<p> Today's information technology (IT) professional must go beyond their technical ability and obtain new leadership skills. Simultaneously obtaining business acumen, developing successful IT-business relationships, communicating effectively, and still being technical makes being an IT professional more challenging than ever. It is the viewpoint of this researcher that self-awareness is the foundational level skill set needed to foster the insights needed to adopt and apply these skills to increase success in the IT professional. Previous research has examined the relationship of self-awareness and it's impact on leadership effectiveness and even explores correlations with emotional intelligence and IT organizations success. However, gaps remain in the literature to the specific correlations of the value and perception of self-awareness within the IT professional, and what specific role self-awareness plays in IT professionals' success. The purpose of this research was to understand and quantify how IT professionals perceive the meaning of the word self-awareness, and the connection between self-awareness and increased effectiveness. A comprehensive survey was conducted with 164 IT and business professionals of different levels, different size organizations and different industries to formalize quantitative answers to these questions. Follow-up interviews were also conducted to gain further clarification of survey results. The results reveal that self-awareness was viewed positively and critical to the success of the IT professional regardless of gender, role, educational level or years in the industry. The data also showed that if more investment in self-awareness training where to incur, the importance of that skill would increase, and the importance of technical skills would decrease; provided they had an external influence ("sponsor") that provided feedback to invest in such skills. They had to have their awareness raised, to raise their awareness, and this effort had to be intentional. Self-awareness had direct positive correlations to improved relationship management. Study limitations and implications to the organization development field are also discussed.</p>

<p> Through this dissertation, the researcher demonstrated validity of a new individual level construct titled <i>perceived business process knowledge</i> (PBPK) and an associated measurement instrument. The concepts and definition of knowledge and business processes from past works were integrated to define PBPK. Factors found in empirically tested information systems models were used to identify five PBPK sub-dimensions: 1) Perceived Business Process Input Knowledge, 2) Perceived Business Process Resources Knowledge, 3) Perceived Business Process Activities Knowledge, 4) Perceived Business Process Constraints Knowledge, and 5) Perceived Business Process Output Knowledge. A sixth sub-dimension, Perceived Business Process Monitoring Knowledge, surfaced in the field research phase.</p><p> The sub-dimensions and focal construct were tested for criterion and predictive validity using SmartPLS and demonstrated high reliability and validity under two samples. All indicators have loadings greater than 0.860 (p &lt; 0.000). PBPK items demonstrated Cronbach Alpha greater than 0.85 and Composite Reliability > 0.95 on both data collections. Focal construct and sub-dimensions demonstrated convergent and discriminant validity; Average Variance Extracted (AVE) greater than 0.5, and square root of the AVE greater than associated correlation with all other constructs.</p><p> The first data collection consisted of representatives from 21 industries; the criterion and predictive validity relationships produced almost acceptable but low R² (> 0.21), medium f², (> 0.27) and moderate path coefficients (> 0.46, p &lt; 0.000) on the smallest predictor to dependent variable relationship. The second data collection consisted of representatives from 3 industries; the criterion and predictive validity relationships were a slightly better; the results demonstrated acceptable but low R² (> 0.29), large f² (> 0.41), and moderate path coefficients (> 0.53, p &lt; 0.000) on the smallest predictor to dependent variable relationship. </p><p> The study also successfully demonstrated that different groups of individuals report different levels of PBPK. These tests were conducted using one-way ANOVA.</p><p> The constructs and associated measurement instrument are expected to increase the predictive ability of Technology Acceptance Models.</p>

