ISSN 2186-7437

NII Shonan Meeting Report

No. 2012-6

A Meeting of IT-enabled Services (ITeS)Yu-Hui Tao
Nagul Cooharojananone
Shiro Uesugi
Hitoshi Okada
July 30–August 2, 2012

National Institute of Informatics
2-1-2 Hitotsubashi, Chiyoda-Ku, Tokyo, JapanA Meeting of IT-enabled Services (ITeS)
Organizers:
Yu-Hui Tao (National University of Kaohsiung)
Nagul Cooharojananone (Chulalongkorn University)
Shiro Uesugi (Matsuyama University)
Hitoshi Okada (National Institute of Informatics)
July 30–August 2, 2012
This meeting is designed to serve as a forum to discuss IT-enabled Services(ITeS). The Internet is certainly one of the core infrastructures in the global
economy. As multinational corporations operate globally, mobility of goods,
human resources and information resources are expanding in a tremendous scale.
Penetration of broadband lets the movement accelerated not only in the scale
but also in the scope. Use of broadband lets services in digital form to become
ITeS. The scale and scope of ITeS are expanding.

1Overview of Talks
What can be further researched in e-service quality measurement? Some personal experiences for future research
Yu-Hui Tao, National University of Kaohsiung
Service quality (SQ) measurement has been extensively researched and widely
applied in the early 1990s. To advance the (e-)SQ research with new incremental
knowledge, future research needs to meet at least one of the following criteria:innovative, interesting, important or insightful. After a few cases of personal
experiences, I am convinced that there may still exist certain practical and academic contributions for future (e-)SQ research. The most dramatic personal
experience was the measurement scale development for e-Banking, in which a
paper I supervised focusing on a review of seven research studies conducted inseven countries was positively recognized by the reviewers of and accepted by
the Service Industry Journal after two major revisions and signiﬁcant context
changes. So was the development of a blog SQ measurement scale for identifying
interesting dimensional diﬀerences between the non-transaction BLOG website
and transaction-based e-Banking websites by E-Commerce Journal published in
Taiwan.
Finally, as the director of Information and Library Center at my aﬃliateduniversity, I found that there is no readily available measurement scale for Information Center as compared to the widely adopted LibQual+ for the library.
With a moderately high percentage (16 percent) of combined library and information center in the higher educational institutes in Taiwan, it presents asigniﬁcant research interest to know (1) what should be the commonly accepted
SQ for an information center, (2) can LibQual+ be directly applied to measure
the service quality of the combined library and information center, and (3) what
are the diﬀerence of LibQual+ and the theoretical SQ for the combined libraryand information center? From the above personal experiences, it is advocatedthat a user-accepted SQ toward an intended ITeS is still a critical concern for
its initial acceptance and future sustainability.

Rethinking Internet Korea and eID system
Dongoh Park, Indiana University, Bloomington
This research deals with the development of Korean information infrastructure, which emerged extremely rapidly and successfully as part of national eﬀorts
to create an information society. This research critically explores the tensions
among state policies, social understandings of the information society, and thecreation of information infrastructure. Korea is often celebrated for its digital
capabilities, as seen in the popular phrase Internet Korea. It will demystify thisimage by showing how information policy was created, implemented and evaluated, and how social, ethical, and political factors shaped Koreas vision for
information infrastructure.
South Korea developed a unique secure online system, which was formallycalled the Oﬃcial Certiﬁcate infrastructure. Use of this infrastructure is now
mandatory in e-commerce and e-government systems. According to OECD2

