Community-based open source (community source) has emerged as a new approach of developing enterprise software systems that requires participation and investments from partner institutions. This new approach provides the opportunity for institutions to pool resources together to achieve objectives that are hard to reach individually. In my dissertation, community-based development of enterprise applications is examined in a real world project called Kuali through the following three perspectives: technology perspective, economic perspective and management perspective. Under the technology perspective, the main research question is "how do service-oriented architectures enable technology flexibility in community source?" The Kuali case provides the initial context for understanding the basic concepts and insights surrounding the technological issues in community source. Under the economic perspective, the main research question is "why are institutions interested in investing in community source?" The case study and analytical modeling are used to better understand the decision-making process in community source. Under the management perspective, two main research questions are studied. The first research question is "what are the factors affecting the project success in community source development?" The case study, the surveys and the interviews are conducted to test the community source project success model. The second research question is "what are the motivations for outsourcing software development in community source?" Based on the results of our interview analysis, we propose a research framework for community source outsourcing. In the long term, I would like to develop a generic framework for describing the process of acquiring application software via either commercial, open source, or home grown approach. My research will concentrate on comparing these three application development approaches with a special focus on community source. The main contribution of my dissertation is to provide guideline for strategic planning and decision making in an institution. The finding in this dissertation research will provide significant insights on the selection of various software development approaches that are useful for both researchers and practitioners.

Open-source software becomes increasingly popular nowadays. Many startup companies and small business owners choose to adopt open source software packages to meet their daily office computing needs or to build their IT infrastructure. Unlike proprietary software systems, open source software systems usually have a loosely-organized developer collaboration structure. Developers work on their "assignments" on a voluntary basis. Many developers do not physically meet their "co-workers." This unique developer collaboration pattern leads to unique software development process, and hence unique structure of software products. It is those unique characteristics of open source software that motivate this dissertation study. Our research follows the framework of the four key elements of software engineering: Project, People, Process and Product (Jacobson, Booch et al. 1999). This dissertation studies three of the four P's: People, Process and Product. Due to the large sizes and high complexities of many open source software packages, the traditional analysis methods and measures in software engineering can not be readily leveraged to analyze those software packages. In this dissertation, we adopt complex network theory to perform our analysis on open source software packages, software development process, and the collaboration among software developers. We intend to discover some common characteristics that are shared by different open source software packages, and provide a possible explanation of the development process of those software products. Specifically we represent real world entities, such as open source software source code or developer collaborations, with networks composed of inter-connected vertices. We then leverage the topological metrics that have been established in complex network theory to analyze those networks. We also propose our own random network growth model to illustrate open source software development processes. Our research results can be potentially used by software practitioners who are interested to develop high quality software products and reduce the risks in the development process. Chapter 1 is an introduction of the dissertation's structure and research scope. We aim at studying open source software with complex networks. The details of the 4-P framework will be introduced in that chapter. Chapter 2 analyzes five C-language based open source software packages by leveraging function dependency networks. That chapter calculates the topological measures of the dependency networks extracted from software source code. Chapter 3 analyzes the collaborative relationship among open source software developers. We extract developer's co-working data out of two software bug fixing data sets. Again by leveraging complex network theory, we find out a number of topological characteristics of the software developer networks, such as the scale-free property. We also realize the topological differences between from the bug side and from the developer side for the extracted bipartite networks. Chapter 4 is to compare two widely adopted clustering coefficient definitions, the one proposed by Watts and Strogatz, the other by Newman. The analytical similarities and differences between the two clustering coefficient definitions provide useful guidance to the proposal of the random network growth model that is presented in the next chapter. Chapter 5 aims to characterize the open source software development process. We propose a two-phase network growth model to illustrate the software development process. Our model describes how different software source code units interconnect as the size of the software grows. A case study was performed by using the same five open source software packages that have been adopted in Chapter 2. The empirical results demonstrate that our model provides a possible explanation on the process of how open source software products are developed. Chapter 6 concludes the dissertation and highlights the possible future research directions.

