The number of small and medium-sized accommodations (SMSAs) has increased in Malaysia in tandem with the growth of the tourism industry worldwide. The states involved in this study were Terengganu, Kelantan and Pahang. The SMSAs in these states are rated using Orchid rating, namely 1-Orchid, 2-Orchid and 3-Orchid, generated by the Ministry of Tourism, Arts and Culture Malaysia (MOTAC). This study applied the Resource-based View (RBV) theory to investigate four factors (marketing management, human resourcesmanagement, innovation capability management and information technology) assumed to be competitive capabilities that may influence accommodation’s performance. The objective of the study is to examine whether the four factors influence the performance of Orchid-rated accommodations located in the East Coast of West Malaysia. The results revealed that the four factors do not have any relationship with the accommodation’s performance. The analysis also singled out one argument of the director of SMSA that competitive capabilities are not important to their business. This argument coincides with the results of the analysis that the four factors are not significant with regards to the accommodations’ performance.
The advancement of technology has allowed a variety of tools for employees and
managers, or knowledge workers, to choose as communication tools, especially for
managing project teams. Instead of communicating and updating project progress
through emails and short messaging system, social messaging (SM) applications, such
as WhatsAppTM, are the current daily choice among them. The over-utilisation of the
SM applications has given an opportunity for a research on project knowledge
retention within project team, since it becomes an addiction to create new groups each
time a new project team is formed. It is believed that project knowledge resides within
these virtual groups, and this paper looks into how project knowledge is managed by
analysing the communication patterns against a measurement metrics based on
personal knowledge management (PKM) theory called GUSC Model. The
communication patterns found existed in the SM application are qualitatively
identified and mapped against the PKM processes within, with weighted score
assigned to each process to quantitatively measure the overall project knowledge
management participation. The differences among the organisational communication
levels, namely upper and lower level communication levels, are analysed and the final
result of participation expectation on member of SM application groups is presented.
The outcome of this research recommends the future intervention on SM application
usage and the application of knowledge management concept in current
communication tool.
A study was conducted to examine the usage of application software and its development practices in Malaysia. The study has shown that the use of application software is greatly emphasized by organizations in their respective businesses. And for most organizations, the application software is supplied by a vendor or through in house development. For the software development practices, the deployment of a current technique and technology is still inadequate. Therefore, most of the existing information technology practitioners should be given additional training on the latest techniques of software development. Other aspect of improvement on software development practices is also discussed.
Satu kajian terhadap status pemakaian dan kegiatan pembangunan perisian gunaan di Malaysia telah dijalankan. Kajian ini menunjukkan yang aspek pemakaian sangat diberi penekanan oleh organisasi. Manakala proses perolehan perisian gunaan pula terbahagi secara setara di antara buat sendiri dengan menggunakan pihak ketiga. Namun begitu yang ketara ialah kadar penggunaan teknologi dan teknik terkini dalam kegiatan pembangunan perisian masih berkurangan. Oleh itu disarankan supaya aspek latihan teknik kakitangan teknologi maklumat organisasi perlu dipertingkatkan secara berterusan. Di samping itu kajian ini memaparkan beberapa aspek amalan pembangunan perisian yang boleh diperbaiki lagi.
Cloud computing has attracted significant attention from research community because of rapid migration rate of Information Technology services to its domain. Advances in virtualization technology has made cloud computing very popular as a result of easier deployment of application services. Tasks are submitted to cloud datacenters to be processed on pay as you go fashion. Task scheduling is one the significant research challenges in cloud computing environment. The current formulation of task scheduling problems has been shown to be NP-complete, hence finding the exact solution especially for large problem sizes is intractable. The heterogeneous and dynamic feature of cloud resources makes optimum task scheduling non-trivial. Therefore, efficient task scheduling algorithms are required for optimum resource utilization. Symbiotic Organisms Search (SOS) has been shown to perform competitively with Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). The aim of this study is to optimize task scheduling in cloud computing environment based on a proposed Simulated Annealing (SA) based SOS (SASOS) in order to improve the convergence rate and quality of solution of SOS. The SOS algorithm has a strong global exploration capability and uses fewer parameters. The systematic reasoning ability of SA is employed to find better solutions on local solution regions, hence, adding exploration ability to SOS. Also, a fitness function is proposed which takes into account the utilization level of virtual machines (VMs) which reduced makespan and degree of imbalance among VMs. CloudSim toolkit was used to evaluate the efficiency of the proposed method using both synthetic and standard workload. Results of simulation showed that hybrid SOS performs better than SOS in terms of convergence speed, response time, degree of imbalance, and makespan.