statistics, e-commerce in Korea grew seven-fold between 2001 and 2010. According to the Bank of Korea, in 2010 the number of internet banking users inSouth Korea reached over twenty million. About 87 percent of the economically
active population uses the digital certiﬁcate system for their secure online activities. Once a user obtains the certiﬁcate from a bank, he or she can then use thecertiﬁcate to access any other private or public bank, stock trade website, internet shopping mall, or government website nationwide. The certiﬁcate acts as thedigital registered seal, which is analogous to the traditional legal certiﬁcation
system in Korea. Like the legal certiﬁcation system, the digital certiﬁcate system provides authentication, identiﬁcation and conﬁdentiality protection withinfor government and commercial transactions in Korea. In 1999, when the useof high-speed internet became widespread, the Korean government emphasizedbuilding a national digital certiﬁcate infrastructure to promote e-commerce andeconomic competitiveness. U.S. Export control regulations prevented the Korean government from adopting the same 128-bit data encryption system usedin the United States. Therefore, the Korean government and the Korea Information Security Agency (KISA) developed their own certiﬁcate system. It useda diﬀerent encryption algorithm, called SEED, and was based on PKI (Public
Key Infrastructure), a common technology used for digital certiﬁcates. However, Korea had to develop its own unique encryption algorithm and could notimport of foreign PKI system products.
The design of the Korean certiﬁcate system led to unintended consequences.
For example, its use of Active-X technology meant the system could only run on
Microsoft Internet Explorer and the Windows operating system. Moreover, thesystem was not compatible with mobile device operating systems, like Google
Android and Apple iOS. This incompatibility has created an instance of Galapagos Syndrome, a term used in the policy literature to describe being isolated
from global markets or global trends.
This research traces the development of this unique technology and uses it
to explain the political economy of e-commerce in Korea. It analyze the Koreancertiﬁcate technology, but it also illustrate the social, political and culturalelements of this system, such as the domestic and international policies usedby the Korean government to promote internet business and build Internet
Korea. In addition my research is interested in how changes in information
management are related to understandings of national modernity, the functionof the state, and the workings of the commercial sector. It also uses methods
from political economy and anthropology as a way to analyze the political andeconomic structures and culture diﬀerences of Korea and Japan.

Young peoples behavior and perceptions for online shops
Takashi Okamoto, Ehime University
In the ICT environment, we can consider EC as IT enabled services and B2C
sales as a common EC service. We see that B2C has been commonly used as animportant element of the consumer market. B2C shops, however, are not always
proﬁtable. To develop online shops market, we need to know users behaviors
and perceptions. As living environments may aﬀect their behaviors, we should
understand more speciﬁc consumer behavior of online shops. Especially we focus
on young people behavior and perception of online shops.
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To examine young peoples behavior and perceptions for online shops, weuse a questionnaire as the research method. From our research result, we ﬁndsome features of behavior for online shops. For most students, online shops arecommon channel of purchasing. Many students purchase goods from physicalshops although they use the Internet for gathering information of goods. They
will have inertia to physical shops for purchasing. And there are some diﬀerences
between urban students and non-urban students for their behavior. Non-urban
students give more priority to goods availability at nearby physical shops thanurban students.
From conjoint analysis, goods availability is not signiﬁcant for online shops,
and site perception is most important. Students evaluate postage more negative
than price of goods. Urban students think Site perception and Procedure more
important and they estimate price more seriously than those of non-urban.
Those who have experiences of using online shops place less importance to site
perception. Women think availability important, although men do not thinkit important. Women dislike postage more than men. We need more precise
research for consumer behavior of online shops, for about other ages, other areas,
and other countries. These will be our future studies.

Unexpected events and the resilient systems
Kazuhiro Minami, Institute of Statistical Mathematics
After the 3.11 earthquake many people realized that there are events thatcannot be reasonably anticipated. These ”unexpected” events occur as an outside of the anticipated envelope (e.g., Tsunami of 14m high vs the anticipatedmax of 5.7m), or something completely unheard of (e.g., Tokyo subway gas attack in 1995). It is thus important to establish general design principles forbuilding ”resilient systems” that contain damages from such unexpected events
to an acceptable level and recover from those damages in a ﬂexible way. In
this presentation, we describe an overview of the systems resilience project addressing those challenges and discuss several fundamental research questions
and possible promising approaches for building resilient systems.

