In private and public sectors, Information Communication Technologies (ICTs) have become a phenomenal asset of resource in strategic management. In developed countries, ICTs are critical tools in the public sector strategy. In specific, Electronic Government has been identified as one of the major competencies required to re-invigorate governance, enhance performance and reduce red-tape bureaucracies in the public sector, e-Government being the use of ICTs in the transformation of public organizations towards efficient service delivery. Though information systems as a discipline has offered some research outputs on the value and the effects of ICTs in the private sector, similar focus on the public sector or e-Government is relatively thin. While the few existing researches have had a relatively weightier focus on developed countries, the evidence-based empirical studies in information systems that have focused on developing countries have produced contradictory results, hence the need for further research to attempt a re-alignment in this sub domain of e-Government. Therefore, this pursuit departs from most past researches by delving into the effects of e- Government investments using theoretical lenses drawn upon disciplines that are outside the mainstream information systems domain. These include public administration, political sciences and public economics. Using a mixed methods approach, a balanced panel data of Kenya's key ministries for a 10-year period of 2004 to 2014 following the launch of e-Government strategy of 2004, audited national government ministries' expenditures, census data, e-Government spending, consumer price indices, gross domestic products, parameters on governance and other data on public services, this research sought to examine the nature and dimensions of public values that the developing countries derive as a consequence of investment in e-Government.

Information systems (IS) and new technologies have become an integral part of conducting business in today’s world. Almost all organisational sectors have adopted the use of IT systems and applications to conduct business and stay competitive in the industry within which they operate. However, if not well managed, Information Technology (IT) usage has the potential to expose organisations to various threats and vulnerabilities, which can have disastrous consequences. A risk mitigation plan is a strategy that helps an organisation to deal with a wide range of unexpected events. It covers a long-term plan and strategy that acts as a safety net to both avert a disaster and ensure long term survival. The purpose of this study is to examine risk factors and associated mitigation strategies in public organisation. The case study is the Industrial Development Zone (IDZ) of South Africa. The study had two objectives: (i) identify risks associated with IDZ; and (ii) examine how IDZ address risk mitigation strategies. A qualitative enquiry was used to carry out the study. Data was collected via interviews that were conducted with executive and other key managers from the IDZ. The study identified human, organisational and technological risk factors as those that impact mitigation strategies in public institutions of South Africa. Proposed contextual solutions for these challenges included: (i) the adoption of mobile solutions and on-going research of new mobility solutions so as to keep up to date with technological advancements; (ii) the regular update of security policies of the organisation so as to align with environmental challenges; and (iii) on-going continuous security checks to evaluate and test disaster preparedness. Awareness of tools and applications used to address mitigation was seen as a key technological factor. This study contributes to a better explanation of the challenges faced by IDZs in the developing country of South Africa, and puts forward recommendations for practice.

Public participation is considered fundamental in the management of water and sanitation. In the view of the South African government public participation is pivotal to addressing service delivery challenges in the country. However, despite investment in various participatory mechanisms, there is some reluctance from rural citizens to engage with municipalities. According to the National Policy Framework for Public Participation 2007, public participation is meant to be an “open, accountable process through which individuals and groups within selected communities can exchange views and influence decision-making. It is further defined as a democratic process of engaging people, deciding, planning, and playing an active part in the development and operation of services that affect their lives”. Thus, resistance by rural citizens to working collaboratively with the municipalities defeats the purpose of the public participation process. Preliminary literature reveals a dearth of research into the cause of the lack of interest in the public participation process from citizens. Existing literature indicates that there is dissatisfaction in the way the public participation process is being conducted, and that more examination is needed. The paucity of research is what triggered the author’s decision to analyse the participatory mechanisms being used by municipalities in the water and sanitation sector of the Eastern Cape. The study was, therefore, an assessment of participatory mechanisms and takes into account the perspectives of rural citizens whose views are thus stakeholder views. The objective was to determine the possible reasons for the dissatisfaction with the process in order to identify the factors that could be taken into account to improve the public participation process in the Eastern Cape. The main research question was: What are the South African rural publics’ perceptions on whether the participatory mechanisms used in the water and sanitation sector achieve the intended goals of public participation? The study assessed the participatory mechanisms used in the water and sanitation sector in the rural communities in South Africa. Two local municipalities in the province of Eastern Cape were used as a case study. Rural citizens’ perspectives on various participatory mechanisms were explored to establish if the mechanisms used are promoting the intended outcomes of public participation.

