Digital India

This study seeks to develop and empirically validate a customer retention model. Based on past studies in the marketing research, we compiled a comprehensive set of constructs and hypotheses and established causal relationships between them. To measure the variables enumerated in the conceptual framework, a well-structured questionnaire was designed. Evaluation of the model with the help of AMOS-SEM was considered initially; however, due to the complexity of causally interlinked relationships in a conceptual framework (as the presence of serial and simple mediations), the results were analyzed using AMOS-SEM and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) approach together. Contrary to some assertions in the past literature, the results suggested inertia has a positive relationship with customer satisfaction. Furthermore, quantitative analysis supported by empirical qualitative pieces of evidence from the survey exhibited that partial mediations were found among the constructs. The empirical results as hypothesized illustrate (a) customer loyalty was positively influenced by customer satisfaction, switching barriers, perceived price fairness, and trust and (b) inertia has no significant influence on customer retention and customer loyalty but found to be positively associated service quality. In conclusion, the managerial implications, limitations, and suggestions for future research are provided.

Smart home is a ubiquitous environment that aims to offer Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) to its occupants. The activity modeling framework proposed in this research work skillfully integrates ambient intelligence into the home environment by a collective process of activity recognition, abnormality detection, and decision making. Moreover, the activity modeling strategy employed in this research work efficiently models both the data and domain knowledge for activity recognition. The primary task in designing an activity recognition system involves the construction of activity model that represents occupant’s Activities of Daily Living (ADL). To achieve activity recognition and abnormality detection competently, it is essential for the activity modeling strategy to consider the design challenges of uncertainty modeling, contextual modeling, composite modeling, activity diversity, and activity dynamics. The challenges of activity dynamics and data uncertainty are well addressed through data-driven approaches, whereas the challenges of activity granularity, contextual knowledge, and activity diversity are well addressed through knowledge-driven approaches. Therefore, activity recognition frameworks are proposed in this research work, where the first framework represents the activity model as a Markov Logic Network and the second framework represents the activity model as a probabilistic ontology. Each of these approaches offers both uncertainty and contextual modeling for activity recognition by integrating data-driven and knowledge-driven techniques. Moreover, this research proposes an assistive dementia care system through smart home that offers functional assistance to the dement occupant during critical situations without the help of caretaker.

UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) is an initiative of the United Nations to provide a technical and operational fit process for the achievement of sustainable development across the globe. Government and NGOs primarily cater to either of the aspects of sustainable development, but they lack infrastructure and capability. The public policies, though central for achieving these goals, are not adequate. The private sector should also be equally involved as they can drive innovation and growth in the nation. With the presence of the organisational and management expertise, the private sector can accelerate the attainment of these goals. This paper studies the role of businesses in attainment of SDG through corporate social responsibility (CSR) with ICT moderating this relationship. Since Information Communication Technologies (ICT) is considered to act as a catalyst for achieving these SDG, a mixed methodology is used in the study. The study identifies the firm size, profitability and industry sensitivity as factors influencing the CSR implementation in Indian ICT organisations and profitability, ICT and industry sensitivity to be influencing SDG. CSR need not be the only means for businesses to contribute to SDG. SDG can be considered as “corporate social opportunity” to obtain a competitive edge over other firms in the industry.

This paper addresses the political economy of social media and the restructured concepts of privacy and security. It also looks at the surveillance mechanism of social media and tries to determine the impact of surveillance on users, digital companies, State governance and on social media governance. This paper uses the theoretical framework of Michel Foucault’s panopticon and governmentality to identify how the digital culture of social media has been constantly attributing new meanings to social relations in the ever-changing context of privacy, security and surveillance. The role of the State is also important in this matter, because State laws, community practices and governance also modify the pattern of access of its citizens to the networks. This paper looks at the way social media configures the political and digital citizenship of their individual users. The digital labour discourses are also instrumental in assessing individual users’ mode of participation in digital communication.

The new source of power is not money in the hands of few but information in the hands of many.– John Naisbitt

Digital technology and businesses are becoming inextricably interwoven. Digital literacy is the ability to use the innovative technology to navigate, evaluate and create information. This paper aims to highlight the prominence and significance of social networking media like Twitter, Google Trends, Yahoo Finance, etc., for enhancing the investor knowledge and influencing the investor behaviour in Indian financial market, i.e. the National Stock Exchange (NSE) and the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE). Previous literature and many research works were analysed which depicted the adoption of these innovative methodologies for market prediction and making future investments by developed nations like the United States, China, etc. The analysis of such past time studies glorified the existence of correlation amongst the posts on Twitter, StockTwits, Google Trends, etc., with price prediction of stocks listed on the Dow Jones, NASDAQ and S&P 500 in US financial market by influencing the sentiments of the investors proposing scope for Indian investors. Thus, in this research work, we elaborated the importance of adoption for these innovative social networking media by current and prospective Indian investors for understanding stock volatility and increased price prediction capabilities.

