Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of North Texas, Aug., 2009. / Title from title page display. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.B.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 1983.

M. Tech. Informatics Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / The demand for better services by customers, citizens keeps increasing at rapid rate. The information technology artefacts are deployed to enable and support processes and activities for improved services, and to give the organisation leverage on the competitive advantage. The deployment of the information technology artefacts to enable, facilitate and support services is done through engineering approaches and methods, such as the enterprise architecture. Many organisations have shown interest, and have deployed the enterprise architecture in the recent years. Even though the enterprise architecture has become an increasingly mature field of work, yet many organisations still struggle with the development and implementation. What and where the challenges are in the deployment of enterprise architecture continue to be a debate. This study adopted two organisations as case studies. The organisations were used to understand the deployment of enterprise architecture through a third eye, using the lens of the structuration theory and also to understand the different non-technical challenges that exists within the deployment of the enterprise architecture in organisations

Thesis (MTech. degree in Business Information Systems.)--Tshwane University of Technology, 2011. / The study aimed at establishing the impact of competitive intelligence on the innovation products and services of information systems in organisations. For this purpose the study was based on one research question: How does competitive intelligence impact on the innovation products and services of information systems in organisations? At the end of the study on the role of competitive intelligence on information systems innovation the following was achieved. It was better understood that while competitive intelligence is overemphasized as revolutionary, customer focused information systems products and services still remain challenging. It was also understood that not all organisations that deploy competitive intelligence produce more innovative methods. A lack of knowledge- sharing and limitations within the organisational culture were found to be important factors for the deployment of competitive intelligence products and services in the organisations. Based on the findings and interpretation, a framework was developed, aimed at improving the development and deployment of competitive intelligence products and services for organisations' competitive advantage

Thesis (MTech. degree in Business Information Systems)-- Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / This research aimed to investigate and understand risks and risk management system and how risk management system was deployed in organisations. In order to achieve this, it was necessary to understand what risk is and also what risk management was. It was also necessary to understand the role information systems played in the deployment of risk management systems. The data gathered from the interview was analysed with structuration theory. Structuration theory enabled the researcher to have a clearer view of the problems in the organisations as it borders around risks. The analyses lead to some findings. Structuration theory played the role of a lens through which the problem was viewed. The findings were then used to develop a framework. It was intended that after this study the framework developed will be used for risk management in organisations. It was also intended that adoption of this framework for use in organisations will reduce the amount of resources wasted on management of risks which could have been spent on other things that are much more useful to the organisations.

Thesis (MTech. degree in Business Information Systems)-- Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / Information systems are defined as a group of interconnected components (people, organisation and technology) that function together to extract, regain, route, accumulate and distribute information, with the aim of business decision making and operational activities in an organisation and other business. As a result, nformation systems are being deployed by organisation to help assure that their daily activities are completed seamlessly. Thus, organisational stakeholders invest a vast amount of money in the deployment of these systems. Furthermore, volumes of organisational data stored within these systems increases on regular basis. As the volume of data and the complexity of information systems increase, business managers expect information systems auditors to become even more relevant and rigorous as these auditors have to ensure that possible risks that these nformation systems may inherent are mitigated. International Auditing standards and best practices emphasise the use of Computer Aided Audit Techniques by IS auditors, within their audit engagements. However, the level of compliance to these international auditing standards and best practices by the South African information systems auditors is still questionable. An empirical study conducted by Vasile-Daniel (2010) indicated that even if technology is accepted, few (if not all) of nformation systems auditors still deploy traditional audit methods within their audit engagements. Currently, auditors were observed to use Computer Aided Audit Techniques only to select random test samples but not necessarily to audit entirely using Computer Aided Audit Techniques. That is, they often revert to executing their audit engagements following the traditional methods. To the preceding point, the present study sought to explore factors that could be influencing the nformation systems auditors not to utilize Computer Aided Audit Techniques fully. The study, underpinned by the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), investigated the use or adoption of Computer Aided Audit Techniques by information systems auditors within a financial institution. The study revealed that senior management support, availability of resources, personal growth, increased productivity, and lack of relevant training tend to be the main factors, amongst others, influencing the use and adoption of Computer Aided Audit Techniques.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems Tshwane University of Technology 2012. / The challenge of providing ubiquitous personalized learning support, sensitive to the learner's background is still prevalent in South African higher education environments. Thus the research argument driving this dissertation is that learning resources and support sensitive to the learner's context should follow the learners, regardless of location and time. In this context, resources include knowledgeable peers who could provide on-demand academic support regardless of time and space. In the study, a learning management system was suggested as a learning environment that could leverage the challenge of providing ubiquitous learning support. The purpose of the research was to understand learning activities and how ubiquitous learning can be supported using learning management systems, in a higher education environment. Subsequently, the goal of the study was to conceptualize a framework for ubiquitous learning support through learning management systems.