Bibliography: leaves 264-288. / The purpose of this study is the development and validation of a comprehensive framework for the analysis and evaluation of enterprise models. The study starts with an extensive literature review of modelling concepts and an overview of the various reference disciplines concerned with enterprise modelling. This overview is more extensive than usual in order to accommodate readers from different backgrounds. The proposed framework is based on the distinction between the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic model aspects and populated with evaluation criteria drawn from an extensive literature survey. In order to operationalize and empirically validate the framework, an exhaustive survey of enterprise models was conducted. From this survey, an XML database of more than twenty relatively large, publicly available enterprise models was constructed. A strong emphasis was placed on the interdisciplinary nature of this database and models were drawn from ontology research, linguistics, analysis patterns as well as the traditional fields of data modelling, data warehousing and enterprise systems. The resultant database forms the test bed for the detailed framework-based analysis and its public availability should constitute a useful contribution to the modelling research community. The bulk of the research is dedicated to implementing and validating specific analysis techniques to quantify the various model evaluation criteria of the framework. The aim for each of the analysis techniques is that it can, where possible, be automated and generalised to other modelling domains. The syntactic measures and analysis techniques originate largely from the disciplines of systems engineering, graph theory and computer science. Various metrics to measure model hierarchy, architecture and complexity are tested and discussed. It is found that many are not particularly useful or valid for enterprise models. Hence some new measures are proposed to assist with model visualization and an original "model signature" consisting of three key metrics is proposed.Perhaps the most significant contribution ofthe research lies in the development and validation of a significant number of semantic analysis techniques, drawing heavily on current developments in lexicography, linguistics and ontology research. Some novel and interesting techniques are proposed to measure, inter alia, domain coverage, model genericity, quality of documentation, perspicuity and model similarity. Especially model similarity is explored in depth by means of various similarity and clustering algorithms as well as ways to visualize the similarity between models. Finally, a number of pragmatic analyses techniques are applied to the models. These include face validity, degree of use, authority of model author, availability, cost, flexibility, adaptability, model currency, maturity and degree of support. This analysis relies mostly on the searching for and ranking of certain specific information details, often involving a degree of subjective interpretation, although more specific quantitative procedures are suggested for some of the criteria. To aid future researchers, a separate chapter lists some promising analysis techniques that were investigated but found to be problematic from methodological perspective. More interestingly, this chapter also presents a very strong conceptual case on how the proposed framework and the analysis techniques associated vrith its various criteria can be applied to many other information systems research areas. The case is presented on the grounds of the underlying isomorphism between the various research areas and illustrated by suggesting the application of the framework to evaluate web sites, algorithms, software applications, programming languages, system development methodologies and user interfaces.

Electronic government (e-government) is how the providers of public services interact with the citizen and business via electronic means. The internet is the most commonly used electronic channel. E-government can provide major benefits to citizens and businesses by making the delivery of public services more efficient and effective. However, recent advances in mobile technology have offered the potential to support government services at various levels. This has made it possible to deliver services to the citizens who have no convenient physical access to government services, for example, people living in rural areas and those who are continually on the move, such as business professionals. This study explores the possibilities of effectiveness, resistance, opportunities and issues related to supporting government services delivery through using mobile cellular technologies. This research study focused on the South African and Nigerian contexts. The focus was to explore various ways that the government can use mobile technologies to improve the provision of government services. A major output of this research work is a conceptual framework to guide mobile government implementation as a vehicle for delivery of government services. Literature from both academic and professional domains were consulted throughout the study. Furthermore, a case study research was conducted in two organisations, which are different in terms of cultural and transformative settings (one in South Africa and another in Nigeria). The study followed an interpretive research approach, and collected data through semi-structured interviews in the two organizations. The data gathered were relevant to the implementation of m-government systems. The study relied on two underpinning theoretical frameworks, namely Structuration Theory and Actor Network Theory to understand the socio-technical factors affecting the implementation of m-government systems in government organisations. The perspective of duality of structure and moments of translation from both Structuration Theory and Actor Network Theory were adopted to analyse the data collected in the case study organisations.

