Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the Master of Information & Communication Technology, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2016. / Community Development service practitioners in South Africa have been increasingly burdened with a broader range of responsibilities. Using ICT proficiently could enhance their productivity. The use of ICT is prevalent in almost every organization, therefore, it can also serve as a major factor in providing flexibility of service to communities, but only if the practitioners possess adequate skills in retrieving, presenting and disseminating valuable and adequate information within the workplace to the parties involved. Training interventions are however not always successful and their impact need to be measured. This study focussed on developing a Multi-Stage assessment model to measure the impact of an ICT training intervention, to provide evidence of the effectivity of the training. A syllabus was developed, based on the European e-Competence Framework for ICT Users - Part 1 (CEN, 2013) and contextualized to suit the work environment of Community Development Workers (CDWs) from KwaZulu-Natal, training material was created and a Learning Management System was used to deliver the training. A self-assessment questionnaire was used to determine the pre-training skills level of the CDWs, 189 CDWs from KwaZulu-Natal were trained and a second questionnaire was used to measure the impact of the training. Results were analysed using Item Response Theory, which provided a way to measure not only overall competency but responses to specific items. Classical Test Theory measuring frequencies and averages were also use and the two sets of responses were compared. The training was found to be effective. Recommendations towards the development of a Multi-Stage assessment model are made. / M

Thesis (MMil (Computer Information Systems))--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Since the 1940s, the evaluation of information systems has been the topic of many authors’ research. When taking into account the amount of resources invested in an organisation’s information systems, especially in the present fiscal conditions, then the evaluation of an information system’s success is imperative. Traditionally, monetarybased evaluation measures were used to evaluate the success of an information system, however, these types of measures were found to be inadequate in their attempt to measure the complexity of information systems successfully. Surrogate measures, such as the user’s satisfaction with the information system, were developed to replace monetary-based evaluation measures. These forms of measures are often perceptual by nature and usually encompass the different stakeholders involved in the information system.

The objective of this research is to build a decision model for a comprehensive assessment of solar photovoltaic technologies using multiple perspectives. These perspectives include: social, technological, economic, environmental, and political (STEEP) with each perspective consisting of multiple criteria. Hierarchical decision modeling and expert judgment quantification are used to provide the relative ranking of the perspectives and criteria. Such modeling is effective in addressing technology evaluations with competing and contrasting perspectives and criteria where both quantitative and qualitative measurements are represented. The model is then operationalized by constructing desirability functions for each criterion. The combined results provide an overall numerical score for each technology under consideration as well as criteria desirability gaps. This model is useful for assessing photovoltaic technologies from varying worldviews such as the electric utility worldview, the photovoltaic manufacturer's worldview, or the national policy worldview. This model can also provide guidance to decision makers and practitioners on areas of improvement for a selected technology. The research utilizes the electric utility worldview as a case study.