The study sought to investigate problems encountered by educators in the implementation of IQMS in selected schools in the Butterworth Education District. The study emerged out of an agreement reached by the Department of Education, Education Labour Relation Council, unions and stakeholders (ELRC, 2003) that Integrated Quality Management System (IQMS) be a developmental programme for quality performance in teaching and learning in public schools. The programme was based on the merging of three programmes, namely the Developmental Appraisal System (DAS), Performance Management System (PMS) and Whole School Evaluation (WSE) which were integrated in the implementation of IQMS (Resolution No.8 of 2003).The first three programmes, DAS, PMS and WSE, were less effective and had some flaws that caused implementers (educators) not to accept them as performance developmental programmes as they were punitive and judgmental. The researcher was interested in investigating those problems encountered by the educators in the implementation of IQMS. The study employed a qualitative research methodology with a qualitative survey design. Structured interviews were used to collect data. Five (5) schools out of three hundred and twenty five schools (325) in the Butterworth Education District were conveniently selected. From each school a sample of five (5) educators was purposively selected according to their duty lines on the IQMS structures, i.e. principal, school coordinator and three educators, for the purpose of getting relevant information from each level. Some of the main findings of the study were: the duration of the training was too short; unclear roles and responsibilities of role-players resulted in non-implementation of the programme; attachment of incentive to the programme made educators to focus on the incentives rather than on the programme and the heavy workload of educators hindered the implementation of IQMS. The researcher recommended that administrators/clerks be employed as a matter of urgency to all schools in order to lessen the educators’ workload especially the principals, for the benefit of accomplishing the objectives of IQMS programmes. Re-training was absolutely a necessity. Delinking of incentives to the development programme was a crucial issue. The researcher also recommended that the IQMS Departmental Officials should monitor the implementation of the programme timeuosly so as to tackle the problems in their premature stages. The improvement of working conditions in schools is essential. Key words: quality performance; quality management; quality performance measurement and quality implementation of IQMS programme.

Published Article / The complexity, uniqueness and importance of performance management systems provide the milieu for the author's demonstration that staff performance remains at the heart of an institution. However, the trick is whether institutions have developed the skill of unleashing this potential. This requires a comprehensive approach, which stresses the merits of improving individual and institutional performance. This article explores one institution's perspective, experiences and challenges that were discovered during the Cinderella case study of a Further Education and Training College in South Africa. One of the distinctive features of a performance management system is that it can become a crucial quality assurance tool to ensure results.

Published Article / The abattoir Hygiene Management System (HMS) was regulated in South Africa under the Meat Safety Act 40 of 2000. Presently, there is no national regulated microbiological standard to compare against meat tested at abattoirs as an indicator of good hygiene practices. The aim of the study was to establish a provincial guideline for a microbiological baseline. This may be used to verify the performance of the implemented HMS. Thirty red meat and twenty-two poultry abattoirs were sampled to determine baseline Total Bacterial Counts (TBCs). The results of this study were compared to standards presently used in the United Kingdom (UK). The results compared favourably.

With Chiptech’s current growth rate and size it has become necessary to develop a Quality Management System to enable repeatability, meet customer demands, and protect Chiptech from staff turnover. ISO 9001 was identified as a base for development, with the imperative that the system identified and developed must deliver value for Chiptech. Several frameworks were investigated, along with journal articles and discussions with industry members in order to determine the aspects that would deliver value, and determine the key success factors. Two factors were identified as critical: employee involvement, and the utilisation of metrics – both of which were leveraged for the project results and recommendations. The systems developed have already proved they offer benefits, however, in order to maintain performance Chiptech must a) keep evaluating the measured results, b) ensure that quality forms an integral part of the organisational culture and, c) continue the systematic approach of continual improvement.