Social media are a space for discussions, debates and deliberations about personality, culture, society, and actual experiences of social actors in South Africa. They offer an unexpected opportunity for the broader consideration and inclusion of community members’ voices in governance decision making and policy processes. They also offer opportunities to engage, mobilise and change people and society in impressive scale, speed and effect: They have mobilising and transformative powers emanating from their interaction with the impetus of the agency of community members seeking better conditions of living. The magnitude of the effects of these powers makes it imperative to have a better understanding of their workings. Social media have been used in numerous social movements as the medium of communication to mobilise, coordinate, and broadcast protests. However, social media were never a guarantee of success as most movements using them did not achieve significant results. Yet, governments in developed and developing countries tend to engage inadequately with social media supported movements. The research problem is that the contribution of social media to the transformation of the social practice of discourse, which causes SSA community members’ agential impetus (collective intentionality for action) to generate a discourse of resistance on social media during social movements, is not well understood. The main research question is: Why are South African community members using social media to enact online discursive resistance during social movements? The aim of the research is to explain, from a critical realism point of view, Sub-Saharan African community members’ emergent usage of social media during social movements, by providing a contextualised social history (a tale) of South African community members’ practice of online discursive enactment of resistance. The emergent usage of social media of concern is conceptualised as “discursive enactment of networked everyday resistance” within a dialectical space of interaction conceptualised as “space of autonomous resistance”; an instance of a communication space allowing for transformative negation to occur. The research follows Bhaskar’s Critical Realism as a philosophical paradigm. Critical Realism seeks to explain phenomena by retroducing (retrospective inference) causal explanations from empirically observable phenomena to the generative mechanisms which caused them. The research was designed as a qualitative, processual and retroductive inquiry based on the Morphogenetic/Morphostasis approach with two phases: an empirical research developing the case of South African community members’ emergent usage of social media during the #feesmustfall social movement, looking for demi-regularities in social media discourse; and a transcendental research reaching into the past to identified significant events, objects and entities which tendencies are responsible for the shape of observed discourse. In the first phase, a case study was developed from data collected on the social media platform Twitter™, documents, and in-depth interviews of South African community members. The data collected were analysed using qualitative content analysis (QCA) and Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) to unveil demi-regularities; moving from the observable individual strategic orientation of messages to discourses, thus to the tendencies of relational emergent properties of systemic magnitude which structure local discourses and are transformed by them. Then, the social mediainduced morphogenesis or transformation of South African community members’ discursive action was postulated in an analytical history of emergence (or analytical tale) of their usage of social media within a “space of autonomous resistance” during social movements. The findings of the research suggest that South African community members authored 3 discourses of resistance on Twitter™: #feesmustfall discourses of struggle, identity and oppression. They identified as “student qua black-child” stepping into the “Freedom fighter” role against the hegemonic post-apartheid condition curtailing their aspirations. It was found that social media socio-cultural embeddedness and under-design (Western European socio-cultural globalising underpinning features and functional features of the platforms) which interaction with the local socio-cultural mix (postapartheid socio-cultural tendencies for domination/power, spiral of silence, and legitimacy/identification) resulted in misfits and workarounds enhancing individual emotional conflict and aligning towards a socio-cultural opportunistic contingent complementarity integration in the deployment of discourse. That integration was actualised as a mediatization emergent property through asignification/signification of mainstream discourses of liberal democracy, colonial capitalism, national democratic revolution, free and decolonised education, black consciousness and Fallism. That mediatization through re-signification of the struggle for freedom created a communication “space of autonomous resistance” where networked freedom fighters enacted discursive everyday resistance against the hegemonic forces of students’ precariousness. The contribution of the research includes a realist model of social media discursive action (ReMDA); an explanation of South African community members’ deployment of discourse over social media during social movement and telling the tale of the transformation of discursive practices with the advent of social media in South Africa.

