A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Commerce. November 1995. / The provision of timely, accurate, and relevant information to executives is prime to ensuring that they make quick and informed decisions that are critical to the competitiveness of their organisations. One such source of information is meant to be the Executive Information System, a system which combines internal and external information for electronic presentation to management in individually customised formats. Whilst it is required that the system address the information needs of the executives, the dynamic and ever-changing business environment makes it difficult for such a system to keep up-to-date. The aim of the research is to identify those critical issues, which when managed properly, will ensure that the system remains providing and meeting the needs of the executives. Ten interviews were conducted from business organisations in order identify these factors. The report consists of chapter one which gives a brief background of the research; chapter two is the review of the available literature which covers the origin, purpose and structure of EIS, criteria for successful implementation, benefits and issues related to the management of an operating EIS; chapter three describes the research methodology used to undertake this research; chapter four describes the data collection phase of the research; chapter five is the analysis and testing of the empirical generalisations ending with a list of critical success factors for managing an operating EIS; and chapter six, which is also the last, which highlights the limitations of the research and areas for further research. After analysing the interview transcripts from the semi-structured interviews using the content analysis method, it was concluded that the empirical generalisations were strongly supported. A list of ten critical success factors raised by the respondents is listed at the end of chapter five. This factors will contribute towards helping South African business organisations in the management of their operating Executive Information Systems investments. / AC2017

Thesis (M.S. in Information Technology Management)--Naval Postgraduate School, March 2010. / Thesis Advisor(s): Cook, Glenn. Second Reader: Housel Thomas J. "March 2010." Description based on title screen as viewed on April 26, 2010. Author(s) subject terms: Information Technology, IT, IT Strategy, Strategy, Management, IT Management. Includes bibliographical references (p. 81-86). Also available in print.

Information is a critical asset without which an organisation could not survive. The adequate and effective governance of this asset is an essential function and is the direct responsibility of the board and senior management. The board and senior management have a responsibility to maintain the financial and material health of their enterprise and this includes setting the proper direction and governance of the information asset. Many organisations have, over the past few years, suffered severe losses and failures due to the inadequate governance and protection of this valuable asset. The reasons for the lack of corporate information governance need to be examined. The board and senior management need to direct and control their organisations effectively, with the appropriate delegation of responsibilities, to reduce the possibility of suffering similar losses and/or failures. The contribution made by this study is illustrated in the designing of a framework and activity plans to facilitate the board in practically implementing an improved corporate information governance process.

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Commerce University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg for the Degree of Masters of Commerce / Investments in information technology have in many cases failed to deliver the anticipated benefits. It is now accepted that real value can only be leveraged by linking IT implementation to organisational change and process redesign. The management of this change is inextricably linked to the overall success of the implementation. The focus of the research was on identifying what the key elements of successful change management were. Research into generic change management was used as a basis for determining these critical success factors. The applicability of these factors in the case of an enterprise wide package software implementation was then tested through a case study method. The research showed that the factors developed were applicable in managing technology driven change. In addition to the factors developed, additional factors were identified as being relevant in the case of packaged software implementations. / Andrew Chakane 2018

Despite the amount of literature on the antecedents and outcomes of IT outsourcing, the vast majority of this research has focused on factors at the firm level. Environmental factors such as industry and country characteristics have received little attention. Environmental factors should be taken into account in IT outsourcing research because firms are open systems and their behaviors are significantly influenced by material-resource and institutional environments. Moreover, previous research at the firm level has not evaluated the effectiveness of IT outsourcing and insourcing in terms of how they create value for firms. To address the paucity of macro-level research in IT outsourcing as well as to augment our knowledge at the firm level, this thesis investigates IT outsourcing issues at three levels, namely, at the firm, industry, and country level. More specifically, I expand firm-level research by jointly examining the impacts of IT outsourcing and insourcing on IT-enabled organizational capabilities and firm performance (Essay #1). I also investigate the roles of industry-level factors such as munificence, dynamism, concentration, and capital intensity (Essay #2) and country-level variables such as the maturity of the IT-related legal system, generalized trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet penetration, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market of a country (Essay #3) in the diffusion of IT outsourcing practice.

