The concept of Architecture has received widespread acceptance within the construction industry. However, its importance within the Information Technology industry is a contested one. Critics of Architecture in the Information Technology (IT) industry posit that there is inadequate evidence to assume that it makes a difference to performance of IT. Enterprises increasingly need to ensure that they leverage their IT benefits not only within their silos but across business units. This need has driven ideas to introduce enterprise-wide blueprints or Enterprise Architecture (EA) Planning solutions to guide them in the design and implementation of IT. This study uses a quantitative survey to attempt to answer two questions: 1) What factors influence EA Planning within organizations? 2) To what extent does EA Planning improve IT performance? The Diffusion of Innovation theory (Compatibility, Ease of Use and Relative Advantage) was used to investigate the use of EA Planning whilst the Resource Based View of the Firm was used to investigate the performance impact of EA Planning. IT Performance is measured by Heterogeneity of Physical IT Infrastructure, Replication of IT Infrastructure Services, Business Application Integration and Enterprise Data Integration. EA Planning is measured by EA Planning Human Capital, IT Infrastructure Flexibility and Partnership Quality. Data was collected from 90 architects, some from South African consulting companies and the rest from architects around the world linked to popular Enterprise Architecture virtual communities. The key findings were significant relationships between the following for the factors that influence use of EA Planning: Compatibility and IT Infrastructure Flexibility; Ease of Use of EA Planning Policies and EA Planning Human Capital; Relative Advantage and EA Planning Partnership Quality. Significant relationships were found between the following for factors that influence IT Performance: EA Planning Human Capital and IT Performance (a combination of Enterprise Data Integration, Business Application Integration, Replication of IT Infrastructure Service and Heterogeneity of Physical IT Infrastructure); EA Planning IT Infrastructure Flexibility and Heterogeneity of Physical IT Infrastructure; EA Planning IT Infrastructure Flexibility and Business Application Integration. EA Planning Partnership Quality was rejected as a determinant of IT Performance. This study sheds light on how resistance to EA Planning can be reduced and also highlights the potential benefits of EA Planning in organizations. The implications will directly affect the relationship between EA practitioners and IT projects.

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University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Information Technology. / As IT environments grow in complexity and diversity, their strategic management becomes a critical business issue. Enterprise architectures (EA’s) provide support by ensuring that there is alignment between an enterprise’s business objectives and the IT systems that it deploys to achieve these objectives. While EA is a relatively new discipline, it has already found widespread commercial application. It is likely that EA will receive even more focus as IT environments continue to grow in complexity and heterogeneity. Despite this widespread acceptance of EA as a valuable IT discipline, there are several serious challenges that contemporary EA approaches are yet to overcome. These arise from the fact that currently, there is no unified EA modelling language that is also easy to use. A unified EA modelling language is one that is able to describe a wide range of IT domains using a single modelling notation. Without a unified, easy to use EA modelling language, it is impossible to create integrated models of the enterprise. Instead, a variety of modelling languages must be used to create an EA, leading to enterprise models that are inconsistent, incomplete and difficult to understand. The need to use multiple modelling languages also places a high cognitive load on modellers and excludes non-IT specialists from developing or using these models, even though such people may be the most important stakeholders in an EA program. The research presented in this thesis tackles these problems by developing a metaphor-based approach to the construction of unified EA modelling languages. Contemporary approaches to the understanding of metaphor are surveyed, and it is noted that one way to understand metaphor is to view it as part of a dynamic type hierarchy. This understanding of metaphor is related to the development of enterprise models and it is shown that highly abstract metaphors can be used to provide conceptually unified models of a range of enterprises and their component structures. This approach is operationalised as methodology that can be used to generate any number of unified EA modelling languages. This methodology is then applied to generate a new, unified EA modelling language called ‘LEAN’ (Lightweight Enterprise Architecture Notation). LEAN is evaluated using a mixed-methods research approach. This evaluation demonstrates that LEAN can be used to model a wide range of domains and that it is easy to learn and simple to understand. The application of the theoretical principles and methodology presented in this thesis can be expected to improve the understandability and consistency of EA’s significantly. This, in turn, can be expected to deliver significant tangible business benefits through improved strategic change management that more closely aligns the delivery of IT services with business drivers. The findings in this research also provide fertile ground for further research. This includes the development and comparative evaluation of alternative unified languages, further research into the use of the methodology presented to align architectures at various levels of abstraction, and the investigation of the applicability of this theoretical approach to other, non-IT disciplines.

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This master’s thesis, conducted at Sectra Medical Systems AB, investigates the feasibility of integrating a search platform, built on modern search technology, into the complex architecture of existing products. This was done through the implementation and integration of a search platform prototype, called Sectra Enterprise Search. It was built upon the search engine library Lucene.NET, written in C# for the Microsoft .NET Framework. Lucene.NET originates from the Java library Lucene, which is highly regarded and widely used for similar purposes. During the development process a lot of requirements for the search platform were identified, including high availability, scalability and maintainability. Besides full text search for information in a variety of data sources, desirable features include autocompletion and highlighting. Sectra Enterprise Search was successfully integrated within the architecture of existing products. The architecture of the prototype consists of multiple layers, with the search engine functionality at the very bottom and a web service handling all incoming request at the top. To sum up, integrating a search platform based on modern search technology into the architecture of existing products infers full control of deployment, users searching in a more intuitive manner and reasonable search response times.

