<p> The Oman government developed a vision to transform the nation into a sustainable knowledge society by supporting information and communication technologies to improve government services (ITA, n.d.). According to a United Nations (2012) report, Oman ranks 64th worldwide in e-government readiness, the lowest compared to other countries in the region. The goal of this qualitative grounded theory study was to explore processes associated with selected unsuccessful e-government projects in Oman, as well as the driver of failure, and generate a model with recommendations for the role of executives in government organization for successful execution of e-government initiatives. The main findings developed into a theoretical concept for a recommended leadership model for executives in Oman to use for the successful implementation of e-government initiatives. The research was guided by three research questions: &ldquo;How do leadership roles in government organizations in Oman support the success of e-government projects?&rdquo;, &ldquo;What leadership skills do leaders need to possess to achieve successful implementation of e-government projects?&rdquo;, and &ldquo;What model of e-government projects in Oman could explain or account for the value of successful leadership?&rdquo;. Study participants were 25 executives from five government organizations in Oman. Four themes emerged from analyzing research data (a) there is a need for e-government, (b) the e-government creates challenges, (c) challenges require a leader, and (d) a leader with particular skills mitigates challenges and influences the way to success. Four e-government essential leadership skills emerged from the study (a) determined, (b) knowledgeable, (c) communicator, and (d) social. </p>

<p> Mergers and acquisitions are a common form of inorganic growth for many companies; however, the failure rate of those activities remains high with IS&amp;T integration noted as one of the causes of failure. The purpose of this narrative inquiry study was to explore the experience of the IS&amp;T leaders during an M&amp;A IS&amp;T integration to understand how to reduce future failures. Interviews were conducted with eight IS&amp;T leaders who have been involved with M&amp;A IS&amp;T integrations at technology companies. Seven themes emerged from the data analysis of the transcribed interviews. The themes resulting from the study are: incomplete or incorrect technology integration and technology architecture, identification and adherence to technology standards, employee uncertainties and conflict caused as a result of the M&amp;A, a lack of agreement on the M&amp;A strategy across leadership, identification of the end state goals of the IS&amp;T integration, development and consistent use of an M&amp;A IS&amp;T integration process playbook, and communication process across leadership and employees. The recommendations from the findings for IS&amp;T leadership provide three areas of focus. First, the findings reflect the issues impacting M&amp;A IS&amp;T integration failures. Second, the rich experiences of the participants provide leadership with recommendations on how leaders can prepare for M&amp;A integrations to reduce the potential for failures. Third, the findings provide recommendations on performing an M&amp;A IS&amp;T integration resulting in a reduction of failures including gaining an understanding of previous failures, preparing for, planning, and executing an M&amp;A integration.</p>

<p> Business organizations are faced with an enormous challenge to improve cyber security, as breeches and lapses through firewalls are increasingly commonplace. The Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) and Information Technology (IT) staff are constantly challenged to identify and purge online and network structural weaknesses. The goal is to reduce overall business risk because unresolved risks are a constant concern to consumers who are uneasy about cyber security failures. The purpose of this general qualitative study was to examine the role and impact of Cyber Security Mentoring (CSM) from the perspectives of the workplace CISO, mentors, and prot&eacute;g&eacute;s, who were randomly polled from various workplace settings across the United States. Mentoring allows IT staff members to learn from their CISOs and from workplace mentor mistakes and successes. Workplace IT staff are also closest to the various attack methodologies used by cyber hackers, and cohort and dyadic mentoring may provide insight into and responding to cyber-attacks and improving cyber defenses. Sixty-eight sets of respondent data relating to field experience, formal education, professional industry cyber security certifications, and mentoring were compared and examined between respondents. The goal was to determine where respondents agreed and disagreed on issues pertaining to cyber security and CSM. The findings suggested that CSM with a qualified mentor could improve cyber security in the workplace; in addition, more time must be devoted to continued professional education. Implications for positive social change included the use of CSM to enhance cyber security through the sharing of incidents, mindsets, procedures and expertise, and improvement of customer-consumer security confidence.</p>