The growing popularity of various Web 2.0 media has created massive amounts of user-generated content such as online reviews, blog articles, shared videos, forums threads, and wiki pages. Such content provides insights into web users' preferences and opinions, online communities, knowledge generation, etc., and presents opportunities for many knowledge discovery problems. However, several challenges need to be addressed: data collection procedure has to deal with unique characteristics and structures of various Web 2.0 media; advanced data selection methods are required to identify data relevant to specific knowledge discovery problems; interactions between Web 2.0 users which are often embedded in user-generated content also need effective methods to identify, model, and analyze. In this dissertation, I intend to address the above challenges and aim at three types of knowledge discovery tasks: (data) collection, selection, and investigation. Organized in this "CSI" framework, five studies which explore and propose solutions to these tasks for particular Web 2.0 media are presented. In Chapter 2, I study focused and hidden Web crawlers and propose a novel crawling system for Dark Web forums by addressing several unique issues to hidden web data collection. In Chapter 3 I explore the usage of both topical and sentiment information in web crawling. This information is also used to label nodes in web graphs that are employed by a graph-based tunneling mechanism to improve collection recall. Chapter 4 further extends the work in Chapter 3 by exploring the possibilities for other graph comparison techniques to be used in tunneling for focused crawlers. A subtree-based tunneling method which can scale up to large graphs is proposed and evaluated. Chapter 5 examines the usefulness of user-generated content in online video classification. Three types of text features are extracted from the collected user-generated content and utilized by several feature-based classification techniques to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed text-based video classification framework. Chapter 6 presents an algorithm to identify forum user interactions and shows how they can be used for knowledge discovery. The algorithm utilizes a bevy of system and linguistic features and adopts several similarity-based methods to account for interactional idiosyncrasies.

Screening individuals for concealed knowledge has traditionally been the purview of professional interrogators investigating a crime. But the ability to detect when a person is hiding important information would be of high value to many other fields and functions. This dissertation proposes design principles for and reports on an implementation and empirical evaluation of a non-invasive, automated system for human screening. The screening system design (termed an automated screening kiosk or ASK) is patterned after a standard interviewing method called the Concealed Information Test (CIT), which is built on theories explaining psychophysiological and behavioral effects of human orienting and defensive responses. As part of testing the ASK proof of concept, I propose and empirically examine alternative indicators of concealed knowledge in a CIT. Specifically, I propose kinesic rigidity as a viable cue, propose and instantiate an automated method for capturing rigidity, and test its viability using a traditional CIT experiment. I also examine oculomotor behavior using a mock security screening experiment using an ASK system design. Participants in this second experiment packed a fake improvised explosive device (IED) in a bag and were screened by an ASK system. Results indicate that the ASK design, if implemented within a highly controlled framework such as the CIT, has potential to overcome barriers to more widespread application of concealed knowledge testing in government and business settings.

Embodied Conversational Agents (i.e., avatars; ECAs) are appearing in increasingly many everyday contexts, such as e-commerce, occupational training, and airport security. Also common to a typical person's daily life is persuasion. Whether being persuaded or persuading, the ability to change another person's attitude or behavior is a thoroughly researched topic. However, little is known about ECAs' ability to persuade and whether basic persuasion principles from human-human interactions will hold in human-ECA interactions. This work investigates this question. First, a broad review of persuasion literature, which serves as an inventory of manipulations to test in ECA contexts, is presented. This literature review serves an inventory to guide future Persuasive ECA work. The ECA literature is then reviewed. Two preliminary studies exploring the effects of physical attractiveness, voice quality, argument quality, common ground, authority, and facial similarity are presented. Finally, the culminating study testing the effectiveness of ECAs to elicit self-disclosure in automated interviewing is presented and discussed. The findings of that automated interviewing study suggest that ECAs may replace humans in automated interviewing contexts. The findings also suggest that ECAs that are manipulated to look like their interviewees are able to induce greater likeability, establish more rapport, and elicited more self-referencing language than ECAs that do not look like the interviewees.

The adage, "old habits die hard", is especially relevant when humans learn new protective behaviors (i.e., dental flossing, IS security behaviors). The foundation that underlies many social-cognitive theories used in IS research is that intention to change predicts actual behavior change. Despite intentions to change, humans do not always change their habits due to actual or perceived obstacles, for example. In this study, user behavior, particularly with respect to vigilance over phishing attempts, was investigated via the theoretical lens of a hybrid continuum-stage behavior change model adapted from health-related fields. This type of model helps us to understand whether there are qualitatively different stages for adopting a more vigilant action plan toward phishing attempts, the number and ordering of distinct stages that a user must move through between forming an intention and subsequent behavior, what characterizes those stages, and how appropriate interventions at these stages can move a user to a higher stage of vigilant behavior. The goal of this research was to gain a better understanding of: a) whether there are distinct stages that distinguish end-users' vigilance toward phishing attempts; b) how many qualitatively different stages there are; and, c) what characterizes these stages. This study profiled IS end-users based on the model's constructs (e.g., coping self-efficacy, intention, action/coping planning, and risk perception) that examined end-users' protective behavior toward phishing attempts. In an exploratory analysis of survey data, stages of IS end-users were determined via cluster analysis techniques (hierarchical followed by K-means). A survey was administered to respondents (n= 394). Next, an agglomerative hierarchical cluster analysis using within-groups method of average linkage and Euclidean distance measures was performed on the model's constructs. Three clusters emerged as the optimal number to be used in the subsequent K-means cluster analysis. After conducting analyses for stability and validity for the 3-cluster solution, I compared the means of the model's constructs to develop profiles for the distinct three stages. I conclude that exploratory cluster analysis is an effective technique to discover natural groupings for protective behavior of IS end-users and propose future research to investigate stage-appropriate interventions to move users to higher stages.