"Multiple U.S. healthcare organizations have been recognized as successful in enterprise-level transformation to create healthcare delivery systems that are safe, effective, patient-centered, timely, efficient and equitable. Many of these organizations have specifically cited the development, deployment and integration of enterprise-level deployment of Lean Management Systems as key to their transformational efforts. Given the intense national interest in improving quality, efficiency and efficacy of healthcare delivery systems, a greater understanding of the strategies utilized by these organizations was required in order to provide an understanding of the mechanisms that drive successful, sustained, enterprise-level transformation. We conducted a realist review of large system transformation utilizing enterprise-level Lean Deployment methods within healthcare organizations. Synthesis and analysis of the results from this review indicate that there are five primary strategies associated with successful healthcare-based Lean deployments: Respect for People; Strategic Alignment; Strategic Deployment; Large Scale System Improvement Efforts; and Small-Scale, Local Improvement Efforts. Additional findings from this review indicate that the applications of the specific mechanisms with these strategies are emergent within multiple transitional phases spanning 6-8 years. To supplement the findings from the realist review, a series of dynamic hypotheses and system dynamics model was created in order to explore how the mechanisms and context interact to drive phase transitions within healthcare-based enterprise-level Lean deployments. The results from this model indicate that no steady state initial conditions exist that support sustained enterprise-level transformation and that the emergent nature of these deployments is necessary to overcome constraints related to the organizational capacity and capability. Additionally, we investigate the design and deployment of enterprise-level Lean programs in order to increase rate of success and decrease deployment cycles. "

Stepping into the 21st century, we see more and more evidence of the growing trend towards the amalgamation of cyberspace and the physical world. This trend emerged as computing technologies moved o_ desktops and migrated into aspects of our lives through their ubiquitous presence in the physical world. As these technologies become enmeshed in our daily routines, they begin to `disappear' from our awareness and cease to be thought of as technologies and simply become tools of everyday use. Yet even as they disappear, these technologies afford a new way for us to interact with the environments of everyday life and with the ordinary objects within these environments. The furthering of this vision will require, in many cases, the tools and applications to possess greater levels of autonomy and an awareness of the user's context. As a result, the applications gradually depend more and more for their behaviour on the information (context information) that is relevant to user interactions. However, it is difficult to develop new context-aware applications that take into account the ever-increasing amount of context information. This is because: the context information sources vary not only in their types, but also in their availability in different environments; the developers have to spend significant programming efforts in gathering, pre-processing and managing the context information when designing and developing the new applications; and, the information sources can fail from time to time, resulting in operational disruptions or service degradation. To make such context information easily and widely available for to new context-aware applications, there is a need to provide information provisioning and management at the infrastructure level. This thesis explores the issues and challenges associated with the development of an autonomic middleware system that addresses the problems discussed earlier, with a particular focus on supporting fault-tolerant context information provisioning for multiple applications, providing the support of opportunistic use of the context sources (the sensors) and, maximising overall the system's interoperability for the open, dynamic computing environments (Ubiquitous computing, for example). The research presented in this thesis makes several key contributions. First, it introduces a novel standards-based approach to model heterogeneous information sources and data preprocessing components. Second, it details the design of a standards-based approach for supporting the dynamic composition of context information sources and pre-processing components. This approach plays an important role in supporting fault-tolerant information provisioning from the sensors and the opportunistic use of these sensors. More specifically, it enables any given piece of high-level context information, as required by applications, to be derived via multiple different pre-processing models, resulting in a higher degree of reliability. Third, it describes the design and development of an autonomic context management system (ACoMS), which harnesses the first two contributions above. Finally, the thesis shows how this autonomic context management system can support context-aware routing in wireless mesh networks. These contributions are evaluated through two corresponding case studies. The first is a practical firefighting scenario with three prototypical applications that validate the design and development of ACoMS. The second is an adaptive wireless mesh surveillance camera system that validates the concept of adopting ACoMS as a cross-layer information plane to ease the prototyping and development of new adaptive protocols and systems, and illustrates the needs of adaptive controls at the sensing layer to optimise resource usage.

