation, and Computer Self-Efficacy. Examination of these theories reveals three main concerns. First, the theories mostly “black box” (or om...

There has been a flowering of scholarly interest in the literature review as a research method in the information systems discipline. We feel privileged to contribute to this conversation and introduce the work of the authors represented in this special issue. Some of the highlights include three new methods for conducting literature analysis and g...

Change is endemic in modern business competition. In an age of globalization, with the rapid development of Internet technologies, changes occur at a much faster pace, and are also more unpredictable. Being agile in a turbulent environment has been ranked highly by executives in surveys of business issues conducted in past five years. Today nearly...

This paper contributes to the understanding of the meaning of shared services and motives for introducing shared services in government organizations. We review and clarify definitions of shared services and derive a definition applicable for the government context. Based on an extensive literature review, we present an empirically grounded researc...

We posit that academic understandings of services and service quality have reached a point in their life-cycles when the use of “umbrella constructs” is no longer productive for researchers. We pose a theoretical argument for resolving the confusion of terminology and definitions of digital services, by inductively developing a taxonomy of digital...

This article summarizes a panel held at the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) in Brisbane, Austrailia, in 2011. The panelists proposed a new research agenda for information systems success research. The Delone and McLean IS success model has been one of the most influential models in Information Systems research. However,...

An increasing range of services are now offered via online applications and e-commerce websites. However, problems with online services still occur at times, even for the best service providers due to the technical failures, informational failures, or lack of required website functionalities. Also, the widespread and increasing implementation of we...

Structural equation models (SEM) are frequently used in information systems (IS) to analyze and test theoretical propositions. As IS researchers frequently reuse measurement instruments and adapt or extend theories, they frequently re-estimate regression relationships in their SEM that have been examined in previous studies. We advocate the use of...

This article summarizes a panel held at the 15th Pacific Asia Conference on Information Systems (PACIS) in Brisbane, Austrailia, in 2011. The panelists proposed a new research agenda for information systems success research. The DeLone and McLean IS Success Model has been one of the most influential models in Information Systems research. However,...

The nature of services and service delivery has been changing rapidly since the 1980's when many seminal papers in services research were published. Services are increasingly digital, or have a digital component. Further, a large and heterogeneous literature, with competing and overlapping definitions, many of which are dated and inappropriate to c...

In this paper, we provide a qualitative analysis of the complexities involved during global e-HRM (Electronic Human Resource Management) implementation. While many studies rely on theory embedded in the Change and International Management literatures, we add relevant Strategic Information Systems literature to enrich the localization- standardizati...

New Zealand is a small country and most of its businesses are small with 96 % of all enterprises employing fewer than 20 people. New Zealand takes pride in its “clean green” image, however small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) have limited resources, low awareness of the environmental impacts of the technologies they use, and perceive relatively...

This paper describes a study of privacy behaviour in situations of strong (bonding), weak and latent (bridging) and "boundary-crossing" relationships in online social network sites (SNS). An experimental study was conducted utilising screen capture, diaries, and a final interview. An innovative aspect of the experiment was the use of emoticons in a...

Semantic web technologies for Human Resource Information Systems (HRIS) are yet to fulfil their full potential. In this paper we reflect on an e-recruiting service development project using semantic web technologies. We use a modified Action Design Research (ADR) lens to organize insights from an innovative, entrepreneurial service offering. The re...

Change is endemic in modern business competition. In an age of globalization, with the rapid development of Internet technologies, changes occur at a much faster pace, and are also more unpredictable. Being agile in a turbulent environment has been ranked highly by executives in surveys of business issues conducted in past five years. Today nearly...

In this paper, we provide an analysis of the complexities involved during global e-HRM (Electronic Human Resource Management) implementation. We present findings from a case study on the challenge of global integration versus local responsiveness of e-HRM systems. We take a local site lens, analysing the experiences of a local IT department in char...

Varying and incommensurable e-Campaigning utilisation frameworks are available in scholarly literature, leading to substantial problems around the comparability, reliability, and robustness of e-Campaigning research across political parties, candidates, elections and electoral systems. This paper proposes a uniform, campaign-focused and technology-...

We present a descriptive literature review and classification scheme for cloud computing research. This includes 205 refereed journal articles published since the inception of cloud computing research. The articles are classified based on a scheme that consists of four main categories: technological issues, business issues, domains and applications...