Increasing amounts of data are being produced and consumed on a daily basis. Every mouse movement and click on a website can be analyzed to discover usage patterns and cognitive load (Jenkins et al., 2014), companies mine purchase histories to discover customer shopping patterns (Brin et al., 1997) and historical business transaction information can be used to improve business processes (Ghattas et al., 2014). Using sophisticated algorithms, data can be turned into information that helps guide marketers, policy makers, business managers, and other decision-makers. However, history has shown that increases in the amount and quality of information do not necessarily lead to better decision outcomes (Dawes et al., 1989). Human decision-makers may fail to understand the information, ignore it, or simply not believe it. Methods for effectively conveying information to humans must be studied so that the full value of information systems can be realized. This dissertation uses three studies to explain the factors that make technology persuasive. In the first study, attitudes toward technology measure how beliefs about technology influence the way people process information. Ordering effects are also examined to determine how people view information from decision support systems, and to find the optimal time to present information to decision-makers. In the second study, the persuasive power of text and audio modalities are compared. Additionally, the loss aversion bias is investigated to determine the utility of leveraging this cognitive bias in a technology context. In the third study, Protection Motivation Theory (Rogers, 1983) is used to extend the loss aversion model from study two. The study also investigates how message vividness and user participation through software personalization influence attitudes and behavior. Together, these experiments extend existing theoretical frameworks while giving actionable guidance to information systems practitioners. The studies demonstrate the importance of understanding cognitive biases, attitudes toward technology, and message delivery in a decision support scenario. These investigations are the first step in creating a more comprehensive model of factors that influence the persuasive power of technology.

The use of computers within the electronic environment has led to rapid and dynamic changes in the way governments and businesses operate. One of the significant outcomes of computerization is that managing electronic records now relies on IT and it needs to be integrated into the business processes of an organization. Therefore electronic records management (ERM) not only requires the involvement of key players in recordkeeping, such as records managers and archivists, but also IT personnel and administrators under a common shared responsibility to establish a credible electronic records management programme. According to McLeod, Hare and Johare (2004) managing records in the electronic environment is not only a major challenge but also increasingly a strategic issue for organizations in both the public and private sectors. They suggested that “a key factor in meeting both the challenge and addressing the strategic management is the provision of education and/or training for employees and potential employees (i.e students). In particular, providing this at the appropriate level of detail and in the appropriate areas of the subject, commensurate with roles and responsibilities so that these people can discharge, both effectively and efficiently, their responsibilities for managing records in the electronic environment”. Within this context, this paper examines the education and training opportunities on ERM worldwide and in Asia.

Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / The Kohonen Self-Organizing Map (SOM) is an unsupervised learning technique for summarizing high-dimensional data so that similar inputs are, in general, mapped close to one another. When applied to textual data, SOM has been shown to be able to group together related concepts in a data collection and to present major topics within the collection with larger regions. Research in which properties of SOM were validated, called the Proximity and Size Hypotheses,is presented through a user evaluation study. Building upon the previous research in automatic concept generation and classification, it is demonstrated that the Kohonen SOM was able to perform concept clustering effectively, based on its concept precision and recall7 scores as judged by human experts. A positive relationship between the size of an SOM region and the number of documents contained in the region is also demonstrated.