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This thesis is concerned with the processes involved in the perception, adoption and use of location-based services (LBS). Location-based services are able to pinpoint the geographical position of an individual and are most often deployed on mobile devices. The capability for LBS to be integrated into other systems such as social networking sites is also growing. The focus of current LBS research is on the development of security measures to protect privacy. The actual privacy concerns of real LBS users, however, have not been considered. The work in this thesis examines location-based services from a user perspective. A previously untested predictive model of LBS was assessed, and shown to be unsuited to account for intentions to use the technology in a workplace setting. A revised and improved model is proposed that suggests four factors account for intentions: perceived usefulness, trust of the LBS provider, disclosure to employer and trust of the employer. This research investigated the types of location information that might be disclosed when using LBS, who the recipients might be, and how people categorise location information into meaningful clusters. Results showed that people have explicit LBS preferences, with the receiver of information and context playing a large role in determining disclosure. Three qualitative case studies aimed to understand implications of LBS use with different populations. Participants raised concerns about trustworthiness of their employer and knowledge of LBS providers, providing support for the theoretical model. These case studies suggest LBS could also successfully be applied to alternate user groups. These findings have important implications for LBS providers and industry. People have a desire to know who the LBS provider is and what role they will play. Making these issues explicit should improve trust and develop the user-LBS provider relationship. When implementing LBS in the workplace, consultation with employees and providing clear information may enhance trust of the employer.

Most if not all organisations claim to pursue a continued improvement philosophy. The processes often adopted are predominantly concerned with the collection and analysis of data. Such approaches take little account of the opinions or varying points of view of the affected groups or individuals. Within this research, these processes are referred to as first order processes. The thesis explores what is termed the second order of organisational improvement, placing the emphasis of the inquiry on the worldviews of those involved. The research includes a study of peoples' attitudes towards organisational improvement and an in depth review of the relevant literature. Initial research consisting of questionnaires and interviews, gave an indication of the willingness within the workforce to engage in improvement activities. This led to the development of a model looking to understand and incorporate the differing worldviews of individuals, into action plans to improve the situations of concern, and an improvement process embedding understanding of others' perspectives and worldviews, dialogical communication and systems thinking. Incorporation of the differentiation of opinions and views of the people affected is central to the second order process. Implementation is possible in any organisation that enjoys an open trusting environment, irrespective of the operational sector. The major contribution of the process is in the change of emphasis from establishment of a commonly held shared view of a situation, to understanding the differences between worldviews of those involved. In effect, the second order process explores the differences in opinions and beliefs that underlie how individuals view a situation. The aim is to understand peoples' different views and incorporate those views in any agreed action.

Nowadays, the global supply chain system needs to respond promptly to changes in customer demand and adapt quickly to advancements in technology. Supply chain management becomes an integral approach which links together producers, distributors and customers in collaborative management of the whole system. The variability in orders or inventories in supply chain systems is generally thought to be caused by exogenous random factors such as uncertainties in customer demand or lead time. Studies have shown, however, that orders or inventories may exhibit significant variability, even if customer demand and lead time are deterministic. Most researchers have concentrated on the effects of the ordering policy on supply chain behaviour, while not many have paid attention to the influences of applying different forecasting to supply chain planning. This thesis presents an analysis of the behaviour of a model of a centralised supply chain. The research was conducted within the manufacturing sector and involved the breathing equipment manufacturer Draeger Safety, UK. The modelling process was embedded in the organization and was focused on the client's needs. A simplified model of the Draeger Safety, UK centralised supply chain was developed and validated. The dynamics of the supply chain under the influence of various factors: demand pattern, ordering policy, demand-information sharing, and lead time were observed. Simulation and analysis were performed using system dynamics, non-linear dynamics and control theory. The findings suggest that destructive oscillations of inventory could be generated by internal decision making practices. To reduce the variation in the supply chain system, the adjustment parameters for both inventory and supply line discrepancies should be more comparable in magnitude. Counter- intuitively, in certain fields of decision, sharing demand information can do more harm than good. The linear forecasting ARMA (autoregression and moving average) model and the nonlinear forecasting model Wavelet Neural Network were applied as the supply chain forecasting methods. The performance was tested against supply chain costs. A management microworld was developed, allowing managers to experiment with different decision policies and learn how the supply chain performs.

