Effectiveness of policy on digital transformation in Kenya's national goverment : Huduma service delivery case study

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the field of ICT Policy and Regulation“Flagship projects” is a hackneyed phrase that features prominently in Kenya’s government policy documents. Yet soon after their unveiling, some of these projects, notably ICT projects have stagnated or diverged from their core objectives as outlined in the said documents. Combining two established theoretical approaches, Hanna’s (2016a) digital transformation approach and McConnell’s (2010b) policy-as-a-programme framework, this study makes an original contribution to address the gap in literature and policy analysis, by tackling the complementarities in thinking about digital transformation as a programme and policy as a programme as it relates to Kenya’s Huduma citizen service experience. Employing a multi-method case study, including 20 key informant interviews, one 7-person focus group, observations at Nairobi’s City Square Huduma Centre and Huduma’s Network Operations Centre, and analysis of 18 policy documents relevant to this study, the research found that most digital innovation projects emphasised technology, while neglecting other key elements in the digital transformation space. However, the Huduma programme was different in that it paid due attention to several framework elements namely, policies and institutions, ICT infrastructure, ICT industry, human capital and public value, resulting into the category of resilient success. The analysis emphasises that sustainable digital transformation of public services can only be realised if all the transformational elements are prioritised in order to fit into the citizen’s way of life and integrate the Kenyan government’s “islands of automation”. The study makes a case for a “whole-ofgovernment” (WoG) digital transformation that extends beyond flagship projects. This will require creating and fostering collaborative leadership structures to enable digital transformation across national government ministries, departments and agencies, encouraged by youthful, highly-trained, non-political, professional leadership, and continuous learning in order to inculcate policy effectiveness and sustainability of digital transformation as a culture in all facets of national government. Key words: Digital transformation, effectiveness, policy, Huduma programmeGR201

Transforming Developing Countries Agrifood Value Chains

The global agrifood trade is highly reliant on developing countries, which affects value chain transformation and which often results in an imbalance of governance and value addition. In order to address this imbalance and increase the overall value creation, this paper develops and empirically tests a framework for agrifood value chain transformation in developing countries. The research employs a qualitative methodology to explore the proposed framework, which is based on a value chain maturity assessment of current practice and identification of a transformation route. Three primary value chain maturity levels in developing countries are established: traditional, managed, and best practice. Each level is determined using key indicators relating to governance (vertical-horizontal coordination, and information flow) and value addition (value orientation, safety, and quality). The application of this framework to Indonesia’s cashew nuts value chain reveals a mix of traditional and managed practices. The short-medium term transformation focuses on enabling farmers, as the decoupled actors, to advance from a traditional to a more managed chain. Further, the major wholesaler and exporter are identified as highly influential in driving the transformation process. The long-term transformation focuses on developing best practices regarding branded value addition and collaborative governance. This framework offers a novel value chain transformation approach based on a maturity assessment technique leading to the identification of transformation routes. This method takes a holistic transformation approach via the evaluation all the value chain actors’ governance and value-addition capabilities. Follow-up research is required to identify the enablers and barriers of globalised value chain transformation, especially with respect to sustainability

Automated Cell Treatment for Competence and Transformation of Escherichia coli in a High-Throughput Quasi-Turbidostat Using Microtiter Plates

Metabolic engineering and genome editing strategies often lead to large strain libraries of a bacterial host. Nevertheless, the generation of competent cells is the basis for transformation and subsequent screening of these strains. While preparation of competent cells is a standard procedure in flask cultivations, parallelization becomes a challenging task when working with larger libraries and liquid handling stations as transformation efficiency depends on a distinct physiological state of the cells. We present a robust method for the preparation of competent cells and their transformation. The strength of the method is that all cells on the plate can be maintained at a high growth rate until all cultures have reached a defined cell density regardless of growth rate and lag phase variabilities. This allows sufficient transformation in automated high throughput facilities and solves important scheduling issues in wet-lab library screenings. We address the problem of different growth rates, lag phases, and initial cell densities inspired by the characteristics of continuous cultures. The method functions on a fully automated liquid handling platform including all steps from the inoculation of the liquid cultures to plating and incubation on agar plates. The key advantage of the developed method is that it enables cell harvest in 96 well plates at a predefined time by keeping fast growing cells in the exponential phase as in turbidostat cultivations. This is done by a periodic monitoring of cell growth and a controlled dilution specific for each well. With the described methodology, we were able to transform different strains in parallel. The transformants produced can be picked and used in further automated screening experiments. This method offers the possibility to transform any combination of strain- and plasmid library in an automated high-throughput system, overcoming an important bottleneck in the high-throughput screening and the overall chain of bioprocess development.BMBF, 031L0018A, ERASysApp2 - Verbundprojekt: LEANPROT - Entwicklung einer Systembiologie-Plattform für die Entwicklung von lean-proteome-Escherichia coli-Stämmen - Deutsches Teilprojekt