Ph.D. (Computer Science) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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In recent years, the impact of global forces such as the increasing pace of technological innovation and the growing affluence of emerging economies has changed the role of Information Technology (IT). New sourcing models and increasing competitive pressure have had a significant effect on the way technologies are delivered and subsequently the role of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) has gradually been migrating from one of a support role to that of playing a crucial part in the execution of corporate strategies. Whilst previous academic studies appear to be focused on the different competencies of the CIO, there have been few studies concerning how CIOs perceive their role and their future. Drawing on the various concepts from role theory, this PhD thesis constitutes the first known study aimed at presenting the role demands, constraints and the choices as perceived by the CIOs. Using a qualitative approach, 25 semi-structured interviews were conducted with both CIOs and senior IT leaders. Empirical evidence highlights the critical importance of role choices in determining what type of CIO an individual will be. It has also enabled the development of two new CIO role models; the Abeyant CIO and the Transmuted CIO. The Abeyant CIO model has been established to help understand the role enactment of CIOs who have not yet made the transition from a manager to a leader. In this scenario, it is asserted that individuals are the recipient of a role that was formulated by the role set, and that this ultimately determines the level of demands and constraints within the individual’s environment. In contrast, the transmuted CIO scenario emphasises that individuals have been through a process of self-reflection and they have made conscious choices throughout their careers that have resulted in approaching the CIO role differently. It is theorised in the transmuted CIO scenario that individuals are not the mere recipient of role set expectations and that they are actively involved in role making.

Thesis (M.Sc.)--University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Science, School of Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, 2017. / Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) provide a principled mathematical framework allowing a robot to reason about the consequences of actions and observations with respect to the agent's limited perception of its environment. They allow an agent to plan and act optimally in uncertain environments. Although they have been successfully applied to various robotic tasks, they are infamous for their high computational cost. This thesis demonstrates the use of knowledge transfer, learned from previous experiences, to accelerate the learning of POMDP tasks. We propose that in order for an agent to learn to solve these tasks quicker, it must be able to generalise from past behaviours and transfer knowledge, learned from solving multiple tasks, between di erent circumstances. We present a method for accelerating this learning process by learning the statistics of action choices over the lifetime of an agent, known as action priors. Action priors specify the usefulness of actions in situations and allow us to bias exploration, which in turn improves the performance of the learning process. Using navigation domains, we study the degree to which transferring knowledge between tasks in this way results in a considerable speed up in solution times. This thesis therefore makes the following contributions. We provide an algorithm for learning action priors from a set of approximately optimal value functions and two approaches with which a prior knowledge over actions can be used in a POMDP context. As such, we show that considerable gains in speed can be achieved in learning subsequent tasks using prior knowledge rather than learning from scratch. Learning with action priors can particularly be useful in reducing the cost of exploration in the early stages of the learning process as the priors can act as mechanism that allows the agent to select more useful actions given particular circumstances. Thus, we demonstrate how the initial losses associated with unguided exploration can be alleviated through the use of action priors which allow for safer exploration. Additionally, we illustrate that action priors can also improve the computation speeds of learning feasible policies in a shorter period of time. / MT2018

The scope of requirements engineering must include high-level business objectives and strategies to achieve traceability between IT and business needs in order to ensure alignment. B-SCP handles this issue effectively. However, we must also deal with the evolution of business strategy operationlised in business processes and supporting it. MAP, goal/strategy modelling technique handles such evolution effectively. Integration of MAP with B-SCP can help us to address deficiency of addressing requirements evolution in the B-SCP framework. This thesis presents the first steps in a research project that integrates the requirements engineering methodologies, B-SCP and MAP, in order to manage evolution of strategic IT. Semantic similarities between B-SCP and MAP motivate us to combine both techniques. The integration theory results in three alternative mechanisms through which we can connect MAP with B-SCP. The usefulness of the three mechanisms is tested on two exemplars -- small one and detailed one. These mechanisms have advantages and disadvantages depending upon the complexity of the business system. MAP has a Gap Analysis process inbuilt so this saves on the overhead of inventing a new approach. In addition, MAP also extends B-SCP's capability by the addition of non-deterministic process modelling which allows B-SCP framework to offer multiple views of requirements. During the integration process, we encountered a number of issues. One important was that B-SCP identifies goals as a snapshot in time which are aligned hierarchically from higher level model to lower level model, however MAP identifies processes that strive to achieve goals and do not provide alignment between different levels of MAPs. This was a challenging issue to deal with during the integration.