Co-regulatory approach for resilient society
Naoto Ikegai, Creative Commons Japan
In the rapid changing information society, traditional top-down governmental legislation process cannot build the legal system to respond to unexpected situations. To realize the resilient society, there is a need to establish the bottomup rule making system, under the recognition that only decentralized private
entities have the knowledge to contribute to the resolution of problem.
I emphasize the importance of new public policy concept ”co-regulation”,
which is recently becoming increasingly important in Europe’s information policy. Co-regulation means the combination of the industry’s self-regulation andthe government’s regulation. In this concept, government has the role of complementing shortcomings of private rule making and enforcement mechanisms.

4Two Examples of Bottom-up Style Resilient IT enable Service
Shigeichiro Yamasaki, Kinki University
I showed two examples of bottom-up style approach for resilient IT enable
service. The characteristics of my proposals are (1) diversity of methods (2)decentralized system (3) adaptable (4) continuous reﬁnement. However, almost
all of them also require some top-down style control to integrate them.
My ﬁrst example is a survivor identiﬁcation service in large-scale disaster.
The proposed service provides diversity of methods to identify the survivors,
such as paper based version, standalone database version, distributed database
cloud version and Twitter BOT type survivor search service version. I also
pointed out that my proposal will not work without the continuous social preparation for information management in the time of disaster including education,
drills and reﬁnement of the system.
My second example is a sensor for adjustment on the demand and supplyof electric power. It is a very simple device to sense the frequency of the ACelectric power in house. The ﬂuctuation of the frequency is an indication of theimbalance of the demand and supply of electric power of the residential area.
The device may have a potential to give consumers to join the control for the
adjustment on the demand and supply of electric power with it, if it works well.
It also will be an example of decentralized and adaptable demand and supply
control service for electric power.

What is ”real name”?
Akiko ORITA, Keio University
My presentation started with questions asking about your online screen
name usage. Most participants have their policy to keep their unique nameor use diﬀerent names by purposes. After my classiﬁcation of pseudonymity
and anonymity online and layered ID representation, I asked again and again”What does real name mean?” to all. Is this a name registered to national registration? Is it deﬁned by relationship among friends (Social graph)? How do you
assure whether your companion’s name is real name or pseudonym? From thediscussion, I am very impressed by some episodes; it is allowed to put a couple of”a.k.a” name on the passport in Taiwan, foreign registration in Japan requires”Roma-ji” name even diﬀerent from the original name and so on. ”Real-name”
sounds a priori idea for us, however, regarding to identity treatment, it is time
to re-deﬁne this term.

Facebook Commerce in Thailand
Nagul Cooharojananone, Chulalongkorn University
Facebook has been the most popular Social Network Site (SNS) in Thailand. This also caused an emerging online market for businesses by introducing e-commerce on Facebook, so called F-commerce. In Japan, even though
E-commerce is running well, many Japanese companies decided to invest on
F-commerce business.
5This is a technological challenge to examine the Facebook’s interface whether
its design really supports e-commerce or not. The investigation of Facebook’ssocial network features toward e-commerce. Social network features allow user(a) to press Like, (b) to update friends information on Wall and (c) to doComment on friends thoughts and their reactions. In many cases on real life
shopping, friend reactions eﬀect our shopping.
This is also a good opportunity to study that how friend reactions eﬀect
online shopping.

The smart devices, past, present and future
Kazuaki Naruse, Matsuyama University
1. The ATM services, e.g., extended service hours, authentication, sorting,recycling banknotes are realized by multi CPU embedded system in 1970’s.
2. Another embedded device for ﬁnancial services, smart card, was developedin 1980-90’s.
3. Most dominant smart card market is SIM, Subscriber Identiﬁcation Module for mobile communication. More than 1 billion SIMs are delivered annually
in 2010.
4. The research topic of new interfaces for aged people was proposed. The
possibility of tablet devices was discussed. They would help order placementin Sushi restaurant for aged people who have less sensitivities in reading andhearing etc.