DRIMET: Deep Registration for 3D Incompressible Motion Estimation in Tagged-MRI with Application to the Tongue

Tagged magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) has been used for decades to observe and quantify the detailed motion of deforming tissue. However, this technique faces several challenges such as tag fading, large motion, long computation times, and difficulties in obtaining diffeomorphic incompressible flow fields. To address these issues, this paper presents a novel unsupervised phase-based 3D motion estimation technique for tagged MRI. We introduce two key innovations. First, we apply a sinusoidal transformation to the harmonic phase input, which enables end-to-end training and avoids the need for phase interpolation. Second, we propose a Jacobian determinant-based learning objective to encourage incompressible flow fields for deforming biological tissues. Our method efficiently estimates 3D motion fields that are accurate, dense, and approximately diffeomorphic and incompressible. The efficacy of the method is assessed using human tongue motion during speech, and includes both healthy controls and patients that have undergone glossectomy. We show that the method outperforms existing approaches, and also exhibits improvements in speed, robustness to tag fading, and large tongue motion.Comment: Accepted to MIDL 2023 (full paper

Affine Registration of label maps in Label Space

Two key aspects of coupled multi-object shape\ud analysis and atlas generation are the choice of representation\ud and subsequent registration methods used to align the sample\ud set. For example, a typical brain image can be labeled into\ud three structures: grey matter, white matter and cerebrospinal\ud fluid. Many manipulations such as interpolation, transformation,\ud smoothing, or registration need to be performed on these images\ud before they can be used in further analysis. Current techniques\ud for such analysis tend to trade off performance between the two\ud tasks, performing well for one task but developing problems when\ud used for the other.\ud This article proposes to use a representation that is both\ud flexible and well suited for both tasks. We propose to map object\ud labels to vertices of a regular simplex, e.g. the unit interval for\ud two labels, a triangle for three labels, a tetrahedron for four\ud labels, etc. This representation, which is routinely used in fuzzy\ud classification, is ideally suited for representing and registering\ud multiple shapes. On closer examination, this representation\ud reveals several desirable properties: algebraic operations may\ud be done directly, label uncertainty is expressed as a weighted\ud mixture of labels (probabilistic interpretation), interpolation is\ud unbiased toward any label or the background, and registration\ud may be performed directly.\ud We demonstrate these properties by using label space in a gradient\ud descent based registration scheme to obtain a probabilistic\ud atlas. While straightforward, this iterative method is very slow,\ud could get stuck in local minima, and depends heavily on the initial\ud conditions. To address these issues, two fast methods are proposed\ud which serve as coarse registration schemes following which the\ud iterative descent method can be used to refine the results. Further,\ud we derive an analytical formulation for direct computation of the\ud "group mean" from the parameters of pairwise registration of all\ud the images in the sample set. We show results on richly labeled\ud 2D and 3D data sets

A strategic leadership framework for successful digital transformation: perspectives on leadership behaviors, styles & organisation culture

The purpose of this study is to explore the experiences and perspectives of senior leaders who have led successful digital transformation in Malaysia to develop an in-depth understanding of key leadership behaviors, style(s) and organisation culture required to lead successful digital transformation. The main objective of this research is to a) identify the key leadership behaviors that influence successful digital transformation b) explore the key leadership style(s) that influence successful digital transformation c) examine the organisation culture that influence successful digital transformation d) investigate how leadership behaviors, style(s) and organisation culture influence successful digital transformation. The main research questions that this study aims to address is: a) what are the key leadership behaviors that influence successful digital transformation? b) what are the key leadership style(s) that influence successful digital transformation? c) what are the organisation culture that influence successful digital transformation? d) how these leadership behaviors, style(s) and organisation culture influence successful digital transformation? A qualitative research method is chosen to collect the data. Interviews was conducted with C-suite executives and head of business units from multiple industries using open-ended question to address the main research questions. The specific data collection and analysis methods used was thematic analysis using inductive research approach that allowed for in-depth exploration of behaviors, style(s) and culture involved in leading successful digital transformation. The findings showed 14 interrelated key components to lead successful digital transformation in Malaysia. A framework that depicts the 14 interrelated components organised into three dimensions: leadership behavior, style(s) and organisation culture that are important to lead successful digital transformation in Malaysia was developed that can benefit a) future leaders of organisations who are already successful in digital transformation b) leaders who are currently taking initiatives to transform their organisation or are considering starting a digital transformation journey c) small and medium sized enterprises, internal and third party change agents who are working with all level leaders in an organisation