Structural equation models are widely used in IS research as they can accommodate both latent and manifest variables. Recent discussion has focused on the relationships between these latent and manifest variables in structural equation models. Despite repeated attempts to clarify the relationships and provide guidelines on their interpretation, the...

Covariance-based structural equation modeling is a popular statistical technique in information systems research, providing a stringent test of model fit and allowing researchers to test multiple hypotheses in the same model. Structural regressions in such models are often assumed to represent the causal nature of the underlying reality as expresse...

Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) is an increasingly popular technique for analyzing quantitative data in Information Systems research. As such, it is traditionally viewed as a method to test theory, rather than build it. However, many of the theoretical models tested with this technique in IS research show significant differen...

As political parties’ and candidates’ e-Campaigning has become increasingly complex and sophisticated, scholars accordingly devise conceptual frameworks to understand and describe this social phenomenon. Yet, there is little scholarly debate concerning the varying conceptualisations of political parties’ or candidates’ utilisation of e-Campaigning....

This article examines the nature, role and function of the literature review in academic discourse. Researchers in information systems (IS) are often advised to espouse a neutral viewpoint and adapt the goal of synthesising previous literature when conducting a literature review. However, since research literature in many areas of IS is diverse and...

Recruiters, in the business of screening job applicants, are increasingly dependent on information systems especially digital resume databases. However, the current literature does not provide a consensus on the requirements for resume content for digital recruiting. This research contributes to the understanding of the different requirements of re...

This paper argues that a multi-channel environment, incorporating ICT-mediated channels such as the Internet, requires a reinterpretation of the traditional ‘‘ line of visibility’’ from service quality literature. In a multi-channel e-commerce environment, inconsistency or service breakdown above the line of visibility gives a negative impression o...

Service quality, and the ServQual model, with origins in face-to-face marketing before the age of the internet, has been drafted into the role of explaining the perceived outcomes of computer-mediated self-service encounters. These however differ in important ways from face-to-face service encounters. In this conceptual paper, we offer a number of...

Partial Least Squares (PLS) is a statistical technique that is widely used in the Information Systems discipline to estimate statistical models with structural equations and latent variables. While PLS does not provide a statistical test of model fit to data, its proponents have suggested a set of criteria that good PLS models should fulfill. Conve...

Online services are becoming increasingly ubiquitous, and this growth has been accompanied by increased business interest in measuring and managing online service quality. This interest is also reflected in a large number of academic studies. Despite this, there is very little consensus about the dimensions and antecedents of perceived online servi...

Online service quality is a much-studied concept. There is considerable evidence that user expectations and perceptions of self-service and online service quality differ in different business domains. In addition, the nature of online services is continually changing and universities have been at the forefront of this change, with university websit...

This paper describes a study using mystery shoppers across multiple channels which investigated the traditional 'line of visibility' from service quality literature, and customer perceptions of organisational competencies "below the line". We posited that in a multi-channel e-commerce environment, inconsistency or service breakdown above the line o...

Many existing theories of user perceptions and attitudes towards technology suffer from "over investigation" of users' attitudes and "under investigation" of the technologies that cause them. This can be the result of a pursuit of generalisability at the expense of accuracy and salience to practice. In this paper, we offer some heuristics for addre...

Recent years have seen much discussion in the literature about the core of the IS field. While extreme positions in this debate see IS research either as purely technical or purely behavioral work, we believe that one area of competence and contribution for IS researchers lies at the boundary of technology and individual human psychology. In addres...

Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) is an increasingly popular technique for analyzing quantitative data in Information Systems research. As such, it is traditionally viewed as a method to test theory, rather than build it. However, many of the theoretical models tested with this technique show significant differences between the...

Cloud computing is an exciting area for research, because of its relative novelty and exploding growth. In this paper, we present a descriptive literature review and classification scheme for cloud computing research. The former consists of 58 articles published since the recent inception of cloud computing. Clearly, there is an explosively increas...

Conventional approaches to literature reviews tend to perform a meta-analysis of previous literature, based on a modernist, normal science paradigm. These reviews typically seek a 'mythical centre' based on synthesis and consensus. This is not always appropriate for research areas that have been characterised by heterogeneous and inconsistent studi...

