Magister Library and Information Studies - MLIS / Universities face complex changes such as mergers; new competitors; socio-economic; political and technological changes. In order to survive and preserve competitive advantage, the university has to adapt to such changes. The University of the Western Cape has been through many changes since its establishment to its current status as a culturally diverse autonomous institution with a mission statement that reflects its ability to respond and adapt to change. Universities that can adapt to changes are considered to be intelligent. Intelligent universities adapt to changing and unpredictable environments by organizing all information resources; transforming information to knowledge; and using this knowledge to enhance performance. Records are an information resource. They contain evidence of business activities of an organization, their management therefore is important. This study was undertaken to add knowledge and insight into records management in the intelligent university by investigating whether records management contributes to making the University of the Western Cape intelligent. Records management is a function within an organization, hence the researcher's choice of the functionalist theory to frame this exploratory qualitative case study. Secondary sources, semi structured interviews; and electronic questionnaires were used to collect data from purposively selected participants. The data was imported and analysed on a qualitative data analysis software Atlas.ti7, version 7.5.10. The findings of the study showed that records management as a function was not used optimally by the university due to limited knowledge and awareness of its existence; as well as other services it offers. Records management therefore does not contribute to making the University of the Western Cape intelligent. Marketing, training, strategic placement of the records management function on the university organizational structure, integration with other components, implementation of electronic records management and a records management model for the intelligent university were recommended to address short-comings. This study adds more knowledge on records management in the intelligent university and brings to light the importance of the records management function; highlights how university records can be used for competitive advantage as well as decision-making; and aids in developing a records management model for an intelligent university. A large scale national study in other institutions of higher learning to provide a clearer picture of whether records management plays a role in making South African universities intelligent is recommended.

A retail enterprise is a business organisation that sells goods or services directly to consumers for personal use. Retail enterprises such as supermarkets enable customers to go around the shop picking items from the shelves and placing them into their baskets. The basket of each customer is captured into transactional systems. In this research study, retail enterprises were classified into two main categories: centralised and distributed retail enterprises. A distributed retail enterprise is one that issues the decision rights to the branches or groups nearest to the data collection, while in centralised retail enterprises the decision rights of the branches are concentrated in a single authority. It is difficult for retail enterprises to ascertain customer preferences by merely observing transactions. This has led to quantifiable losses. Although some enterprises implemented classical business models to address these challenging issues, they still lacked analytics-based marketing programs to gain competitive advantage. This research study develops an intelligent analytics-based (ARANN) model for both distributed and centralised retail enterprises in the cross-demographics of a developing country. The ARANN model is built on association rules (AR), complemented by artificial neural networks (ANN) to strengthen the results of these two individual models. The ARANN model was tested using real-life and publicly available transactional datasets for the generation of product arrangement sets. In centralised retail enterprises, the data from different branches was integrated and pre-processed to remove data impurities. The cleaned data was then fed into the ARANN model. On the other hand, in distributed retail enterprises data was collected branch per branch and cleaned. The cleaned data was fed into the ARANN model. According to experimental analytics, the ARANN model can generate improved product arrangement sets, thereby improving the confidence of retail enterprise decision-makers in competitive environments. It was also observed that the ARANN model performed faster in distributed than in centralised retail enterprises. This research is beneficial for sustainable businesses and consideration of the results is therefore recommended to retail enterprises. / Computing / M Sc. (Computing)

This study aims to investigate the naturalistic decision-making role of business intelligence (BI) in the oil and gas (O&G) industry. O&G organisations spend a lot of time, effort and resources in maximising their operations to gain a competitive advantage. With the introduction of technological solutions, BI provides organisations with the ability to collect, sort, analyse and transform data into timely intelligence. However, the industry is characteristically competitive, difficult to predict and continuously changing with decision-makers sometimes faced with naturalistic decisions necessitating quick decisions under pressure, strict timeframes and with incomplete data. Literature on the role BI in the O&G industry has been minimal, with the focus being on how BI is used to assist rational decision-making. This study relies on data collected from two O&G organisations operating in different streams of the industry. Using a dynamic model of situated cognition, this study employs an interpretive, qualitative approach to data analysis in an attempt to fill the gap in the literature and determine whether BI plays any role in facilitating the decision-making process in response to naturalistic decisions. A dynamic model of situated cognition has been employed because of its strong correlation with naturalistic decision-making (NDM). The findings of this study indicate that different naturalistic decisions exist in the two streams of the industry and these decisions vary in their levels of complexity and domains. Furthermore, the findings show that while BI plays a major role NDM, this role is mitigated by the cognitive capabilities of individual decision-makers and their areas of expertise.

