Since the first confirmed case in January 2020, Coronavirus disease 2019(COVID-19) has brought many changes to our society, and Korea is no exception. Some changes are direct and immediate such as restrictions on overseas travel and social distancing, but the others are indirect and slowly adapted such as lifestyle changes impacting industries and businesses. IT service sector is tremendously influenced by COVID-19. IT service is used extensively in response to COVID-19 taking advantage of its non-face-to-face characteristics. In that sense, the industry is positively affected and in some sense invigorated, giving birth to new kind of services. This special issue focuses on introducing how the IT services are affected, what kind of transformations are undergoing, and how these are expedited after COVID-19. This special issue expands and extends the case research section by collecting new IT service case studies concerning these topics. After competitive review process, 11 studies are selected for this special issue which deals with four different but closely related aspects: (1) evolutions of private IT services, (2) transformations in public IT services, (3) impacts in the hospitality and tourism industry, and (4) changes of people's behavior along with COVID-19. The first set reports on the evolution of private IT services that have created terms such as foodtech and edutech as we enter a rapid non-face-to-face situation. The second set consists of studies dealing with the evolution of public IT services. Evolution and rapid response to non-face-to-face appear to be no exception in the public sector. The third includes studies of hospitality and tourism which is most strongly affected by COVID-19. The last set deals with the behavioral changes of users such as technostress in telecommuting. Lessons learned through best practices and key problems identified in these studies may help us to actively respond to the coming waves of changes incurred by COVID-19 in our society as well as in the IT service industry.

As untact travel has become a new trend in leisure culture due to the spread of COVID-19, car camping market is rapidly increasing. The sales of car camping-related goods increased by up to 600 percent, and the sales of SUV in Korea also increased by about four times. Despite the growth of the car camping market, there is a lack of research on the actual condition of the car camping market or research on the user's perspective. Therefore, in this study, a survey of actual camping users was conducted to derive factors that they consider important in camping, and through this, a car camping map was produced. As a result, two types of maps were produced: a map about the car camping site and convenience facilities closest to the car camping site in Gangwon-do, and a hash tag themed map based on keywords for each car camping site. We gathered data on portal sites and social media to obtain information related to camping sites and proceeded with analysis using text mining. In addition, we extracted keywords using network analysis techniques and selected key themes that represent them. This allows the user to choose a car camping site by selecting keywords that suit their taste. We hope that this research will help car camping researchers as a prior study and provide a foundation for leading a clean camping culture through clean camping campaign. Also, we hope that car camping users will be able to do quality trip.

The spread of COVID-19 has been changed the tourism industry. Travelers changed their traveling style and started to consider congestion of the spot for their health and safety. In Jeju, a famous tourist destination in South Korea, managing the congestion of tourists has become an important issue. This example introduces the Jeju Tourism Organization's development of a system as a smart tourism information service that manages congestion in real-time big data. Combining with congestion theory and behavior immune system, we would like to assure the necessity of the system. Also, by analyzing the system, we understand how deducing congestion information from big data and the new paradigm of the tourism industry combined with congestion theory. Data was collected by Korea's telecommunication company SKT to develop the system. The paper explains the reason for choosing the company and the pros of data quality. We expect this system to be a solution for any other city in the world under a similar situation. Finally, several suggestions for the system are included to promote and better future usage.

Currently, citizens' expectations and concerns on utilizing artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in the public sector are widening with the rapid digital transformation. Furthermore the level of global acceptance on the AI and other intelligent digital technologies is augmenting with the needs of non-face-to-face types of public services more than ever due to the unforeseen and unpredictable pandemic, COVID-19. Thus, this study intended to empirically examine what policy directions for the public should be considered to provide well-designed services as well as to promote the evidence-based public policies in terms of Al speaker technology as a non-contact smart city service. Based on the survey of senior citizens' perceptions on AI (AI Speaker technology), this study conducted structure equation modeling analyses to identify whether technology acceptance models on to the varied dependent variables such as actual use, perception, attitude, and brand royalty. The Results of the empirical analyses showed that AI increased the positive level of citizens' perception, attitude and brand royalty on non-contact public services (smart city services) which are becoming more crucial for developing AI oriented government and providing intelligent public services effectively. In addition, theoretical and practical implications are discussed for understanding the changes of public service in the post-corona.