The impact of Web 2.0 technologies has crossed the Internet borders and is increasingly af-fecting not only individuals but also organizations as entities. The emergence of the Enter-prise 2.0 concept, which presumes the application of Web 2.0 tools within the organiza-tional context, is being intensively adopted by many organizations of all types and sizes world-wide. Authors suggest that there is a direct impact of Enterprise 2.0 system on such organizational aspects as communication, collaboration, cooperation, co-creation and even innovation activities. There is though a sort of informational gap in the literature that would address these concepts (Enterprise 2.0 and Innovation) simultaneously and this was one of the main reasons that motivated the authors of this master thesis to investigate this topic. In conducting this research all kinds of informational resources were used and these find-ings were combined with the results obtained from a real business case study, which is an example of an Enterprise 2.0 platform (Incentive) implemented within an organization (IBS). The overall research can be described in three main parts. In the first part analysis of the theoretical aspects related to Innovation and Enterprise 2.0 is made. A preliminary re-search framework is build based on these findings and this framework represents an at-tempt to bridge these theoretical dimensions. In the second part the investigation of the „Colin‟ case study was presented. With this case investigation the research gains access to primary data and information. This strengthens the initial research framework and also de-livers new insights and perspectives in connection to the highlighted topic. The findings re-lated to the impact of Enterprise 2.0 on Innovation processes are analyzed and discussed in the final part of the research from theoretical and empirical perspectives. An enhanced framework, representing the result of the theoretical and empirical studies, is ultimately suggested. This model represents an attempt to portray how can an Enterprise 2.0 system support innovation activities in a more generic way, addressing together major factors that are critical for an innovation process. This investigation has also determined that such Enterprise 2.0 tools as Wikis, Blogs, Social Networking, Micro-blogging, Forums & Discussions, Search Engines, Tagging etc. are having the highest impact on innovation related activities. Additionally, the managerial aspect in relation to Enterprise 2.0 influence on Innovation has proved to be extremely important, especially during the implementation phase.

Generally Accepted Accounting Principles (GAAP) is the term used to refer to the standard framework of guidelines for financial accounting that financial and accounting people must follow when they form, perceive and conduct those financial information and data. In response to the globalization era, increasing comparative among various international enterprise financial reports under same principles and terms, also to reduce the fund-raising costs while enterprise seeking for the funding in the world capital market, on May 14, 2009, Financial Supervisory Commission, Executive Yuan, R.O.C (hereafter refers to as FSCEY) announced that ROC GAAP will adopt framework and principle of International Financial Reporting Standards (hereafter refers to as IFRS) from 2013 by means of several phases, and public companies are enforced to implement IFRS from 2013. Directorate General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics, Executive Yuan, R.O.C. asked all government-owned enterprises have to keep consistency and conduct IFRS in the first stage same as public companies, in order to pass the Bill of annual budget that reviewed and ratified by The Legislative Yuan of ROC. Therefore, for all government-owned enterprises who early-adopting IFRS have to prepare and present the related financial report in year 2013 same as public companies. Government-owned enterprises are requested to provide an update of progress on its IFRS changeover plan and any changes in its plan on ¡§footnote disclosure¡¨ of interim and year-end financial report of the financial year 2011 and 2012. The main purpose of the essay is discussing development of IFRS, US GAAP and ROC GAAP, and analyzes the case company, one of the government-owned enterprises, in this essay could face problems when implement IFRS according to FSCEY timetable. The conclusion of this essay proposes the feasible implement plan for case company reference. The findings showed, although case company could face with many uncertainty while implement IFRS, but it should have high confidence to expect success of conducting IFRS on time through early kick-off implement plan with more communication and collaboration with the upper supervisory organization in this country.

Abstract This thesis studied the choices of different operation models of CPC (Chunghwa Post Co. Ltd): Privatization, Public Corporatization, or Enterprise? As the society becomes more diversified and globalized, people are becoming dissatisfied about the inactive and low efficient executive departments. The government property is becoming poor while the power of enterprises grows. In consideration of the limited resources, privatization has become the main trend of the Government restructure motion in many countries from the 1980s. Following this trend, the Government works hard to draw up the policy, and depend on the private departments, carries out the policy to provide the public service. Meanwhile, the need for communication securities and privacy concerns seem to be more important to the general public. Because it develops very rapidly and possibly leads to social class clashes, people wish to know about how the postal service has evolved. People want the postal service to be more efficient to bring their functions to full potential. As a result, many more Postal service systems of different kinds have come into existence. The same scenario applies to Taiwan. The Government wants to reorganize the administrative organizations such as the CPC. Their operation model has supposedly been ¡§outsourcing¡¨, ¡§corporatization¡¨, ¡§deregulation¡¨ or ¡§decentralization¡¨, if they are less connected with the public power. The Government hopes to improve the efficiency of the CPC, because these choices could remove its constraints. On the other hand, many believe that, if the Post decides to contract out, the Government would elude her responsibilities about the public service. Therefore it is very crucial that CPC chooses the appropriate operation model. This thesis first gathered related documents and introduced theories of Privatization, Enterprising, and Public corporatization and their experiences worldwide. In addition, the background of CPC and a synopsis of its organizational structure, mission, and current operation status are included. After researching the related industry and compared with the other competitors, the table of globalism analysis showed that CPC has innovative power and a wonderful staff who combine their work with a mission in mind. But they should be released from rigid constraints of the public system to work more smartly. Furthermore, the facilities could be located in Taiwan, but they still have some logistic issues needed for further study. Therefore, joining the public with a privately-owned enterprise to operate CPC would be the best choice.

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