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.

An automatic deception detection system (ADDS) is to detect deceptive human behavior with machine extractable evidences (i.e., cues). One of the most prominent challenges for building a ADDS is the availability of reliable cues. This study represents one of the first attempts to address the system's reliability by identifying the set of reliable cues in order to improve the system performance (detection accuracy).This study addresses two critical challenges of existing machine cues, irreproducibility and inconsistency. First, in order to mitigate the irreproducibility, the study introduces a set of machine measurable cues to estimate the commonality of related machine cues. These more reproducible cues are referred to as the macro cues which can be applied for automatic pattern recognition. Second, in order to address the consistency, the study separates cues based on the controllability, and defines the strategic cues as those can easily be manipulated by deceivers during interaction. The strategic cues fluctuate during deception and thus are less consistently reliable as predictors for the ADDS. On the contrary, the nonstrategic cues are more consistent. This study also considers other moderator effects that influencing the ADDS performance: time and the condition of interviewer's immediacy (ERIMD).The macro cues are automatically estimated from the micro cues based on the predefined relational models. The empirical data support the relationship models between macro and micro cues. Results show that macro cues mitigate the irreproducibility problem by reducing the variability in the single cues. However, the results also show that using macro cues as predictors in the discriminant analysis does not perform better than micro cues, and thus imply the needs to adjust weights of important components when constructing the macro cues. In terms of the consistent cues, results show that the nonstrategic cues are relatively more consistent than strategic ones in ADDS performance. Furthermore, the study suggests that particular detection methods must be tailored according to the feature of strategic and nonstrategic cues. The findings have many potential implications. One is to use the macro cues to recognize the dynamic patterns in deceptive behaviors. Specifically, truthtellers increase the certainty, immediacy, and tend to decrease the cognitive load; but deceivers behave the opposite. The other is to rely on the characteristics of strategic cues to manipulate the communication environment to improve the ADDS performance. This concept is also referred to as the Proactive Deception Detection (PDD). In the current study, the interviewer's immediacy is a controllable environment factor for PDD. The high ERIMD increase the system performance because it has higher overhead added to the deceptive behavior to trigger more abnormal cues. In sum, methods and results of this study have multiple impacts in information assurance and human-computer interaction.

Previous studies have explored self-verification theory to explain the relationship between self-verification and relationship conflict in collocated teams. This study expanded the application of self-verification theory in distributed team environments. More specifically, this study investigated the effects of similarity of personal identities on self-verification and the effects of self-verification on relationship conflict in both collocated and distributed teams. In addition to the self-verification theory, other identity related theories and communication theories were used to develop the hypotheses and to analyze the results. The hypotheses subsequently were tested using Partial Least Squares models. Participants of this study were members of one of the collocated or distributed engineering design teams. The findings show evidence of the moderation of team type on the relationship between self-verification and relationship conflict. The findings suggest that similarity of personal identities positively affects self-verification in collocated teams but not in distributed teams. Self-verification, in turn, reduces relationship conflict in collocated teams and increases relationship conflict in distributed teams. The implications of the findings on the theories, especially self-verification theory, are discussed.

This dissertation studies how information technologies, such as automatic question answering (QA), can add interactivity into a multimedia-based e-learning system and turn it into a "virtual mentor" to provide students with interactive, one-on-one instruction. It also explores the key factors of making such a "virtual mentor" as effective as a real mentor.Based on a review of multiple learning theories and technologies, an exploratory model for studying the effectiveness of interactive e-learning, named "Learning with Virtual Mentors (LVM)", is proposed and a prototype system is developed to implement the LVM model. A series of studies, including controlled experiments and surveys have been conducted to explore the relationships among the core constructs of the LVM model: learning phases, system interactivity, learner characteristics, learning activity and learning outcomes.Findings indicate that learning phases and some learner characteristics such as learning style affect students' behaviors, performance, and perceptions in e-learningpartly as we expected. Furthermore, the virtual interaction impacts student behaviors, encouraging students to interact more and increasing student satisfaction with the learning process. However, the correlation between virtual interaction and actual learning performance is limited. Consequently, the LVM model needs to be further explored and developed.

More and more organizations are starting to use workflow management systems (WfMS) to monitor, control and manage business processes. However, currently available commercial workflow systems are rather rigid and cannot meet the requirements of a dynamic and fast-changing business. Exception handling capabilities of the systems are very limited. Some research work has been done to address the issue by extending database technologies in workflow domain. In this thesis, we begin with a brief review of some main workflow concepts and do a survey of current research work on exception handling. We propose a leveled workflow model based on Micro-Organization Activity Processor (MOAP) and Object-Oriented Workflow Model (OOWM), which is an extension of Object-Oriented Enterprise Modeling (OOEM). The MOAP construct is extended with a goal concept and the OOEM service concept. We then propose a mechanism for exception handling which utilizes artificial intelligence technologies such as means-end analysis. We further demonstrate the functionalities and exception handling processes with a web-based simulator by applying some workflow exception cases.