Rapid progress of Information Communication Technology (ICT) will accelerate the distribution of
information from government to the people; however the monopoly of technology ICT services will
lead to inequality of information distribution in between of normal people and disabled people.
Embrace with the inequality of ICT distribution directly make the group of disabled people left behind
at the information age, or the situation also known as digital divide. Hence, this article attempts to
identify and examine the issues facing by disabled people in order to catch up the fast diffusion of ICT.
Technology invention and implementation have resulted in long-term educational progress. This study aimed to identify the innovative strategies in determining the factors influencing in-service teachers' technology integration in China, focusing on the information and communication technology (ICT) integration. The sample consists of 685 in-service teachers. Four factors are found to influence in-service teachers' ICT integration: attitudes, self-efficacy, digital competence, and digital tools use. The results of the study utilizing the PLS-SEM approach demonstrated that all four factors have a substantial impact on in-service teachers' ICT integration and interact with each other. Meanwhile, attitudes, digital competence, and digital tools use have a mediating effect in this research. In addition, the study discussed the effects of gender, age, and teaching experience on influencing factors and ICT integration. This research provided beneficial insights for a successful design of instruction with ICT and contributed to innovative strategies for educational technology.
Supervision and monitoring of practical students are among the pertinent components in the management of industrial training among students in institutions of higher learning (IPT) in Malaysia. The easiest way to monitor is by reporting such students’ daily activities in their logbooks. Due to the dispersal of offshore industries, it directly impacts to students, institution and industry such as management costs, wastes supervision time for travel and stresses other factors in managing industry supervision such as ongoing supervision, verification of customization of industry entities regarding needs and reduction of allocation by IPT. Thus, a new mechanism needs to be implemented by considering the advantages and benefits that can be developed throughout the use of information technology (IT). In conjunction with this circumstance, a Smart LogBook prototype has been developed to address the problems encountered in the supervision process of the industry training students as stated. A study of students’ perceptions of the Smart Logbook prototype was also tailored to assess student perception compared to using supervisory methods using the old logbook. The Rapid Application Development (RAD) methodology was used in software development while a set of questionnaires was distributed to 65 respondents to obtain their assessment feedback data. The findings show that students have a positive assessment of their perception of the use of this prototype.
Objective: This study aims to develop, validate and determine the reliability of an interactive multimedia strategy to prevent tobacco use among the young (TUPY-S) from an adolescents’ perspective. Methods: A descriptive study design was utilized. A modular instruction guideline by Russel (1974) was followed in the entire process, comprising a feasibility study, a review of existing modules, specification of the objectives, identification of the construct criterion items, learner analysis and entry behavior specification, establishment of the sequence instruction and media selection, a tryout with students and a field test. Result: Feasibility was agreed among the researchers and the school authorities. Culturally suitable rigorously developed tobacco use preventive strategies delivered using information technology (IT) are lacking in the literature. The objective of TUPY-S is to prevent tobacco use among adolescents living in Malaysia. Identified construct criterion items include knowledge, attitude, intention to use, self-efficacy, and refusal skill. The target population was early adolescents belonging to generation-Z. Content was developed from the adolescents’ perspective and delivered using IT in Malay language. Content validity, assessed by six experts in the field and module development, was good at 86%. The students’ tryout showed satisfactory face validity subjectively and objectively (85.5%) and high alpha Cronbach reliability (0.91). Conclusion: TUPY-S was confirmed to suit early adolescents of the current generation living in Malaysia. It demonstrated good content validity among the experts, satisfactory face validity and reliability among the target population. TUPY-S is ready to be evaluated for its effectiveness among early adolescents.