Avec l’internationalisation croissante des entreprises québécoises, de plus en plus d’organisations cherchent à recruter et former des employés capables d’interagir efficacement avec des individus issus d’une diversité de contextes ethnoculturels. Or, aucun outil de mesure francophone, validé empiriquement au Québec, n’est disponible pour évaluer cette compétence. Cette étude avait pour objectif de traduire et de faire la validation transculturelle de l’Expanded Cultural Intelligence Scale, un outil de mesure de l’intelligence culturelle permettant d’identifier des individus efficaces dans leurs contacts interculturels. L’outil a été traduit grâce à la méthode de traduction inversée, méthode qui a permis l’élaboration d’une version expérimentale qui entretenait une bonne équivalence sémantique, expérientielle et conceptuelle avec l’outil original. La version expérimentale a tout d’abord été soumise, en même temps que la version originale, à un échantillon de 39 personnes bilingues. Des coefficients de corrélations élevés ont permis de confirmer la validité concomitante et de contenu de la version expérimentale. Par la suite, la version expérimentale a été soumise, à deux reprises, à un échantillon d’étudiants issus du CÉGEP de Victoriaville et de l’Université de Sherbrooke. 679 étudiants ont répondu au questionnaire lors de la première administration et 531 ont répondu à celui-ci lors de la deuxième administration. Les coefficients de corrélation test-retest confirment une stabilité temporelle acceptable de la version de l’E-CQS. Les alphas ainsi que la structure factorielle de l’outil ont été testés au Temps 1 et au Temps 2. Dans l’ensemble, les résultats suggèrent que la version francophone de l’E-CQS produit dans la présente recherche est un outil de mesure prometteur de la compétence interculturelle.

Si les activités de renseignement public n’étaient pas encadrées, la loi du 24 juillet 2015 relative au renseignement a permis de créer un cadre juridique du renseignement, tout en mettant en avant la communauté du renseignement. Cet encadrement juridique des activités de renseignement s’exerce dans le but de faire face aux menaces à la sécurité nationale. Cet encadrement juridique est aussi une avancée qui a permis d’ériger le renseignement public comme une politique publique, nécessaire pour protéger les intérêts fondamentaux de la Nation, et a été complété par un contrôle concret de ces activités de renseignement. / As the activities of public intelligence services were not regulated before, the law on intelligence dated July 24th, 2015 allowed to create a legal framework of intelligence, while showcasing the intelligence community. This legal framework of intelligence activities is meant to deal with the threats to national security. This legal framework is also a breakthrough allowing to turn public intelligence into public policy, which is required to protect the fundamental interests of the Nation, and it has been completed by an effective control of these intelligence activities.

For a little over the past decade since the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2004 and the more successful Urban Challenge in 2007 autonomous vehicles have seen a surge in popularity with car manufacturers, and companies such as Google and Uber. Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) has been one of the major sensors in use to sense for acting on the surrounding environment instead of the classic radar which has a much narrower field of vision. However the cost of the higher end 3D LiDAR systems which started seeing use during the DARPA challenges still have the high cost of $70,000 a piece which is an issue when trying to design a consumer friendly system on a family car. This work aims to investigate alternate 2D LiDAR systems to the costly systems currently in use in many prototypes to find a cost efficient alternative that can detect and track obstacles in front of a vehicle. The introduction begins by summarizing some related prior works, particularly papers from after the Grand Challenge as well as some about the competition itself. Detection and tracking methods for point clouds generated by the LiDAR are explored including ways to search through the data in an efficient manner to meet real-time constraints. Some of the trade-offs in going from a 3D system to a 2D system and examined along with how some of the drawbacks can be mitigated.

Today’s organizations struggle to remain competitive within the contemporary turbulent business environment and are therefore demanded to develop and implement new working processes. Organizations, although striving for innovation, frequently fail to fully benefit from them due to implementation failures. An often-disregarded issue is the entanglement of emotions during this phase. Thus, this thesis aims to investigate how innovation implementation is related to emotions, addressing it towards the team’s working climate and leader’s emotional intelligence. For this purpose, we employ a conceptual research approach to build an integrated conceptual model that, by proposing hypotheses and propositions, may serve as a starting point for future empirical studies. With this model, we suggest that leaders with higher levels of emotional intelligence, by the mindful management of emotions, can consciously influence the emotional contagion process and therefore affect the team climate. By establishing a climate for innovation characterized by a team vision, participative safety, task orientation and support for innovation, emotionally intelligent leaders can thus positively influence innovation implementation. The thesis does thereby contribute to an understanding of the factors that affect innovation implementation within teams.

The potential brought about by artificial intelligence (AI) to reshape national, economic and security interests has triggered a competition between various governments regarding who will be leading this new technology. This thesis focuses on determining the process of development and management of AI technology in the United States in relation to addressing its national interests, as well as how this might have developed between the Obama and Trump Administrations. This is done by employing the theoretical framework of structural realism and a deductive approach. Further, the case study method is utilized by focusing on the U.S. and a qualitative content analysis focusing on three reports released by the National Science and Technology Council during the Obama Administration and compare these with two reports released during the Trump Administration. The key finding of this thesis is that the role of national interests in the construction of AI policy in the U.S. is to guide how key issues are framed throughout its development and how points of focus in the reports, such as security and national and international considerations, are constructed. Further, the results illustrate how this has changed from the Obama to the Trump Administration, as the Obama Administration stressed the importance of military and technological capabilities and promoted international cooperation, while the Trump Administration opted to prioritize national interests.

