Knowledge Sharing Processes for Identity Theft Prevention within Online Retail Organisations

Abstract

The occurrence of identity theft has increased dramatically in recent times, becoming one of the fastest-growing crimes in the world. Major challenges associated with identity theft related offences include problems of consumers with credit, such as: aggravation by debt collectors; rejection of loans; disturbance in normal lives such as reputation damage; and the psychological disruption of providing personal data to organisations and banks during the investigation. For these reasons, and with the ready access of identity thieves to the retail industry, this problem is acute in the online retail industry, yet there has been insufficient research undertaken in this domain.
This research investigated knowledge sharing processes for identity theft prevention within online retail organisations. An analysis of how individual staff and teams share their knowledge for identity theft prevention in organisations is presented, which includes the investigation of existing barriers in knowledge sharing for identity theft prevention in organisations. A qualitative case study research approach, using the guiding framework proposed by Salleh (2010), was adopted and extended to improve knowledge sharing processes for identity theft prevention in online retail organisations. Three case studies were conducted with leading online retailers in the UK. Data collection included one-to- one semi-structured interviews, internal documents from the researched companies and external documents from various secondary sources. The researcher used the thematic analysis approach using the NVivo software tool and a manual coding process.
The total number of interviews was 34 across 3 case studies, with each interview lasting between 45 and 75 minutes. The participants were selected according to their experience, knowledge and involvement in solving identity theft issues and knowledge sharing. Investigation of internal documents included email conversations, policy documents and internal conversations such as emails and memos from the researched companies.
This study found that knowledge of identity theft prevention is not being shared within online retail organisations. Individual staff members are learning from their experiences, which is time-consuming. Existing knowledge sharing barriers within the organisations were identified, and improvements in knowledge sharing processes in the online retail industry of the UK using the extended framework are proposed.
This research contributes to existing research by providing new insights into knowledge sharing for identity theft prevention. It extends an existing framework proposed by Salleh (2010) in the new context of knowledge sharing processes for ID theft prevention in the retail industry by simplifying the model and combining elements into a more coherent framework. The present study also contributes by investigating the online retail sector for knowledge sharing for ID theft prevention. The empirical research identifies the barriers to knowledge sharing for ID theft prevention and the weaknesses of knowledge sharing in online retail organisations relevant to ID theft prevention. Finally, this study provides managers with useful guidelines for developing appropriate knowledge sharing processes for ID theft prevention in their organisation, and to educate staff in effective knowledge sharing.