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This research explores the combined use of soft systems methodology (SSM) and UML based business process modelling (BPM) techniques. These two techniques are integrated to provide a framework for the analysis and definition of suitable business process models. Such integration better supports developers following objectoriented (00) approaches than traditional business process modelling. The thesis describes the importance and difficulties in getting development proj ects aimed at the correct needs. We provide an overview of current business process modelling practices. From this it is argued that current practices show two major weaknesses. Firstly, the modelling language that is used is not a current standard amongst developers who now expect 00 and UML based approaches. Secondly, the techniques used do not emphasise analysis, often resulting in a lack of appreciation of the problem. In order to deal with these inadequacies, the thesis critically examines suitable techniques that can be used to analyse and model business processes to support the developer's requirements. The examination of SSM reveals that the technique does deal with the analysis limitations of current business process modelling techniques. SSM has been linked to information systems provision by previous researchers. Unfortunately the examination ofthese research attempts shows that the linking is conducted in an ad-hoc manner with no underlying theoretical basis or emphasis on business process modelling. We show how soft systems methodology techniques can be married with Eriksson and Penker (2000) UML business process modelling techniques following Mingers (2001) multi-methodology framework in a way that can over come these difficulties. This combined business analysis and modelling technique is applied to the production process in an aluminium rolling plant. Based on the experiences at one site, the integrated approach is able to deal with the complexities caused by multiple stakeholders, and is able to provide a UML representation of the required business process to guide developers. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2003.

Executive Information Systems (EIS) grew out ofthe information needs of top executives. The recent literature reports that EIS usage has spread throughout organisations. Web-based technologies are causing a revisit of existing IT implementation models, including those for EIS. These technologies include: Intranet, Internet, Extranet, e-Commerce: Business-to-Business (B2B), e-Comrnerce: Business-to-Consumer (B2C), Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) and other mobile technologies. The author conducts a field study of 31 well-established organisations in KwaZulu/Natal, South Africa, which have EIS experience. A validated survey instrument is administered to an EIS stakeholder in each organisation surveyed. This dissertation reports on (1) an investigation into previous research on IT adoption; (2) that there is little evidence to support that the theoretical usage aspects of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) are echoed in EIS implementations in KwaZulu/Natal; and (3) identifies and ranks Web-based technologies in order of their perceived impact on EIS currently and in the future. There is a positive impact level trend for all Web-based technologies on future EIS implementations. The results from this field study could be useful in formulating a set of management perspectives for organisations in South Africa wishing to embark on EIS implementation programs. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2002.

This study addresses how transformational organisational change can be enabled by dispersing and distributing leadership to change teams. It responds to the research challenge set by Caldwell (2003; 2005) to investigate change teams and explores issues raised by some authors that understanding of dispersed change agency (Buchanan et al., 2007) and distributed leadership (Gronn, 2002) may offer some insights regarding the management of complex organisational change processes. The study focuses on the implementation of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) in a Multi-National Corporation (MNC). It is accepted that failure rates for this type of technological change process are high and that most ERP implementations fail to achieve their objectives (Caruso, 2007; Aiken & Keller, 2009). In this study, a processual methodology (Pettigrew, 1985: Dawson, 1994; 2003) was employed and qualitative methods used, to unravel the complexity and develop rich and critical insight into the roles, relationships and competencies of three types of change teams. Research findings identify how change leadership was dispersed to three types of change team and how this led to rapid ERP implementation which was judged as ‘on time and in budget’. From this analysis, we develop a typology of change teams which identifies three types of change team: a control team; translation team; and a trouble shooting team. This typology characterises their roles, competencies and optimum conditions for interaction. In particular, we demonstrate how change teams working in concert demonstrate specific competencies, use complementary methods and employ specific political tactics to enable rapid improvisation of the implementation strategy and the ERP software.