Les technologies du numérique s’invitent de plus en plus dans l’enseignement. Les nouvelles pratiques pédagogiques révolutionnent également les standards de la formation. La « gamification » des cursus est, par exemple, devenue une tendance actuelle. Elle permet, par le jeu, d’exercer les apprenants différemment. Les simulations de gestion d’entreprise entrent dans ce cadre. Elles positionnent les stagiaires à la tête d’entreprises virtuelles et simulent un marché concurrentiel. Le déploiement de cette pratique se heurte néanmoins à des difficultés opérationnelles : taille du groupe, formation de l’animateur… C’est dans ce contexte que nous envisageons la mise en œuvre d’agents autonomes permettant d’accompagner ou de concurrencer les apprenants.Pour cela, nous proposons, tout d’abord, une modélisation performante d’une entreprise à base de programmes linéaires mixtes permettant l’optimisation des départements internes des entreprises (production, distribution, finance). Ensuite, nous introduisons une heuristique de recherche locale afin de générer des solutions performantes dans un environnement économique. Aussi, à la suite d’une phase d’extraction de connaissances, nous proposons la définition et la construction d’arbres d’anticipation qui permettent de prévoir les décisions concurrentielles des protagonistes engagés et ainsi de pouvoir estimer la qualité des solutions construites. Afin de valider les approches proposées, nous les avons comparées aux comportements réels de joueurs et avons évalué l’apport de l’exploitation de la connaissance. Enfin, nous avons proposé une généralisation de la méthode à d’autres simulateurs de gestion d’entreprise. / Digital technologies are becoming increasingly popular in teaching and learning processes. New educational practices are also revolutionizing the standards of training. For example, the "gamification" of the curricula has become a current trend. It allows, through games, to exercise learners differently. Business management simulation, also known as business games, fall within this context. They place learners at the head of virtual companies and simulate a competitive market. The deployment of this practice nevertheless encounters some operational difficulties: size of the group, training of the teacher... It is in this context that we envisage the implementation of autonomous agents to accompany the learners or the competitors.To do this, firstly, we propose a modeling of a company, based on mixed linear programs allowing optimization of the internal departments of the companies (production, delivery, finance). For the second step, we will introduce a local heuristic search, ensuring a generation of efficient solutions in a given economic and competitive environment. Thirdly, following a knowledge extraction phase, we propose the definition and construction of anticipation trees that predict the competitive decisions of the engaged protagonists and thus to be able to estimate the quality of the solutions built. In order to validate the proposed approaches, we compared them with the real behaviors of players and evaluated the contribution of the exploitation of the knowledge. Finally, we proposed a framework allowing a generalization of the method to other business games.

Over the past few years, emotional intelligence (EI) has generated significant interest and a wealth of research as a possible area of insight into what determines outstanding performance in the workplace (Ashworth, 2013:8; Pillay, Viviers and Mayer, 2013:1). The internal environment of organisations in the labour-intense hospitality industry is complex and dynamic. Given the unpredictability of change, the researcher found the hospitality industry to be an intriguing milieu within which to ascertain the importance of EI in predicting leaders’ effectiveness as a measure of outstanding performance. As employees are the internal customers of any hotel organisation, representing many hotel organisations’ only true competitive advantage, the purpose of this quantitative investigation was to examine the relationship between leaders’ EI and followers’ motivational behaviour and organisational commitment. Despite the intuitive plausibility of the assumption that leaders who exhibit EI competencies contribute to outstanding performance, the issue of followers’ motivational behaviour and organisational commitment as leadership indices has received little empirical attention. This study sets out to integrate prior findings on EI, motivation and organisational commitment, to support these findings in literature, and to incorporate these findings into a comprehensive conceptual framework. Using critical realists’ post-positivistic philosophical assumptions, the researcher used the Emotional and Social Competencies Inventory (ESCI) to assess leaders’ EI. Furthermore, the Motivational Sources Inventory (MSI) was used to assess followers’ motivational behaviour, while Organisational Commitment Scales (OCS) were used to assess followers’ organisational commitment. The survey respondents consisted of 120 leaders and 435 followers from 13 hotels in four prominent hotel groups in South Africa. The quantitative data collected from the surveys was analysed quantitatively using SPSS to reach substantial results with inferences. The analysis of variance revealed an overall positive relationship between demographic variables and Leaders EI, followers’ motivational behaviour and followers’ organisational commitment. The correlational analysis revealed positive relationships between leaders’ EI and followers’ motivational behaviour and organisational commitment (R= 0.05-, p<0.01) except for instrumental motivation. The correlation between leaders’ emotional self-awareness and followers’ intrinsic process motivation was somewhat weak while the relationship between leaders’ emotional self-awareness and instrumental motivation was found to be sufficient, but statistically not significant. The researcher can conclude that generally the results of this study reveal that organisational leaders can positively influence the motivational behaviour and organisational commitment of their followers by enhancing their own EI competencies. The results add to the leadership literature by illuminating possible antecedents to leadership effectiveness. It is believed that this research will help the hospitality industry at large in clarifying the importance of EI competencies in leadership as a means of obtaining positive motivation behaviour and commitment from followers. Furthermore, the findings have both managerial and research implications for hospitality operations strategy formulation in order to gain competitive advantage and improve the financial position of the businesses.