<p> Hackers external to the organization continue to wreak havoc upon the information systems infrastructure of firms through breaches of security defenses, despite constant development of and continual investment in new IS security countermeasures by security professionals and vendors. These breaches are exceedingly costly and damaging to the affected organizations. The continued success of hackers in the face of massive amounts of security investments suggests that the defenders are losing and that the hackers can innovate at a much faster pace. </p><p> Underground hacker communities have been shown to be an environment where attackers can learn new techniques and share tools pertaining to the defeat of IS security countermeasures. This research sought to understand the manner in which hackers diffuse innovations within these communities. Employing a multi-site, positivist case study approach of four separate hacking communities, the study examined how hackers develop, communicate, and eventually adopt these new techniques and tools, so as to better inform future attempts at mitigating these attacks. The research found that three classes of change agents are influential in the diffusion and adoption of an innovation: the developer/introducer of the innovation to the community, the senior member of a community, and the author of tutorials. Additionally, the research found that three innovation factors are key to successful diffusion and adoption: the compatibility of the innovation to the needs of the community, the complexity of the innovation, and the change in image conferred upon the member from adopting the innovation. The research also described the process by which innovations are adopted within the hacking communities and detailed phases in this process which are unique to these communities.</p>

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Commerce (M Com) at the University of the Witwatersrand, February 2017 / Information systems development (ISD) project teams are involved in requirements elicitation, analysis, development, testing and deployment of various information technology solutions. These teams often compete with each other for limited resources in an attempt to fulfil their organisational mandate. As a result, project teams can exert power over each other and employ various influence tactics in attempt to gain and maintain positions of power which allow them to control key resources and influence decision making processes. This study examined the strategic environmental and structural conditions of fulfilment which influence the power of ISD project teams, and the extent to which influence tactics can impact on team power level. Data was collected using a structured questionnaire instrument. A sample of 106 teams from five companies was obtained. The companies operate in the financial services and government sectors. A single key informant responded on behalf of their team. Correlation and regression analysis was used to test the hypothesized links between power and the structural conditions of fulfilment namely centrality and substitutability, as well as, the environmental condition of coping with uncertainty. The moderating effects of influence tactics on these relationships was tested via hierarchical moderated regression. Results indicated that the strategic condition of coping with uncertainty significantly and positively affects perceived team power, whilst substitutability significantly and negatively affects perceived team power. Support for the structural condition of centrality was not found to be significant. Additionally, the influence tactic of rational persuasion was found to moderate the relationship between power and coping with uncertainty such that rational persuasion interacts with coping with uncertainty to affect power. Results also indicated that the influence tactic of collaboration was not a moderator but rather has significant direct effects on perceived team power. The study concluded that ISD project teams who cope with project uncertainties and whose tasks and functionalities are difficult to replace, as well as, those who effectively collaborate with other teams will have greater power within project settings. Moreover, ISD project teams can combine rational persuasion tactics with coping with uncertainty to exert even stronger effects on power. The outcomes of this study help to bring an understanding of the impact of the strategic conditions factors on perceived team power within ISD project settings, as well as the role of specific influence tactics in the formation of power. / GR2018

by Lo Wai-kuen, Ng Wai-ming. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1986

