Thesis (M.A.)--Ohio State University. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M. Tech. Business Information Systems)-- Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / The services of many academic libraries have remained stagnant for many years. They have not been responding to rapid technology change. As a result, some of these libraries have become reactive in the services that they provide to their users. The reactive approach has impact on the activities and processes of the consumers. The impacts are associated to the overall performance of the institution. These challenges have triggered innovation for change in some institutions of higher learning in many countries including South Africa. The technological solutions include the adoption of Mobile Technology to improve and enhance library's services. The study investigated how Mobile Technology could be adopted to enhance the services of academic library, this include investigation on the factors which influence and impact technology adoption. Factors influencing the adoption of Mobile Technology were identified from the findings, and a Framework was developed. The primary aim of the Framework is to guide adoption and use of Mobile Technology for an improved and enhanced service which are provided by library.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / Mergers and acquisitions have increased in the post 2006 recession as corporations attempt to develop their competitiveness during the upturn process. Previous research has suggested that information systems' capability, during the pre- and post-merger implementation, is critical. In most rapid mergers and acquisitions, strategies for integrating information systems and conducting technical due-diligence, do not often follow widely understood approaches. This study explored the importance of considering and addressing, strategically, information systems' integration during the merger of the Technology Innovation Agency. It further highlighted the importance of dealing with systems integration issues before, during, and after the merger. Previous studies indicate that information systems integration is the main challenging assignments in the merger process. The present study focused on the dynamics of starting the information systems scope from the "Greenfield situation" instead of adopting the organizations existing and aligned tooling, before creating a shared cost management model. This study will contribute towards formulating South African literature on pre-merger information systems. At the moment, most literature covering pre-merger information systems planning is dominantly USA and Europe based.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / In the last decade, the deployment of information technology artefacts to enable and support processes and activities in organisations has increased tremendously. Organisations deploy information technology artefacts in different ways, but primarily for competitive advantage. Hence emphasis and resources (human included) are invested on information technology by many organisations. The deployment information technology artefacts are often carried out through projects. Irrespective of the size of the information technology project, there are potential risks associated to it. Risks associated to information technology projects are often not technical. Some of the risks are relative to the context in which the project is initiated and deployed. Over the years, the challenge to identify, assess and manage risk in information technology projects has become an increasing concern for many organisations. Many approaches and methods have been employed to address this challenge of risks identification, assessment and management. Unfortunately, the challenge persists. This could be attributed to the fact that there has been more focus on the technological aspect of the deployment. The research was aimed at understanding the sources of risks, and how they manifest themselves in the deployment of information technology projects in organisations. The research focused on how risk factors impact and influence information technology projects. This was done through examining how risk is identified, monitored and managed in information technology projects in organisations.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems, Tshwane University of Technology, 2011. / In this current information era, e-learning is considered as one of the means to enhance worldwide competitiveness. Before e-learning is implemented in education systems, it is of critical importance to assess the e-learning readiness thereof. Previous researches have always focused on measuring the e-learning readiness of organisations and of higher learning institutions; as a result a research gap on the use and readiness of e-learning in primary and secondary schools has been left. The aim of this research is to find out teachers' e-learning readiness in rural South African. Informed by the theoretical triangulation of Technology Readiness Index and Technology Acceptance Model, a conceptual framework was produced. In the study, Technology Readiness Index's personality characteristics (optimism, innovativeness, discomforts, and insecurity) and the cognitive dimensions of Technology Acceptance Model (perceived ease of use and the perceived usefulness) were used. Four factors affecting the e-learning readiness of teachers' in rural schools were identified: individual factor, technological factor, institutional factor and social factor.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems, Tshwane University of Technology, 2011. / This research addresses how online learning through social networks can encourage active participation inside and outside of the classroom environment. Using Activity theory and Actor-network theory, the Research aims to provide: an informed understanding of online social networks and how they can be utilized in a learning environment.

M. Tech. Business Information Systems, Tshwane University of Technology, 2011. / This dissertation addresses the outsourcing of information technology operations - where outsourcing was defined as a strategic use of external service providers to undertake the activities that are done by the internal employees. In this study, IT outsourcing activities included the transferring of IT services such as the service desk, IT applications and the management of networks and servers to an external IT service provider who then performs the activities. Outsourcing does not always happen seamlessly. In other words, there are often challenges and issues that manifest during the outsourcing period, both from the side of the company outsourcing and the one providing the service. This dissertation argues that by making use of the well-managed service level agreement, organization can subsequently manage the environment, improve the processes and be able to evaluate the desired outsourcing success and performance. Using a South African parastatal as a case study, the study analysed how outsourcing of IT operations can be done in order for the organization to realise and understand the value of outsourcing IT operations.