According to Lyytinen and Robey (1999), information systems development (ISD) involves risk. This risk is regularly being taken by managers and employees within an organisation but the outcome of such information systems development projects many become a failed information system (IS). The problem is further compounded through the lack of learning about such failures, and unsuccessful/negligible efforts to try and avoid such mistakes in the future (Lyytinen and Robey, 1999). The contribution to knowledge of this thesis is the development of a framework to incorporate a learning approach within information system application (ISA) projects. This thesis puts forward the need for an embedded learning approach and examines its importance for organisations. It is argued that more attention needs to be placed on generating learning because many individuals within organisations focus mainly on their operations and less on other processes. Three areas of theory are argued to relate to exploring these issues, namely how IS can currently be designed and implemented, what role the area of the learning organization can contribute in helping promote and embed a learning approach into an ISD methodology and finally, what theories of learning can be applied to these two bodies of literature. From addressing such issues, the main question of this thesis is how a learning approach can be incorporated into soft methodologies for the design and implementation of information systems applications. By examining a number of soft methodologies and arguing for the expansion of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM), or as the expansion is labelled, Soft Systems Methodology eXpanded for Learning (SSW), a manufacturing organisation is used to test out the framework in practice. The first cycle of action research investigated how SSM' worked in practice. The second cycle of action research, while not using a formal framework, investigated how these participants implemented and managed the technology. Reflecting back on the technology management literature, a technology management process framework (TMPF) is identified and adapted to try and further embed the learning individuals have obtained from the SSM' framework. A discussion on how the two frameworks can be joined together and used in practice is undertaken. This framework is labelled as Soft Systems Methodology eXpanded for Learning and incorporating Technology Management (SSM'). A second case is used to test this now developed SSWTM framework. The second case involved a National Health Service (NHS) organisation. This second case identifies learning points that support or can pose problems with the SSW' framework allowing any refinements to be made. This work finishes by firstly, providing a detailed discussion on the research process this work adopted as well as undertaking an evaluation of the SSW' framework. Secondly, the conclusions address how well a learning approach can be incorporated into a soft methodology for the design and implementation of information system applications (ISA). Lastly, it is stated how this SSM'm can impact on theory and practice.

The Web has had a tremendous success with its support for the rapid and inexpensive exchange of information. A considerable body of data exchange is in the form of semi- structured data such as the eXtensible Markup Language (XML). XML, an effective standard to represent and exchange semi-structured data on the Web, is used ubiquitously in almost all areas of information technology. Most researchers in the XML area have concentrated on storing, querying and publishing XML while not many have paid attention to updating XML; thus the XML update area is not fully developed. We propose a solution for updating XML as a representation of semi-structured data. XML is updated through an object-relational database (ORDB) to exploit the maturity of the relational engine and the newer object features of the OR technology. The engine is used to enforce constraints during the updating of the XML whereas the object features are used to handle the XML hierarchical structure. Updating XML via ORDB makes it easier to join XML documents in an update and in turn joins of XML documents make it possible to keep non-redundant data in multiple XML documents. This thesis contributes a solution for the update of XML documents via an ORDB to advance our understanding of the XML update area. Rules for mapping XML structure and constraints to an ORDB schema are presented and a mechanism to handle XML cardinality constraint is provided. An XML update language, an extension to XQuery, has been designed and this language is translated into the standard SQL executed on an ORDB. To handle the recursive nature of XML, a recursive function updating XML data is translated into SQL commands equipped with a programming capability. A method is developed to reflect the changes from the ORDB to XML documents. A prototype of the solution has been implemented to help validate our approach. Experimental study to evaluate the performance of XML update processing based on the prototype has been conducted. The experimental results show that updating multiple XML documents storing non-redundant data yields a better performance than updating a single XML document storing redundant data; an ORDB can take advantage of this by caching data to a greater extent than a native XML database. The solution of updating XML documents via an ORDB can solve some problems in existing update methods as follows. Firstly, the preservation of XML constraints is handled by the ORDB engine. Secondly, non-redundant data is stored in linked XML documents; thus the problem of data inconsistency and low performance caused by data redundancy are solved. Thirdly, joins of XML documents are converted to joins of tables in SQL. Fourthly, fields or tables involved in regular path expressions can be tackled in a short time by using mapping data. Finally, a recursive function is translated into SQL commands equipped with a programming capability.

The published work in this thesis is based on a number of studies that utilise a suite of (related) “best practice” benchmarking tools, providing an evaluation of the North East England’s manufacturing and service sectors and the UK Further Education sector. Within this submission, a supporting commentary in the form of a critical literature review is provided. The complementary review initially provides an introduction and background to the studies that as a whole comprise this PhD by publication. Consideration is then given to the literature specific to benchmarking, particularly in terms of its role in facilitating organisational improvement and learning, as well as its take-up and applications. The studies described above relate to the implementation of related “best practice” frameworks, yielding data from the self-assessing participating organisations. This leads to the third part of the literature review where the association between practice and performance is assessed relating to certain connected themes. The final part of the commentary assesses the contribution to knowledge that is made by this PhD submission in terms of the literature that existed at the time the constituent papers and reports were developed, along with my specific contribution to these outputs and the potential future research that could lead from this contribution. A key contribution of this work to the benchmarking literature rests in the deployment of a framework in two new sectoral contexts, the regional application being underpinned by a novel approach to supported self-assessment. This complemented the case-based literature dominant at the time, the review providing a critical comparison of “best practice” frameworks and the adoption of generic benchmarking metrics. The empirical assessment of practice against performance suggests that the former does impact on the latter, but with greater influence internally. The association between excellence achievement and stakeholder satisfaction is holistically positive, although the findings are perhaps both less than clear-cut and unexpected. The contribution to knowledge provided here relates to the assessment of the broader service sector, including dual consideration with stakeholder perception and examination of additional performance areas, such as corporate social responsibility, thus moving this evaluation into areas under reported at that time.

