ABSTRACT The Relationship Between Strategic Alignment of Information Systems and Performance Impact in Hospitals Huang, Ying Hsiang The Taiwan government implemented the National Health Insurance (NHI) program in 1995 to provide comprehensive and uniform health services to the entire population. The ensuring phenomenon from the implementation of the NHI program is the furious competition in the healthcare market that has become matured. To survive, hospitals need to enhance efficiency and provide high quality of care to the patients. Often, hospitals cope with external environmental changes through the choice and application of appropriate strategies. Forming strategic alignment with resources is an increasingly adopted strategy by hospitals. The recognition of information systems (IS) as the most valuable resource has motivated hospitals to engage in their formal management. To achieve better hospitals¡¦ performance from managing IS, management strategists recommend that hospitals relate IS management with business activities in hospitals. As a resource, IS can be related to business through alignment (in terms of strategic alignment of IS), as is applicable to other resources such as manpower resources. Despite interest in managing IS, however, there has been little or not research about aligning IS with business in hospitals. Lack of empirical evidence creates a gap between the theory and practice of strategic alignment of IS. In this study, to integrated theories about IS and alignment to develop an alignment framework and model for IS alignment research, developed a strategic alignment construct, and empirically tested the alignment model within the mediation perspectives along with the Venkatraman¡¦s theory. Mediation was interpreted as the mechanism through which IS strategy could catalyze business strategy for the attainment of better performance. Data from hospitals¡¦ survey in Taiwan was analyzed using the variance-based partial least square and multiple regression method. IS strategy and business strategy in mediating the performance, the links were examined. Results indicate that strategic alignment of IS positively impact performance, explaining about 52.4% of its variation. In all models, the interactionist perspective as the better mediator of hospitals¡¦ performance. Through exploratory, an important management implication of this study is that it may make more sense for hospitals to orientate their business strategies and operations based on their IS resources strategic alignment rather than engage in IS function as a response to business needs since this study shows such strategic alignment of IS contributed on performance with 8.4% of its variation.

With the growing popularity of the Web Ontology Language (OWL) as a logic-based ontology language, as well as advancements in the language itself, the need for more sophisticated and up-to-date ontology engineering services increases as well. While, for instance, there is active focus on new reasoners and optimisations, other services fall short of advancing at the same rate (it suffices to compare the number of freely-available reasoners with ontology editors). In particular, very little is understood about how ontologies evolve over time, and how reasoners’ performance varies as the input changes. Given the evolving nature of ontologies, detecting and presenting changes (via a so-called diff) between them is an essential engineering service, especially for version control systems or to support change analysis. In this thesis we address the diff problem for description logic (DL) based ontologies, specifically OWL 2 DL ontologies based on the SROIQ DL. The outcomes are novel algorithms employing both syntactic and semantic techniques to, firstly, detect axiom changes, and what terms had their meaning affected between ontologies, secondly, categorise their impact (for example, determining that an axiom is a stronger version of another), and finally, align changes appropriately, i.e., align source and target of axiom changes (so the stronger axiom with the weaker one, from our example), and axioms with the terms they affect. Subsequently, we present a theory of reasoner performance heterogeneity, based on field observations related to reasoner performance variability phenomena. Our hypothesis is that there exist two kinds of performance behaviour: an ontology/reasoner combination can be performance-homogeneous or performance-heterogeneous. Finally, we verify that performance-heterogeneous reasoner/ontology combinations contain small, performance-degrading sets of axioms, which we call hot spots. We devise a performance hot spot finding technique, and show that hot spots provide a promising basis for engineering efficient reasoners.