China has a huge internal IT outsourcing industry. Industry commentators have predicted that this capability can be leveraged to capture an increasingly large share of the global IT outsourcing market. Obstacles include a fragmented market, and business process that are immature or incompatible with those of Western companies. In this qualitative m...

Online service quality is a much-studied concept. Despite this, dimensions that make up service quality, and the items used to measure those dimensions have proven unstable. It is widely suggested that service quality measurement scales need to be instantiated differently in different business domains. In addition, the nature of online services is...

Information Technology (IT) is often assumed to be a critical enabling factor for modern democratic processes. We briefly examine widespread reform of public service institutions along market principles, known as the New Public Management (NPM). We then examine some of the IT management issues that have arisen as a result of the changing nature of...

This study examines and tests the veracity of five main dimensions of outsourcing operationalization that have been found to influence the quality of relationship between parties and ultimately the success of an outsourcing arrangement. A single case study of a long strategic outsourcing relationship was utilized. The findings suggest that transiti...

In this mini-track, we explore the role of ICT in customer service. Customer service quality is considered essential to customer satisfaction, customer retention and business success. The nature of service delivery is undergoing change. Customers are interfacing directly with ICT systems rather than dealing face to face. This change has created new...

Research on perceived online service quality has, since its beginnings in the 1990’s, shown little consensus about its dimensionality. In this study, we modify a well-tested existing instrument to add the notion of transaction quality. We carry out exploratory factor analysis and find that our results disconfirm our a priori hypotheses about the fa...

This paper offers an alternative method for conceptualising and presenting an information systems literature review, based on Checkland's Soft Systems Method (SSM). We apply this approach to service quality research in the Information Systems (IS) field. Despite a large volume of existing literature, the number of new articles published in this are...

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This paper argues that the advent of multi-channel environments, incorporating ICT-mediated channels, necessitates a reinterpretation of the ‘line of visibility’ found in the service quality literature. In a multi-channel environment, inconsistency or service breakdowns above the line of visibility gives a negative impression of organisational comp...

Information technology (IT) is often assumed to be a critical enabling factor for modern democratic processes. In this paper we examine some of the IT management issues that have arisen as a result of the changing nature of local government. We identify a disconnect between the current orthodoxy of local government, the expected benefits of informa...

After the “dot-com bust” there is considerable evidence that multi-channel retailers are more successful than purely on-line retailers. We talked to the management team of one of the most successful multi-channel apparel and home-ware retailers in Australasia about the business and technology factors that enabled their growth. We found seven key bu...

After the dot-com bust there is considerable evidence that multi-channel retailers are more successful than purely on-line retailers. Multi-channel retailing is becoming mainstream and considerable research exists on successful multi-channel strategies. Despite this, some organisations are having more success than others with their multi-channel ap...

The management and reuse of digital learning resources has become a major business. Repositories of reusable learning objects (RLO's) are increasingly popular, but pose serious management challenges. In this paper, we report the findings of a case study with a leading distance education provider currently engaged in an RLO strategy. We find that ou...

Buying and selling clothing can be a stressful and risky business for both consumers and retailers, even without the complications of e-commerce. Yet recent figures from the U.S. and from Korea show an increase in online sales of apparel. In this chapter we investigate the reasons for this through examination of the literature and research of best...

In their influential paper, Dervin and Nilan compared and contrasted the "traditional" and "alternative" paradigms for human information behaviour research, highlighting the inadequacies of the former and promoting the importance of the latter. In this paper, we argue that the two paradigms are not irreconcilable. We offer a research framework that...

A web site that appeals to all audiences is the "holy grail" of developers, but is not likely to be found. Therefore, organisations must decide what groups of users they want to target and gain a thorough knowledge of their needs and preferences. In this pilot study, we grouped users according to their purpose for using the Web and examined their p...

The quality of online services is a research area at the intersection of marketing and information systems. Traditionally, it is rooted in ideas about service quality of non-virtual service interactions that have been adopted from the marketing literature. However, as Information Systems researchers adapt the concepts and measures to fit virtual, o...

This research-in-progress paper describes action research in the development, use, and impending evaluation of purpose-built mixed-mode teaching resources for introductory web development. The material combines web- based self-study exercises, face-to-face demonstrations, tips, examples, and reviews - all within single workshop sessions. The aim wa...