Technostress management is increasingly getting important as ICT advances and infiltrates every job and task. Especially with the advent of COVID-19, workers had to switch to teleworking utilizing ICT extensively. In this study, we developed a research model explaining antecedents and their impacts on technostress in telecommuting context, especially under the COVID-19 situation. The result revealed that techno-complexity, techno-invasion, and techno-overload are the dominant factors that affect the negative psychological responses in the COVID-19 situation. Among them, we found that techno-overload maintain the most significant influence. It is due to the lack of instant feedback on workload allocations in telework and the lack of adjustment period with the sudden shift to telecommuting. In the case of techno-complexity, employees seem to experience difficulty acquiring new technical skills. Finally, the techno-invasion came out significant, signifying the infiltration of working space by home-related activities. The emotion-focused coping strategy had a moderating effect. In contrast, the problem-focused coping strategy had no significant effect, indicating that an appropriate emotional coping strategy is more important for workers undergoing extreme changes in the work environment. Subsequently, practical and theoretical implications, limitations, and future research directions are discussed.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about many changes in our daily lives and in industries as a whole. The most notable change was the spread of the untact culture to minimize face-to-face contact. The spread of the untact culture has changed the use of public transportation. Looking at the results of previous SARS and MERS studies, it was found that as the pandemic spreads, the use of public transportation decreased. Recently, the mobility sharing service is attracting attention as a personalized means of transportation instead of public transportation. Therefore, in this study, the factors affecting the intention to use the mobility sharing service were to be identified by the actual users. In this study, economic benefit, convenience, sustainability, and sense of belonging were set as independent variables based on previous studies. In addition, the relationship between the perceived usefulness and perceived pleasure of these factors of use on intention to use was empirically analyzed through PLS-SEM. As a result of the study, it was found that economic benefits, convenience, sustainability, and sense of belongingness had a significant effect on intention to use through perceived usefulness and enjoyment. This study was meaningful in that it was verified through the study that economic benefits, convenience, sustainability, and a sense of belongingness were significant variables affecting the intention to use through usefulness and pleasure.

Food delivery service combined with IT technology and HMR (Home Meal Replacement) are rapidly growing due to the COVID-19. Recently, the demand for salads along with HMR has increased among office workers in their 20s and 30s who are interested in health and beauty. Freshcode is a food startup with 6 years of experience that started selling salad products through O2O service. Freshcode applied for a patent for a service that collects orders from nearby areas and delivers them on the same day to a designated delivery address 'FCOSPOT' to save shipping costs. In March 2021, in recognition of the growth potential of the regular delivery service, Freshcode received an investment of 6 billion won in Series A. This study may have practical implications to early-stage startups and scale-up stage startups through a longitudinal case study on the growth of a single company. As for the research method, the lean startup methodology and lean canvas were used in the early stage of startup. In particular, the process of the build-measure and learn feedback-loop, which is the core of lean startup methodology, was applied to each major decision-making step. In the scale-up stage after 5 years, the business model canvas was used to schematize the growth as a food online O2O platform to verify continuous innovation. This case study has three main findings. First, the idea of 'FCOSPOT' was successfully implemented through the Lean Startup methodology. Second, Freshcode demonstrated the scalability of the differentiated business model of shared base delivery O2O. Third, a key factor of success was the digital integrated communication operation strategy that maximizes the experience for the created customers.

As we enter the era of the 4th industrial revolution, information and communication technologies, including artificial intelligence and big data, are converging throughout society. Especially, as the importance of the social foundation of hyper-connection grows, the social influence of IoT, a network of connecting objects, people, and various entities, is also gradually expanding. In addition, as a pandemic, COVID-19, continues, interests in untact-oriented technology and service development are growing more than ever, and each company is trying to establish a core competency strategy to gain an edge in competition in the changing society. This study is a case study centered on Dawon DNS, a company that provides an IoT-based AI smart plug platform. Dawon DNS is broadening its services while developing products by applying advanced technologies, and this study is aiming to investigate the core competencies of the business evolution process. The obtained result of this study will provide implications for companies to become more competitive by suggesting the attitudes and strategies that startups should have during the transforming business environment.

Since the global spread of COVID-19, social distancing and untact service implementation have spread rapidly. With the transition to a non-face-to-face environment such as telework and remote classes, cyber security threats have increased, and a lot of cyber compromises have also occurred. In this study, cyber-attacks and response cases related to COVID-19 are summarized in four aspects: cyber fraud, cyber-attacks on companies related to COVID-19 and healthcare sector, cyber-attacks on untact services such as telework, and preparation of untact services security for post-covid 19. After the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, related events such as vaccination information and payment of national disaster aid continued to be used as bait for smishing and phishing. In the aspect of cyber-attacks on companies related to COVID-19 and healthcare sector, we can see that the damage was rapidly increasing as state-supported hackers attack those companies to obtain research results related to the COVID-19, and hackers chose medical institutions as targets with an efficient ransomware attack approach by changing 'spray and pray' strategy to 'big-game hunting'. Companies using untact services such as telework are experiencing cyber breaches due to insufficient security settings, non-installation of security patches, and vulnerabilities in systems constituting untact services such as VPN. In response to these cyber incidents, as a case of cyber fraud countermeasures, security notices to preventing cyber fraud damage to the public was announced, and security guidelines and ransomware countermeasures were provided to organizations related to COVID-19 and medical institutions. In addition, for companies that use and provide untact services, security vulnerability finding and system development environment security inspection service were provided by Government funding programs. We also looked at the differences in the role of the government and the target of security notices between domestic and overseas response cases. Lastly, considering the development of untact services by industry in preparation for post-COVID-19, supply chain security, cloud security, development security, and IoT security were suggested as common security reinforcement measures.