<p> Leaders remain perpetually connected to their work because of the rapid advancement of information technology. This research, using a qualitative approach, explored how increased connective technology is affecting school leaders with the central question: <i>How is hyperconnectivity experienced by school leaders?</i> Using personal interviews, the lived experiences of fifteen international middle and high school principals with one-to-one student-to-device programs were collected. Raw transcriptions of their experiences were analyzed using the descriptive phenomenological approach as outlined by Giorgi (2009). This approach allowed for the data to be reduced into a single narrative description shared by all participants indicating the essences of their lived experience as hyperconnected school leaders. </p><p> This shared narrative highlighted complex and paradoxical experiences associated with how these school leaders interact with technology. Their experiences indicated that work-life balance for hyperconnected leaders required strong personal boundaries and skillful use of connective technologies. Examples of effective leader development of self and community highlighted, paradoxically, the need to unplug to effectively deploy connected technology within their leadership practice. Conversely, this study also showed how leaders can be controlled by connectivity. They associated their roles as responsible school leaders with perpetual connectivity; in consequence, they fused their work and home lives, experienced increased stress, and struggled with work overload. These results imply that international school principals are impacted by increased connectivity in different ways. Findings from this study indicate those leading hyperconnected schools must pay attention to how connectivity is affecting themselves and members of their school communities. Principals must protect themselves from the increasing demands upon their attention that constant connectivity presents in order to make mental room for the self-reflection and creativity needed to provide novel solutions and approaches towards their leadership work.</p>

<p> This study investigated the influence of professional training and personal factors on five categories of technostress: techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. The goal of the study was to determine whether experience and knowledge gained during professional training influenced the level of technostress individuals experienced in the workplace. The research also sought to determine how personal factors influence technostress directly and whether those factors moderate the relationship between professional training and technostress. The specific personal factors that were examined included gender, generational cohort, race, religion, and education level. A sample of 212 individuals who regularly use information technology as part of their daily work routine were surveyed on their levels of stress related to techno-overload, techno-invasion, techno-complexity, techno-insecurity, and techno-uncertainty. Multiple linear regression analyses were then conducted to examine the relationship between the criterion variables (categories of technostress) and the predictor variables (professional training and personal factors). The data analysis demonstrated that while professional training had little influence on technostress, women experienced significantly higher levels of techno-overload, older participants experienced significantly higher levels of stress related to techno-complexity, non-Whites experienced significantly higher levels of techno-insecurity, and age impacted levels of techno-uncertainty in individuals in the IT/engineering field who had received professional training. These results suggest that there is a need for further investigation into how specific elements of technostress impact individual populations.</p><p>

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / This research was inspired by the need to create a universal net-centric environment to enable collaborative defense capabilities and deliver knowledge dominance to the DoD. Since superior information management and the use of collaborative IT technologies is fundamental to building intelligence capabilities, this study aims to contribute to the optimization of collaborative system use by military groups and organizations. The proposed research model illustrates and explains the direct relationships between collaborative IT competence and collaborative functionalities, which can be used not only to assess current technologies but also aid in requirements generation for designing the ideal collaborative tool suite. Central to the research model we introduce the concept of collaborative IT competence, defined as the effective use of collaborative functionalities, and explore its relationship to performance outcomes. Having pre-tested and validated the proposed research model by means of empirical data collection in the form of an end-user survey instrument we recommend further research be conducted on a Navy-wide scale to evaluate the 181 collaborative technology tools currently in use. End-user/warfighter insight will dramatically influence future CIT investment decisions by providing decision makers critical information regarding the pragmatic versus the advertised attributes of the application/tool suite. Additionally, this model is designed to provide the road map to the ideal combination of core functionalities and required collaborative IT competence. / Major, United States Marine Corps / Lieutenant Commander, United States Navy

Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited / The Department of Defense (DoD) environment is continuously changing to keep up with highly sophisticated technology that is increasingly creating a global environment and to combat recent international terrorism threats. DoD technology must continue to evolve with modern demands in order to remain effective in today's dynamic and unpredictable environment. Therefore, new demands in software development are constantly increasing to fulfill the needs of rapidly changing business processes. The DoD is slowly becoming more automated and innovative to meet these new demands; however, current software development methodologies provide only limited support and their use often results in increased costs, changes in project scope/duration, and a reduction in system reliability and interoperability. Significant budget constraints and decreasing software development lead times present the need for higher levels of system reliability and interoperability. Our goal is to make DoD software development more efficient by decreasing the necessary time and expense for development by adopting an approach that will go straight from prototype to production. / Captain, United States Marine Corps / Lieutenant, United States Navy / Major, United States Marine Corps