Achievement of diversification gains is one of the most important objectives of portfolio optimization. We aim to ascertain the magnitude and robustness of diversification gains for an already diversified portfolio due to inclusion of Bitcoin from the standpoint of an Indian investor. We use eight indices to build a portfolio spread across six asset classes, namely, equity, fixed income, commodities, real estate, gold and alternative investments. All asset classes except alternative investments are represented by indices which track performance of respective assets in India. We employ three investment strategies, namely, ‘long only’, ‘constrained’ and ‘equally weighted’ to construct optimal portfolios. Instead of the traditional mean-variance optimization methodology, we apply mean-CVaR approach for optimal allocation of weights to assets. Our findings suggest that portfolios containing Bitcoin have superior risk-adjusted returns as compared to portfolios without Bitcoin for two strategies, ‘long only’ and ‘equally weighted’. Results suggest relatively stable weights across the investment horizon for Bitcoin in ‘long only’ strategy as compared to ‘constrained’ framework. The findings are relevant for institutional and retail investors looking to earn higher risk-adjusted returns for a portfolio denominated in Indian rupee. The study highlights the immense potential of Bitcoin as an investment alternative and also adds fresh evidence to the scarce literature on Bitcoin from a financial perspective.

The objective of this paper is to provide directions to governments and corporates for supporting the 2030 agenda for sustainable development across the world. This study proposes an approach for analyzing the inclination of leading CEOs (as social influencers) toward SDGs by analyzing the CEOs’ conversation on social media platforms. The study also tries to investigate the usage pattern of Twitter among the CEOs and themes of the tweets posted by CEOs. The results of the study show, through social media platforms (such as Twitter), CEOs are expressing their opinions for various events happening across the world and motivating Twitter users for building their career and improving their living standards. The outcome of the study suggests, if some organization (such as United Nations or governments) pushes these CEOs on SDGs themes, then these CEOs can act as the great influencers on SDGs’ theme on social media platforms.

The main purpose of this research study is to conceptualise a comprehensive framework for assessing the overall outcome of e-government projects in context multi-stakeholders with focus on service provider. There is a growing need especially in developing countries to know whether the e-government projects are comprehensively achieving their desired objectives and if each stakeholder of the initiative is performing its role as expected, especially the service provider under public-private partnership. We need tools and models to know and understand this domain more holistically. Most of the studies in the area of e-government performance assessment have been done considering citizens as stakeholder. The perspectives of other stakeholders are hardly part of literature available on e-government. A comprehensive framework for assessing the performance of e-government projects has been conceptualised as part of this research and would be empirically validated as part of the future scope of the research. This framework will have the competence to evaluate an e-government initiative from the perspective of service providers. The practical assistance we can get from framework would be to evaluate the impact of an e-government initiative by comparing with the earlier proposed objectives for it, so that the results can contribute to the subsequent decision-making related to the concerned projects and also to assist the government in making decisions for the future e-government initiatives.

Since the increase on use of the digital services, there has been growth of risk surrounding information. So the measure of the information risk while using digital services has been a concern for the information security managers. The purpose of the study is to develop a conceptual model which can be used to measure the information risk while using digital services. The sharing of information during the purchase of the digital services is very certain. The conceptual model develops the antecedents of the information risk. The antecedents are network environment characteristics, network trust, general information security awareness, perceived information privacy concern and information type. The model also includes the contrast which shows the willingness to buy the digital services. It includes perceived risk, trust in service provider, perceived size and reputation of the digital service provider.

In the aftermath of recent corporate and government scandals, stakeholders have become wary, demanding more transparency and accountability in organizational processes. Transparency is a complex concept, with various perspectives existing in academic literature and many organizations struggling to identify an adequate level of transparency which balances the expectations of its various stakeholders. These expectations may be shaped by the cultural environment, and consequently, the desired level of transparency from an organization may be a function of country culture. While there is much academic literature pertinent to transparency in developed countries, very few researchers have explored this domain in the Indian context. Hence, considering the importance of and need for organizational transparency in India, our study raises three key research questions, to empirically examine the concept of transparency and expand the understanding of factors affecting transparency in public and private organizations.