Includes bibliographical references. / Information and communication technologies (ICTs) are used to support almost all areas of human activity, and information systems play an increasingly important role in organisations and in society as a whole. At the same time, continuous and dramatic changes in the field of Information Systems (IS) and its context pose serious challenges to educators preparing students for professional practice. This study is therefore about the search to design, develop and implement a framework for constructing a capstone course that will be both flexible and efficient, while simultaneously embracing the interdisciplinary character of the IS field. A capstone course can be viewed as a man-made artefact intended to meet the needs of the world we live in and the activity of building theory in such a world is embedded in the sciences of the artificial. The research paradigm for this environment thus comprised a combination of the behavioural science and design science paradigms. The evolution of a capstone course at the University of Cape Town commenced in 2001 and led to the development of a conceptual framework for a coherent practice. During 2010 and 2011 the conceptual framework acted as a bridge enabling the researcher to develop, refine and evaluate a design science theory. This was done through a series of themed action experiments each consisting of several interventions, to create a synthesis of theory and practice for preparing thoughtful practitioners. The theory includes prescriptive statements of actions leading to specific outcomes that provided evidence of how a reflective practice nurtures deep involvement of students in their learning experience. It further demonstrated how accompanying theories within this framework can be utilised either to underpin or to make sense of the different activities within this practice. These meaning-making activities initiated the reconstruction of interventions and actions to promote transcendence and embodied cognition, nurturing competence and lifelong learning. Ultimately, the intention of the theory is to extend the boundaries of the capabilities of IS majors (or students of other exit level courses) to such an extent that they become empowered to cope with the complex and changing demands of the real world.

The relevance of this research stems from the persistent failure rate of large-scale Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementations. The foremost reasons advanced in explaining organisations' failure to achieve the desired ERP benefits, despite substantial investments, relates to the complex, risky and challenging nature of the implementation process. Understanding the ERP implementation challenges faced by organisations and the subsequent coping mechanisms deployed to overcome the challenges remain a pertinent research endeavour. Another eminent area of concern alludes to the limited significance attributed to the systemic analysis of the implementation process. This research describes the challenges faced by organisations during their ERP implementation process and explains the systemic interaction of the ERP implementation challenges. In conjunction, this study identifies the coping mechanisms established by organisations to overcome the encountered ERP implementation challenges. An interpretive research paradigm, in concurrence with an inductive research approach was adopted for the purpose of this research. This study was conducted within the context of a large, decentralised, public organisation. Two embedded case studies within the designated organisation were selected. At the onset of the study, the organisation was in the process of implementing a large-scale vanilla ERP solution. The study was qualitative in nature and data were collected through interviews, observations and documentary evidence between April 2012 and October 2014. The ERP implementation challenges and ensuing coping mechanisms were revealed through the use of thematic analysis. Constant comparative analysis allowed the researcher to compare and contrast the data and themes emerging from both cases. The systemic interrelation and interconnected nature of the ERP implementation challenges were, subsequently, examined, using the principles of system dynamics. Key research contributions comprise the development of both descriptive and explanatory knowledge. The research findings disclose numerous ERP implementation challenges resulting in the emergence of a taxonomy which includes organisational, project management, management, change management, technical and knowledge challenges. The proposed taxonomy provides a comprehensive breakdown and analysis of different ERP implementation challenges which adds to the existing body of knowledge on ERP implementation. The major theoretical contribution, however, is the explanatory theory arising from the systemic model of the dynamics of ERP implementation challenges. The theory provides rich insights into the complex and interconnected nature of an implementation process. Specific implications are drawn from the empirical findings to form theoretical propositions as principles of explanation and generalisation. Another key contribution includes an interpretation of how coping mechanisms are deployed by organisations to overcome the ERP implementation challenges. The predominant coping mechanisms include the use of workaround solutions, workgroups, super-users, and retraining, support, and rewards and incentives. The theoretical contribution can be generalised to large, decentralised organisations implementing ERP systems. The contribution to practice is to assist organisations in their implementation endeavours by empowering ERP implementers with the fundamental knowledge in order for them to better manage the inherent complexity of their implementation processes.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-209). / This thesis critically investigates the impact of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) infrastructure expansion on Development in Six West African Countries. While recent research has shown that ICT has contributed significantly to economic and social transformation in Western developed countries, the same is not necessarily true for less developed countries. After over a decade of heavy investment in ICT infrastructure expansion in Africa, little empirical research on the contribution of ICT to development has been conducted to assess the impact of these investments on the development of these countries. This work is a groundbreaking effort to advance a much needed research program to measure the impact of ICT infrastructure expansion on development in Africa.