Benefits and Challenges of IT-Enabled Human Resource
Practices Agenda for future research
C. Rosa Yeh, National Taiwan Normal University
The abstract of Talk 2 appears here. A prominent feature of 21st century
is the wide application of IT innovation in business. The human resource management ﬁeld as well takes advantage of IT applications and manifested these
IT-enabled services in E-HR systems and practices. E-HR has been helpful inleveraging organizational resources. E-HR contributes to the Human Resource
department in many perspectives, such as streamlining the administrative processes, lowering the costs, competing eﬀectively for talents from all over the
globe, improving accessibility to employees and managers in organization, providing timely information for decision making and enabling HR professionals tofocus more on business strategies.
This presentation introduces the overall beneﬁt of adopting IT in the HR
ﬁeld, as well as the current features and issues of E-HR in core functions, including HRIS, e-recruiting, e-learning, e-performance management and employee self
services. Major issues resulting from the use of IT include higher expectations
on HR department, lack of expertise in IT installation and maintenance, identity and privacy of job applicants and employees, trust and credibility as a resultof increasing virtuality (decreasing visibility) of HR professionals.
HR applications in emergent technology such as social networking tools andcloud computing are also discussed. The presenter concludes that (1) because
HR is an applied ﬁeld, it relies on the research and development from many6

diﬀerent ﬁelds, IT included, to advance its practice; (2) the human resource
processes and activities still require much human judgment, thus HR professionals should regard IT as a mean, not as an end, and use IT wisely to theorganizations advantage.

Man shall not live by bread alone A Challenge for Developing A New Standard to Measure the Level of ITeS
Shiro Uesugi, Matsuyama University
The measurement of the level of ICT or IT has been developed and deployedby organizations such as OECD and UN. They use such measurement as thedegree of FTTH penetration, readiness to access broadband, numbers of PC
per population, and so on. The results of these measures have been reﬂected tothe policy making by the government as well as to the marketing of commercialorganizations.
It seems to me that the measurement is useful at macro-level but not at
micro-level. For micro-level, such as individuals and small corporations, moreeasy-to-use measurement is necessary. In my observation, it is like an equivalentof Big Mac Index in ITeS ﬁeld. Once you travel abroad and ﬁnd the price of
the Big Mac, you can convert the level of consumer prices there to the level athome intuitively with very simple calculation.
Likewise, I found the price to access voice and/or data communication overmobile phones reﬂects the level of the ITeS in the designated nation or region.
To be precise, the price of SIM plus minimum prepaid amount reﬂects the levelof ITeS. Furthermore, in my observation, the price that the combination (SIM +minimum service) usually totals around JPY3,000-5,000 or US30-50 or EU30-50.
Therefore, my challenge to develop a new standard to measure the level of
ITeS is to look for the evidence that the minimum level of mobile phone service(voice and data) is how deﬁned and provided for how much. It is essential forhuman beings now a days to have the access to the net – Man shall not live by
bread alone.

Comparative analysis of Japanese restaurant information
services
Hidenobu SAI, Ehime University
Popularization of restaurant information services is remarkable and it ischanging customers’ behaviors. Restaurant information has characteristics of
local information, which is generated in local place, and highly valuable in one
place and not valuable in others place. Because of it, restaurant information
service has characteristics diﬀerent from other information services.
In this talk, we present some data and compare three major restaurant services in Japan; Gurunavi, Tabelog, Hot Pepper Gourmet. Quality and quantityof information oﬀered by them are aﬀected by each structure of service (TypeCA, Type CGM, and Type GB). Especially, number of consumer who input
information is important for success of Type CGM and it is necessary to lower
input burden and encourage them to input information.

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Participants
Akiko Orita, Keio University
Andrew A. Adams, Meiji University
C. Rosa Yeh, National Taiwan Normal University
Chih-Chien Wang, National Taipei University
Hidenobu Sai, Ehime University
Hiroki Nogawa,Japan Medical Information Network Association
Hiroshi Maruyama, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan
Kazuaki Naruse, Matsuyama University
Kazuhiro Minami, Institute of Statistical Mathematics, Japan
Naoto Ikegai, Creative Commons Japan
Park Dongoh, Indiana University
Shigeichiro Yamasaki, Kinki University
Takashi Okamoto, Ehime University
Tsung Teng Chen, National Taipei University
Yann-Jy Yang, National Chengchi University8