Thesis (D. Tech. in Business Information Systems) Tshwane University of Technology 2011. / The major objective of this study was to establish and determine the critical factors influencing effective usage of Integrated Tertiary Software (ITS). ITS is an enterprise resource planning system that is used in many organizations for decision making, though mostly, is used in institutions of higher learning. ITS, like many other enterprise resource planning systems, is characterized by several factors that influence its effective usage. This study assessed these factors by going through various stages.

Consider companies who rely on revenue generating equipment that fails from time to time. Assume that a company owns one unit of equipment, whose maintenance and repair services are outsourced to a qualified service provider. We assume that the company (the principal) outsources the maintenance and repair services using performance based contracts. Such contractual relationships fall into economics' principal-agent framework. The owners of the revenue generating units are referred to as principals, and the service provider as the agent. We address the following questions: What are the optimal contracting strategies for a principal and an agent? Can the agent benefit from pooling the service demands from multiple principals? This dissertation contains two main bodies of work contained in chapters 2-7 and chapters 8-13 respectively. In the first part of this dissertation (chapters 2-7) we examine the contractual options between a single principal and a single agent. The contractual options of a principal and an agent are modeled as a Markov process with an undetermined time horizon. For a risk neutral principal we identify the conditions under which a principal contracts with a risk-neutral, risk-averse, or risk-seeking agent and derive the principal's optimal offer and the agent's service capacity response. In essence, we provide an extensive formulating analysis of principal-agent contracts given any exogenous parameter values. That is, we derive mathematical formulas for the optimal contract offers and the agent's optimal service capacity. It turns out that a small number of formulas cover a large spectrum of principal-agent conditions. In the second part of this dissertation (chapters 8-13), in a counter distinction to the vast literature in economics on principal-agent contractual interplay and its predominant concern with the principal, here we focus on the agent. In the case of performance based service contracts it is known that the principal extracts all the economic surplus and the agent breaks even. But this is not the case for an agent of good standing contracting with multiple principals. We show that an agent who contracts a collection of principals with interdependent failure characteristics does better than break-even - such an agent realizes a profit rate that is convexly increasing in the number of principals. The corresponding cooperative game assessing each principal's contribution to the agent's profit is convex and its easily computable Louderback's value seems always to be in its core. In chapter 14 we present the outline of a future study that compares several different options of contract structure faced by the principal and the agent, because the optimal contracting strategies for the principal and the agent may not necessarily be the same under different contract structures. We discuss briefly the agent's and the principal's behavior under different forms of performance based contract, which serves as a starting point for future extensions of this dissertation. To summarize, this dissertation provides practical mathematical results and important managerial insights into the principal-agent contract in equipment repair services industry.

Various phenomena within the information systems discipline can be studied using the social network paradigm that views social entities as nodes with links between them. The social network analysis (SNA) theory has applications in knowledge management, computer mediated communications, security informatics, and other domains. Challenges in SNA can be classified into three broad areas: instance modeling, evolution modeling, and predictive modeling. Instance modeling focuses on the study of static network properties, evolution modeling examines factors behind network growth, and predictive modeling is concerned with identification of hidden and future network links. This dissertation presents four essays that address these challenges with empirical studies in knowledge management and security informatics.The first essay on instance and evolution modeling contributes to SNA theory by examining a real-world network that contains interactions between thirty thousand individuals. The study is among the few that empirically examine large human-only networks and verify the presence of small-world properties and scale-free distributions. In addition, it proposes a novel application of a network evolution model to examine the growth of networks across geographical boundaries.The second essay on evolution modeling proposes a methodology to identify significant link-formation facilitators. The study found that homophily in age, gender, and race were not significant factors in predicting future links between individuals in dark networks. These results contradicted some previous studies in the same domain that used smaller datasets to study the phenomena.The third essay focuses on evolution and predictive modeling and examines the role of inventor status on the selection of knowledge recombined to produce innovation. A new network measure based on random walks and team identification (RWT) is proposed to model knowledge flow. It is found that inventor status as measured by RWT has a positive relationship with the likelihood of a future citation link to the inventor.The fourth essay focuses on predictive modeling. A modified mutual information formulation is proposed to identify hidden links between nodes based on heuristics of time and location of previous co-occurrences. An evaluation of the proposed technique showed that it performed better in predicting hidden links than other co-occurrence based methods.