Significant progress has been made on maximising passive solar heating loads through the careful selection of glazing, orientation and internal mass within building spaces. Control of space heating in buildings of this type has become a complex problem. Additionally, and in common with most building control applications, there is a need to develop control solutions that permit simple and transparent set up and commissioning procedures. This work concerns the development and testing of an adaptive control method for space heating in buildings with significant solar input. A simulation model of a building space to assess the performance of different control strategies is developed. A lumped parameter model based on an optimisation technique has been proposed and validated. It is shown that this model gives an improvement over existing low order modelling methods. A detailed model of a hot water heating system and related control devices is developed and evaluated for the specific purpose of control simulation. A PI-based fuzzy logic controller is developed in which the error and change of error between the internal air temperature and the user set point temperature is used as the controller input. A conventional PD controller is also considered for comparison. The parameters of the controllers are set to values that result in the best performance under likely disturbances and changes in setpoint. In a further development of the fuzzy logic controller, the Predicted Mean Vote (PMV) is used to control the indoor temperature of a space by setting it at a point where the PMV index becomes zero and the predicted percentage of persons dissatisfied (PPD) achieves a maximum threshold of 5%. The controller then adjusts the air temperature set point in order to satisfy the required comfort level given the prevailing values of other comfort variables contributing to the comfort sensation. The resulting controller is free of the set up and tuning problems that hinder conventional HVAC controllers. The need to develop an adaptive capability in the fuzzy logic controller to account for lagging influence of solar heat gain is established and a new adaptive controller has therefore been proposed. The development of a "quasi-adaptive" fuzzy logic controller is developed in two steps. A feedforward neural network is used to predict the internal air temperature, in which a singular value decomposition (SVD) algorithm is used to remove the highly correlated data from the inputs of the neural network to reduce the network structure. The fuzzy controller is then modified to have two inputs: the first input being the error between the setpoint temperature and the internal air temperature and the second the predicted future internal air temperature. When compared with a conventional method of control the proposed controller is shown to give good tracking of the setpoint temperature, reduced energy consumption and improved thermal comfort for the occupants by reducing solar overheating. The proposed controller is tested in real time using a test cell equipped with an oil- filled electric radiator, temperature and solar sensors. Experimental results confirm earlier findings arrived at by simulations, in that the proposed controller achieves superior tracking and reduces afternoon solar overheating, when compared with a conventional method of control.

This report presents work on the detection and tracking of people in digital images. The employed detection technique is based on image processing and classification techniques. The work uses an object detection process to detect object candidate locations and a classification method using a Self-Organising Map neural network to identify the pedestrian head positions in an image. The proposed tracking technique with the support of a novel prediction method is based on the association of Cellular Automata (CA) and a Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN). The tracking employs the CA to capture the pedestrian's movement behaviour, which in turn is learned by the BPNN in order to the estimated location of the pedestrians movement without the need to use empirical data. The report outlines this method and describes how it detects and identifies the pedestrian head locations within an image. Details of how the proposed prediction technique is applied to support the tracking process are then provided. Assessments of each component of the system and on the system as a whole have been carried out. The results obtained have shown that the novel prediction technique described is able to provide an accurate forecast of the movement of a pedestrian through a video image sequence.

Information Systems (IS) alignment is one of the most significant areas of concern in terms of priority for both the Information Technology and the Management fields. In this context, many scientific research organisations face the challenge of integrating their IS with organisational strategic objectives. This research aimed to develop a practical model of IS strategic alignment, that can be adopted by scientific research and development (SR&D) organisations in order to improve technology transfer activities. The research involved a single exploratory case study of an SR&D organisation in Kuwait, the Kuwait Institute for Scientific Research (KISR). Thirtyseven respondents from the research management, IS management, and planning and support groups of KISR, namely, the scientific research senior managers, IS senior managers, and consultants, respectively, were interviewed concerning issues related to the organisational, strategic, and IS domains. Semi-structured interviews have been designed as a data collection method. The study has utilised certain data analysis techniques including template analysis, coding and classification, and interpretive analysis methods. In the analysis of the external and internal contexts, briefly, Kuwait’s IT plan was discussed, along with the challenges, and in detail, the description and analysis of KISR’s strategic plans. Twenty-two factors were identified and have emerged in this study which have effects on IS alignment. The key contributions, including a critical and comprehensive survey of IS strategy literature has led to the identification of factors that may affect IS alignment. A conceptual framework was designed to enable a better insight of the IS alignment challenges. A practical road map was developed in this study to guide and direct SR&D organisations in achieving IS alignment effectively and efficiently. This road map is aimed at bridging the gap between theory and practice for organisations. The proposed practical road map will help KISR and other SR&D organisations to achieve both successful and feasible IS strategic alignment to enable effective technology and knowledge transfer.