by Li Wai Ming. / Thesis (M.B.A.)--Chinese University of Hong Kong, 1996. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 78-79). / ABSTRACT --- p.ii / TABLE OF CONTENTS --- p.iii / LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS --- p.v / PREFACE --- p.vi / Chapter / Chapter I. --- INTRODUCTION --- p.1 / Company Background --- p.1 / Polymers Division --- p.2 / Project Objectives --- p.3 / Methodology --- p.4 / Chapter II --- LITERATURE REVIEW - THE EMERGING CONCEPT & TECHNOLOGY OF EIS --- p.7 / Evolution of EIS --- p.7 / Definition and Characteristics of EIS --- p.9 / The Executive's Role --- p.10 / Chapter III --- REVIEW OF CURRENT SYSTEM AND INFORMATION NEEDS --- p.15 / BPCS - AS/400 --- p.15 / Personal Computer Usage --- p.17 / Local Area Network --- p.17 / Management Information System --- p.18 / Limitations of Current Management Information System --- p.19 / Information Needs of Executives --- p.20 / Chapter IV --- CONCEPTUAL DESIGN OF THE EIS --- p.23 / Addressing Problems of the Current MIS --- p.23 / New System --- p.24 / Chapter V --- SELECTION OF TOOLS --- p.26 / Considerations for Hardware and Software Selection --- p.26 / Client Server Concept --- p.28 / Microsoft Visual Basic 3.0 for Windows & Microsoft SQL Server4.21 --- p.29 / Potential Problems --- p.34 / Chapter VI --- COST ESTIMATION --- p.36 / Hardware --- p.36 / Software --- p.36 / Personnel Cost --- p.36 / Time Frame of Development --- p.37 / Chapter VII --- RESOURCE ALLOCATION --- p.38 / Existing Computing Resources in PO Division --- p.38 / Chapter VIII --- DESIGNING THE EIS INTERFACE AND DATABASE STRUCTURE OF THE NEW SYSTEM --- p.40 / User Interface --- p.41 / Information Provided by the System --- p.41 / Database Structure --- p.42 / Data Security --- p.43 / Chapter IX --- DISCUSSION --- p.44 / Implementation Problems --- p.44 / Evaluation --- p.45 / Chapter X --- CONCLUSION --- p.48 / APPENDIX --- p.53 / BIBLIOGRAPHY --- p.78

The key theme of this research is the planning and management of information security and in particular, the research focuses on the involvement of information stakeholders in this process. The main objective of the research is to study the ownership of, and acceptance of responsibility for, information security measures by stakeholders having an interest in that information.

A major challenge to achieving business process agility is the fragmentation of business processes, especially in organizations with semiautonomous business units. This fragmentation manifests itself in the form of diversified business processes performing similar activities. To address this challenge and achieve synergies across business units, processes should be integrated. Extant research on business process management has not paid much attention to such integration. Motivated by this concern, the primary objectives of my research are: “1) to understand how integration of similar business processes is achieved by semiautonomous business units and 2) to develop a process modeling support system that can help find similarities among business process models to aid process designers and to empirically evaluate its effectiveness in supporting process modeling activities.” I use a two-phased approach to address above objectives. In the first phase, I draw upon the analytic concept of frames of reference to develop a socio-cognitive process model to understand cognitive processes of stakeholders involved in the business process integration. This is done by analyzing the shifts in frame salience and frame congruence to enable the development of common-yet-tailorable business process. Data collection was conducted at ManCo, a Fortune 500 manufacturing company that had undertaken a process integration initiative in its multi-billion dollar supply chain across its five business units. Using qualitative data analysis, I identify four frame domains. Shifts in the frame salience and congruence highlight how, through a series of events, process stakeholders bring about integration. Frames domains identified in phase 1 highlight how individual business units’ perceptions differ. The use of diverse terminologies to refer to similar concepts added to the inability of process designers to reuse existing process models. These observations motivated the design research conducted in the second phase. I develop a prototype system, BPSimilar, which helps users to retrieve semantically similar process models. The approach to retrieve process models combines structural and semantic similarity-matching. The need for such a mechanism to speed up the model development was suggested by the case study. The effectiveness of BPSimilar for improving performance of users is evaluated in a qualitative study using verbal protocol analysis.

Understanding individual adaptation to Information Systems (IS) has received relatively little attention in IS research. For furthering these issues, a multi-paper dissertation is adopted and studies distinct aspects of user interaction with IT related with adaptation. Thus, in order to better understand how system users adapt to IT disruptions this study examines (1) how system users who become disrupted by IS that provide them with too much information interact with these systems, (2) the influence of espoused cultural values (Srite et al. 2006) on user coping strategies of adaptation to IS, and (3) middle managers responses to the implementation of disruptive IT in public administration. These dissertation studies together help improve our knowledge on individual adaptive responses to IT disruptions.