Recently, public participation in government policy design has been further expanded and public services perceived by users are expanding. At this time, the role of the digital government and the direction of the service to be pursued are user-centered, and above all, it is necessary to focus on the keywords of pre-emptive, preventive, and customized. In order to propose service quality improvement in the public sector, service user-centered classification and monitoring are integrated and the usability of government documents is improved. It is necessary to identify the needs of whether to provide a path for public participation. In the post-corona era, people are accessing quarantine information from the digital government every day. The government should proactively respond to the acceleration of digital transformation and the non-face-to-face demands of the people who experience non-face-to-face daily life. In order to evolve into a smart organization along with the innovation promotion plan and to provide customized services, it is necessary to use existing guides for institutional and technical improvement, along with new technology and data-based analysis, to strive for change management. The government should seek counter-measures that have advanced one step ahead by incorporating new high-tech IT with user-centered necessary services. This study aims to derive improvement plans to provide user-centered digital government service design when designing public services and collecting public opinions. Based on the e-government development model research and the existing research on user-centered service design in the public sector, institutional and technical measures are provided for the improvement of digital government service design.

The digital transformation and COVID-19 are also causing major changes in teaching-learning methods. The biggest change is the spread of remote training and the emergence of various innovative learning platforms. Distance education has been criticized for not meeting technology trends and field demands..However, the problem of distance education is being solved through a system that supports various interactions and collaborations and supports customized learning paths. The researcher conducted a case study on domestic and foreign learning platforms that provide non-face-to-face ICT education. Based on the case study results, the researcher presented the functional characteristics of a learning platform that effectively supports non-face-to-face learning. In common, these sites faithfully supported the basic functions of the information system. In addition to learning progress check and learning guidance, some innovative learning platforms were providing differentiated functions in practice support, performance management, mentoring, learning data analysis, curation provision, and CDP support. Most learning platforms supported one-way, superficial interaction. If the platform effectively supports a variety of learning experiences and provides an integrated learning experience thanks to the development of IT technology, user satisfaction with the learning platform, intention to continue learning, and achievement will increase.

In this study, we performed a comparative analysis of the sentiment value for the tourists in USA, China, and Korea on the COVID19 pandemic era to explore and find out the features of the tourists by using online reviews. We collected a total of 243,826 online hotel reviews for metropolitan city and vacation spot in the three countries to compare the features between the business and the vacation trips. We collected the online reviews into the tow groups from Jan. 1, 2019 to Nov. 31, 2019 for before COVID19 pandemic and from Apr. 1, 2020 to Deb 28, 2021 for during COVID19. Online reviews were categorized into 6 dimensions using LDA model. Sentiment analysis were presented for 6 dimensions by utilizing a lexicon base. We proposed an approach to analyzing the importance of each attribute by applying 6-dimensional sentiment values to conjoint analysis. Our empirical analysis showed that the proposed approach could explore and find out the changed features of travelers during the COVID19 pandemic.

The global economy has been very difficult due to the recent impact of COVID-19. Korea is also pushing for strong quarantine policies such as K- quarantine and social distancing, but the economy is hardly recovering. In particular, the economic situation began to change rapidly depending on the export and domestic market, the public's interest in the economy increased, and companies became more sensitive. In order to estimate this rapidly changing economic situation, major advanced countries have also developed models that can periodically monitor the economy at the government level. Through this, by periodically reporting the economic trends, the public and companies can be aware of the economic trends to some extent. This study analyzed the cases of weekly business trends in advanced countries and developed a model of weekly economic activity suitable for Korea. To verify this, indices closely related to the economy such as mobility, industrial activity, face-to-face consumption, and psychology were discovered and estimated. As a result of the study, the weekly economic activity index was judged to be very useful in capturing short-term real economic activity. In the future, in order to secure the robustness and stability of the index and to increase the reflection of reality, model improvement and parameter estimation should be performed regularly.

Voice interaction combined with artificial intelligence is poised to revolutionize human-computer interactions with the advent of virtual assistants. This paper is analyzing interactive elements of AI-based voice recognition services such as sympathy, assurance, intimacy, and trust on intention to use. The questionnaire was carried out for 284 smartphone/smart TV users in Korea. The collected data was analyzed by structural equation model analysis and bootstrapping. The key results are as follows. First, AI-based voice recognition service characteristics such as sympathy, assurance, intimacy, and trust have positive effects on interactivity with the AI-based voice recognition service. Second, the interactivity with the AI-based voice recognition service has positive effects on intention to use. Third, AI-based voice recognition service characteristics such as interactional enjoyment and intimacy have directly positive effects on intention to use. Fourth, AI-based voice recognition service characteristics such as sympathy, assurance, intimacy and trust have indirectly positive effects on intention to use the AI-based voice recognition service by mediating the effect of the interactivity with the AI-based voice recognition service. It is meaningful to investigate factors affecting the interactivity and intention to use voice recognition assistants. It has practical and academic implications.