Mobile victimisation is one form of cyber aggression that is increasing and affecting many young people in the developing world today. However, the focus on mobile victimisation in developing nations is limited. There is also limited theoretical work to enhance the conceptualisation of mobile victimisation. Understanding this phenomenon in developing countries is particularly critical as mobile phone usage and crime in these countries are among the highest in the world. Literature shows that in addition to these challenges, schools that have adopted paper or program-based interventions have not been very successful in combating victimisation. Research from other disciplines, however, suggests that digital interventions effectively address health and psychological challenges by offering digital self-intervention. Research shows that reporting bullying incidents is a form of intervention whose challenges in developing and maintaining mechanisms persist. Schools particularly lack systems for reporting and students do not trust some of the reporting mechanisms. Similar problems have been identified in cyberbullying literature. Reporting violence in schools is particularly important in a country like South Africa, where the rate of crime remains the highest in the world. Understanding the circumstances under which victims decide to report (or not report) is important for effective development and implementation of appropriate interventions. Studies on crime reporting provide mechanisms for predicting reporting behaviour that are mainly based on sociological, economic or psychological models. Given that this study investigated reporting behaviour from a technological perspective, technological models were also considered. However, focusing on one theoretical model may fail to capture the complexity of the factors influencing a victim's decision whether or not to report aggression. A broader theoretical perspective would allow for the identification of the various motivating factors which generally do not operate exclusively. In addition, most existing studies have focused on traditional forms of violence. Victimisation in schools is increasingly committed using mobile technology, making it imperative to examine the problem of reporting in a mobile environment. Reporting practices in a digital context may, however, differ in some aspects from reporting in a non-technological environment and these may vary across cultural groupings. Applying a design science research (DSR) process within a pragmatic paradigm and being informed by literature, this study developed an integrative framework for understanding the under-reporting of mobile victimisation by students so as to inform the development of a mobile-based intervention. Findings from the study confirmed that students do not report their victimisation because of economic, psychological, cultural-sociological and technological factors as predicted by the integrative theoretical framework. This confirmed the complexity of the factors influencing students decision whether or not to report aggression. This, therefore, implied that the proposed framework is not only valuable in explaining the broad socialcultural context of victimisation reporting, but also in reporting behaviours at the individual level. The proposed framework, therefore, informed the design, development and evaluation of a mobile application for reporting mobile victimisation faced by high school students in South Africa. An application named the Mobile Victimisation Monitoring and Reporting (MVMR) application was then developed and evaluated among high school students. The MVMR application (app) provides useful features that enable: reflection by students; empathy from adult figures; empowerment for the students; consequence for the bullies. It also mitigates students’ fear and provides them with the ability to control their reporting. Of the features engrained in the MVMR app to capture these themes, students found the option to report anonymously, the option to identify the bully and the display of their frequency of mobile phone use to be the most relevant and useful. The study makes significant contribution to knowledge by providing insights into the reporting behaviours of high school students, which is an understudied research area. One essential theoretical contribution was the development of an integrative theoretical framework that provides the theoretical and social-ecological underpinnings to reporting behaviour which have previously been broad-brush approaches given to a whole class or whole school. Concerning the contribution to practice, the study produced an IT artefact that is based on the proposed integrative theoretical framework. With this tool, high school students will have a means by which to report their victimisation and have the report addressed by an administrator who has a social-ecological understanding of that student. This creates a shift from generalised interventions and creates a more personalised approach to intervening mobile victimisation. Further discussions on the theoretical, practical and methodological contributions are made in this thesis, along with the limitations of the study and recommendations for future research.