India is moving at a very fast pace towards the digitization of nation, but the true benefits of this digitization are not yet achieved. Reason being usage of technology to transform the same old physical processes of government and public sector (GPS) to realize the E-Governance as are being following since independence. E-Governance is a much broader term (then only providing online access to government services), which encompasses usage of technology to enhance transparency, accountability, collaboration and participation of citizen in policy making, decision-making and improving services. Merely transforming physical services to electronic service cannot yield the benefits of E-Governance; rather necessity is to go for re-engineering of old government processes which are in desperate need of transformation. And in order to redesign these old GPS processes, it is firstly required to evaluate the current GPS processes to identify the problematic areas and then diagnosing the non-value-adding and value-adding activities in same. Here comes the role of value chain analysis which enables the BPR teams and change agents to identify non-value-adding activities in the government processes and evaluate how technology can enhance value of GPS processes. Now, the problem is that there is a lack of concrete value chain for government sector in literature, and this motivated the authors to undertake the present research work and propose a conceptual value chain for GPS which would later be tested empirically using SEM at the next stage. Value chain here has been developed based on SAP-LAP methodology proposed by Sushil (Manag Decis 38(5):347–353, 2000).

The paper provides an overview on the current trends and future perspective of Industry 4.0. Besides, the paper also presents the advances of Industry 4.0 which has enabled systematic functionalities for cyber-physical systems. It has paved way to integrate functional capabilities in physical assets which facilitates monitoring and synchronization of real-time information over the Industry 4.0 network. Smart analytics of Industry 4.0 effectively and efficiently communicates and coordinates with entire components of the system. In addition, the paper also proposes six-leveled architecture for Industry 4.0 which shows an implication in the containerization system of container supply chain at the port. Further, advancements of Industry 4.0 are implemented in the containerization system to optimize business operation at the port to effectively and efficiently build container supply chain.

The cities and urban areas are complex social ecosystems in any country. The smart city encompasses smart solutions for the urban development with the help of high-end technology to resolve the existing issues of urbanism and to improve the living environment and services for the residing citizens. The smartness in smart cities could be introduced by the integration of multimodal sensors, technological devices, telecommunications, computer-based technologies, analytics, and real-time response system into the city infrastructure. For this, effective policies are needed with the proper planning of the implementation especially in the large countries. The chapter proposes a conceptual framework to design effective policies and implementations for the smart city development. The indicators are selected from the vast literature studies. All the indicators have been classified into four groups. The results explain the socio-digital environment structure to enhance the smart city policy design with the help of planning, citizens’ centricity, digital space, and city government. The chapter would form the basis for new learners, policymakers, city planners, and government officials to understand, learn, and gain knowledge on effective policy design and implementations to develop the urban space as a smart city.

Technological revolutions have resulted in adoption of digital services by both public and private sectors. In this era of digitisation, the use of digital services increases the accessibility and penetration among the masses. This study is a review of the impact of the refresher investor awareness programme (IAP) conducted by the Government of India through Common Services Centres (CSC). The programme targets rural citizens to educate them about financial aspects including savings, investments and insurances. The study is an impact assessment of the programme and adopts a multivariate model to investigate the correlation between adoption constructs to the final outcome. The constructs comprise of training service quality, user satisfaction, training comprehension, usefulness and perceived benefits which impact the dependent constructs, namely, behavioural intention and social benefits. A total of 378 respondents have been considered for the assessment. Findings may be beneficial for policy-makers for initiation of similar programmes in future.

Internet of Things (IoT) as a field consists of multiple coexisting and competing products and platforms. IoT business ecosystem represents community of firms interacting with each other as well with the socioeconomic environment. To survive, the firms must cooperate as well as compete by using a common set of resources like hardware, software, platforms, standards that cater to the connectivity of connected devices, applications developed, provisioning services, assurance of quality and billing, etc. This paper analyzes prominent literature, reports, and white papers on the community psychology of members or players in the IoT ecosystem. Some of the key findings in this paper highlight that (i) the firms join the IoT ecosystem community due to their dependency on the ecosystem; (ii) they are motivated to bring in quality of life to the citizens via delivering cost-effective goods and services while focusing on profitable growth; (iii) depending on the role they play in the IoT value chain, their aspirations could differ from each other; and (iv) areas of special attention required around various challenges to ensure IoT ecosystem remain promising to stakeholders.