A study to determine influential factors on data security

Article history: Received September 15, 2012 Accepted August 5, 2013 Available online August 7 2013 During the past few years, there has been increasing interest in making online transaction. As people become more interested in using internet for their daily business activities such as regular communications, financial transactions, etc., there will be more concerns on security of available data. In fact, data security is the primary concern in today’s online activities. This paper performs an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing data security in Municipality is city of Tehran, Iran. The survey uses factor analysis to find important factors using a questionnaire consist of 29 variables, which were reduced to 22 questions after considering skewness statistics. Cronbach alpha is calculated as 0.86, which validates the questionnaire. The survey detects six factors influencing feasibility study, organizational learning, management strategy, enterprise resource management, process approach and the acceptance. © 2014 Growing Science Ltd. All rights reserved.


Introduction
The new millennium started with tremendous changes on business models due to recent advances of information technology (Niehaves, 2011;Janowski et al., 2012).People now are able to make a purchase order on different goods and services by simply clicking a bottom on their computer at home without bothering to go out.They may even file their income tax using the internet facilities (Terpsiadou & Economides, 2009).This makes it easy to save time and money for end users since there is no need to walk out of house for no good reason.However, one important concern is to make sure the data are transmitted, properly and securely.Any e-government that uses easy access and friendly web based system to offer services could significantly save people's time and energy.Bureaucratic institutions not only provide tools to coordinate work activities in the public sector, but also serve to enforce the democratic values of equality and impartiality.Cordella (2007) explored how recent techniques to e-government ignore these necessary dimensions of bureaucracy and proposed an alternative approach to e-government.The e-bureaucratic form has been proposed as an e-government solution, which, help to enforce the values of equality and impartiality underpinned through the necessary actions emanating from bureaucratic structures.Cordella and Iannacci (2010) investigated the logics embedded in the design of new technology and extant political interests and values inscribed in e-government policies.Kardan and Sadeghiani (2011) implemented a longitudinal investigation at two points in time to evaluate the path from egovernment to e-democracy based on two different methods of a systematic evaluation based on a checklist and a questionnaire survey.Zissis and Lekkas (2011) explored increasing participation and sophistication of electronic government services, through using a cloud computing architecture.Dawes (2009) presented a conceptual framework for learning the future, drawn from a stakeholderdriven investigation into potential scenarios of society and government.The framework presents a dynamic socio-technical system encompassing interactions among societal trends, human elements, changing technology, interaction and complexity, information management, and the role of government.Hung et al. (2012) learned more about user acceptance of mobile e-government services.

The proposed method
The proposed model of this paper uses factor analysis (Azad & Hassanabadi, 2013;Azad & Mohammadi, 2013) to determine important factors influencing data security in municipality organization in city of Tehran, Iran.The study designs a questionnaire consists of 29 questions and in Likert scale.The sample size is calculated as follows, where N is the population size, and N=1300, the number of sample size is calculated as n=185.Cronbach alpha has been calculated as 0.856 in preliminary stage and final 0.856 in final stage, which are statistically acceptable.In addition, Kaiser-Meyer-Olkin Measure of Sampling Adequacy is calculated as 0.76, which is within an acceptable limit and validates the results.Since factor analysis is sensitive on skewness of factors, we have decided to delete seven questions.Fig. 1 demonstrates Scree plot on questions of the survey.Table 1 demonstrates important extracted factors.In addition, Table 3 and Table 4 show details of principles component analysis before and after rotation.As we can observe from the results of Table 4, we may extract six important factors influencing on data security.Next, we explain all these factors in details.

The results
The implementation of factor analysis helps us group different factors and find better insight on market development.

Acceptance
The first factor is associated with the level of acceptance and it includes five factors including customer trust to e-government, being user friendly for customers, general perception of advantages, popularity of software packages and general culture of using electronic services.Table 5 summarizes the results of our findings.As we can observe from the results of Table 5, being user friendly is the most important factor followed by general perception of advantages.

The second factor: Process approach
The second factor is associated with process approach, which consists of four factors summarized in Table 6 as follows,

Table 6
The summary of different components associated with process approach According to the results of Table 6, re-engineering of methods and approaches is the most important factor followed by standardization of all services, having updated systems and life cycle of system.

The third factor: Human resources management
Human resource management is the third factor and it includes four items summarized in Table 7 as follows,

Table 7
The summary of different components associated with human resources management According to the results of Table 7, economic resource development is the most important factor followed by human resource development, having supportive operating systems and organizational resource distribution.

The fourth factor: Management strategy
Management strategy is the fourth factor and it includes three items summarized in Table 8 as follows, According to the results of Table 8, sufficient management control is the first important factor followed by integrated performance measurement and top management support.

The fifth factor: Organizational learning
The fifth factor is associated with organizational learning, which consists of four factors summarized in Table 9 as follows, According to the results of Table 9, ease of use of related software packages is the most important factor followed by organizational learning capabilities, training and clear responsibility of all workers.

The sixth factor: Feasibility study
The last factor is associated with feasibility study, which consists of two sub-components summarized in Table 10 as follows, According to the results of Table 10, having bigger internet band wide is number one priority followed by existing laws, rules and regulations.

Conclusion
This paper has presented an empirical investigation to find important factors influencing data security in municipality of Tehran, Iran.Using a questionnaire in Likert scale, the survey used factor analysis to find influencing factors in data security.The first factor was associated with the level of acceptance including five factors of customer trust to e-government, being user friendly for customers, general perception of advantages, popularity of software packages and general culture of using electronic services where being user friendly was the most important factor followed by general perception of advantages.The second factor is associated with process approach, which consists of four factors where re-engineering of methods and approaches was the most important factor followed by standardization of all services, having updated systems and life cycle of system.
Human resource management is the third factor and it includes four items, where economic resource development was the most important factor followed by human resource development, having supportive operating systems and organizational resource distribution.Management strategy is the fourth factor and it includes three items where sufficient management control was the first important factor followed by integrated performance measurement and top management support.The fifth factor is associated with organizational learning, which consists of four factors where ease of use of related software packages was the most important factor followed by organizational learning capabilities, training and clear responsibility of all workers.Finally, the last factor was associated with feasibility study, which consists of two sub-components where having bigger internet band wide was number one priority followed by existing laws, rules and regulations.

Table 1
The results of extracted factors

Table 2
The results of total variance explained

Table 3
The results of Principal Component Analysis

Table 5
The summary of different components associated with acceptance

Table 8
The summary of different components associated with management strategy

Table 9
The summary of different components associated with organizational learning

Table 10
The summary of different components associated with feasibility study