Approved for public release, distribution unlimited / Efforts to improve the military decision and action cycle have centered on automating the command and control process and improving interoperability among joint and coalition forces. However, information automation by itself can lead to increased operator overload when the way this information is stored and presented is not structured and consistently filtered. The majority of messaging systems store information in a document-centric free-text format that makes it difficult for command and control systems, relational databases, software agents and web portals to intelligently search the information. Consistent structure and semantic meaning is essential when integrating these capabilities. Military-grade implementations must also provide high performance. A widely accepted platform-independent technology standard for representing document-centric information is the Extensible Markup Language (XML). XML supports the structured representation of information in context through the use of metadata. By using an XML Schema generated from MIPâ s Land Command and Control Information Exchange Data Model (LC2IEDM), it is feasible to compare the syntactic strength of human-readable XML documents with the semantics of LC2IEDM as used within a relational database. The insert, update, retrieve and delete performance of a native-XML database is compared against that of a relational database management system (RDBMS) implementing the same command and control data model (LC2IEDM). Additionally, compression and parsing performance advantages of using various binary XML compression schemes is investigated. Experimental measurements and analytic comparisons are made to determine whether the performance of a native-XML database is a disadvantage to the use of XML. Finally, because of the globally significant potential of these interoperability improvements, a number of look-ahead items to future work are proposed including the use of.

The purpose of this thesis is to develop a web-enabled database which facilitates research related connections and communication among Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) students, professors and DOD organizations. The proposed name for the prototype website is the Joint Online Thesis and Research System (JOTARS). The specific functional objectives of JOTARS are to establish standard infrastructure and processes that allow DOD organizations to dynamically propose research topics, view research in progress, and a means to suggest topics for class projects. JOTARS will also enable NPS students to conduct refined searches of proposed research topics.

The theories supporting Network Centric Warfare (NCW) continue to mold the tactical use of U.S. forces throughout the global warfare environment. This thesis research will correlate the four tenets of NCW to the tactical employment of the Naval Postgraduate School's LRV. The four tenets of NCW are: 1. A robustly networked force improves information sharing. 2. Information sharing and collaboration enhance the quality of information and shared situational awareness. 3. Shared situational awareness enables self-synchronization. 4. These, in turn, dramatically increase mission effectiveness. The faculty and students at NPS are dedicated to researching methods to leverage science and technology in order to maximize the combat effectiveness of U.S. and allied forces. In teaming with our primary sponsor, U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), NPS has developed the Tactical Network Topology (TNT) series of experiments aimed at providing the warfighter information solutions for the battle space. The NPS LRV was derived from an operational requirement to have a mobile C4I/ISR platform that provides enhanced real-time information sharing to tactically employed units. Total force combat effectiveness is growing more reliant on agile means of information sharing. Wireless communications and collaborative technologies are essential to ensuring dynamic, forward-deployed forces have the ability to transmit and receive critical information when and where it is needed. Through past TNT experimentation, the LRV has not demonstrated itself as a stable platform providing a high-bandwidth information sharing capability. This research advanced the LRV concept by bridging the multiple wireless technologies and providing a reliable high-bandwidth communications link.

This thesis will focus directly on the enhancement of an established Network Operations Center (NOC) and will extend the capabilities of this asset beyond its present scope. By defining the current infrastructure using present network management tools it will provide a better understanding of the present network, as well as enhance management for future field experiments. Finally, extending the CENETIX network via implementation of Virtual Private Networking (VPN) technology will allow other experimental labs who currently utilize the Defense Research Engineering Network (DREN), such as the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), Biometrics Fusion Center (BFC), Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTR), Office of Force Transformation (OFT), Coast Guard station (located in Alameda), various other US allied forces, Oversea Partners, etc.) access to current and future field experiments.