<p><font face="Times New Roman"> <p align="left">This study focuses on the Performance Management System in the South African local government with specific emphasis on policy implementation.</p> </font></p>

Many organizations are planning and developing information systems specifically to facilitate and manage knowledge activities. Such systems are referred to as Knowledge Management Systems (KMSs). How to successfully implement KMS is an important issue that has attracted the interest of many pundits. However, KMSs are just beginning to appear in organizations. There is a general scarcity of models and frameworks available for evaluating and guiding KMS success. This study proposes a model for measuring KMS success. An empirical study was conducted to collect data. This data was empirically used to test the proposed research model. This model is derived through an analysis of current practice and outcomes of knowledge management and an intensive review of information system success literature. Five variables, system quality, knowledge/ information quality, valuation of KMS benefits, user satisfaction, and system use, are proposed as dependent variables to evaluate KMS success and their interrelationships are defined and discussed.

The liberalization of cross Strait tourism not only is essential to mere financial benefit, but also will drive the political movement and economical strategy. The development of tourism policy is at the same time affecting the momentum of interflow in the private sector across the Strait. In coordination with the ¡§Tourist Doubling Program¡¨, the Ministry of Interior has revised the policy on ¡§Regulations Governing the Permission for Mainland Personnel to Come to Taiwan for Tourism Activities,¡¨ which called off the ¡§Group-in, Group-out¡¨ rule for Category III Mainland tourists . This means Mainland Chinese who stays overseas could travel to Taiwan even alone. Deregulating this rule is considered to be effective in promoting cross Strait tourism and cultural exchange. ¡§Complete Liberalization the Visits by Mainland Tourists to Taiwan,¡¨ is a determined government policy and could be seen as the prelude of ¡§Three Links (links in mail, transportation and trading).¡¨ Taiwan travel agencies are anticipating eagerly on Taiwan government¡¦s liberalization of Category I Mainland tourists through political negotiation after the admission of Category II and III tourists to visit Taiwan since January 2002. This research reveals the problems which might arise from the ¡§Complete Liberalization the Visits by Mainland Tourists to Taiwan,¡¨ and the ways both government and tourism industry would take to solve these problems. This research acknowledges that supporting measures for the ¡§Complete Liberalization the Visits by Mainland Tourists to Taiwan¡¨ should be devised. While using Mainland tourist management experiences in HK, USA and Japan as reference, this research also touches the issues of currently implemented regulation for Category II and III tourists, such as quantity entry control, prior material screening, immigration security, itinerary management, guarantee fund system, quota management, group-in/group-out, custom route arrangement, certificate identification, stowaways prevention, overstay, etc. The core objectives of this research are to share my research findings, conclusions and suggestions for the strategic planning of government and for the reference to the tourism industry, as well apply them for practical use.

The term incident management system (IMS) denotes a particular approach employed by many fire departments. The IMS aims to manage diverse resources at a wide variety of emergency scenes. Due to the barrier of culture, different task grouping and etc... , Taipei Fire Department Rescue Team is the only fire fighting unit implementing IMS in Taiwan for the time being. This research aims to find out the important factors for fire departments in Taiwan if they want to implement IMS. Our inductive study conducted 23 experts to explore the factors. Based on progressive discussions with the experts group, we summarized and clarified the key points and identify 22 factors of IMS. Furthermore, a five perspectives and 22-factors questionnaire was prepared to conduct a quantitative method. This research applied the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP) method to facilitate the decision of CSF. In general, this research suggests ¡§resource management¡¨ should be viewed as the most important factors among the five perspectives. While within the five perspectives, there are five critical success factors, which are ¡§formulate SOP¡¨, ¡§clear group and division¡¨, ¡§set up resource management unit¡¨, ¡§recruit more firefighters¡¨ and ¡§improving incident commander abilities¡¨, for the fire departments in Taiwan as a reference to implement IMS.