Data warehouse - opportunity for local authorities

Local government exists in a very complex organizational environment, which has been subjected to an ever increasing pace of changes. This situation has generated a huge impact on the local government's reaction towards two major elements in is administration - decision making and technology approaching. The data warehouse technology offers a solution to this problem. But there are various obstacles that inhibit the government from adopting this technology

Internal Controls After Sarbanes-Oxley: Revisiting Corporate Law\u27s Duty of Care as Responsibility for Systems

Revisiting section 3.4.2 of Clark\u27s Corporate Law (\u27Duty of Care as Responsibility for Systems ) reminds us, however, that the internal controls story actually goes back many decades, and that many of the strategic issues that are at the heart of section 404 have long been contentious. My Article will briefly update Clark\u27s account through the late 1980s and 1990s before returning to Sarbanes-Oxley and rulemaking thereunder by the SEC and the newly created Public Company Accounting Oversight Board ( PCAOB ). My main point builds on one of Clark\u27s but digs deeper. Internal controls requirements, whether federal or state, are incoherent unless and until one articulates clearly for whose benefit they exist, and to what end. There are, in fact, a number of competing articulations. The failure to identify a single and coherent rationale creates significant uncertainty, which has been exploited by players in the legal, accounting, consulting, and information technology fields. Companies are probably spending more time and resources on 404 compliance than a reasonable reading of the legislation and the rules necessarily requires, heavily influenced by those who gain from issuer over-compliance. This rent-seeking compromises the political viability and substantive quality of what is at the heart a beneficial statutory reform

Information systems evaluation: Mini-track introduction

abreast of technological innovations. Yet, companies are becoming more aware that a competitive advantage can not be achieved, or even maintained by utilizing the latest technology. Indeed, it is becoming more apparent that a strategic competitive advantage will not be achieved through embraced technology alone but, in the way companies approach the evaluation, management and exploitation of their human, organizational and technology based assets and infrastructure. In support of this, Sohal et al. (2001) reported the results of a large-scale survey that demonstrated the limited Information Technology (IT) enabled business benefits resulting in service and manufacturing sectors. The survey highlighted that many of the benefits achieved through adopting IT/IS were limited to improvements in productivity and cost alone. Clearly, such results are surprising given the emphasis the normative literature has placed on the strategic benefits achievable from IT/IS. As a result of the far reaching conclusions reported by Sohal et al. (2001), many organisational have begun to question the scope and depth of those IT-enabled business benefits that are not achieved by those companies proactively adopting IT/IS

Expanding software process improvement models beyond the software process itself

Bibliography: pages 182-188.The problems besetting software development and maintenance are well recorded and numerous strategies have been adopted over the years to overcome the so-called "software crisis". One increasingly popular strategy focuses on managing the processes by which software is built, maintained and managed. As such, many software organisations see software process improvement initiatives as an important strategy to help them improve their software development and maintenance performance. Two of the more popular software process improvement (SPI) models used by the software industry to help them in this endeavour are the Capability Maturity Model for Software (SW-CMM) from the Software Engineering Institute and the Software Process Improvement and Capability determination (SPICE) model from the International Standards Organisation. This research begins with the supposition that, although these SPI models have added significant value to many organisations, they have a potential shortcoming in that they tend to focus almost exclusively on the software process itself and seem to neglect other organisational aspects that could contribute to improved software development and maintenance performance. This research is concerned with exploring this potential shortcoming and identifying complementary improvement areas that the SW -CMM and SPICE models fail to address adequately. A theoretical framework for extending the SW-CMM and SPICE models is proposed. Thereafter complementary improvement areas are identified and integrated with the SW-CMM and SPICE models to develop an Extended SPI Model. This Extended SPI Model adopts a systemic view of software process and IS organisational improvement by addressing a wide range of complementary improvement considerations. A case study of an SPI project is described, with the specific objective of testing and refining the Extended SPI Model. The results seem to indicate that the framework and Extended SPI Model are largely valid, although a few changes were made in light of the findings of the case study. Finally, the implications of the research for both theory and practice are discussed

Research Perspective in Enterprise Architecture

The challenges of aligning IT with business triggered the attention towards Enterprise Architecture (EA). Despite the increase interest of academic scholars in EA, there is scarcity of studies that provide an up to date comprehensive research perspective view. The purpose of this study is to examine the research methodologies and theories utilized in EA studies from 2010 to 2016. The study employed Systematic Literature Review (SLR) as method to explore and analyze the literature of EA. The study revealed the research approaches and data collection methods utilized in EA. It shows that case study approach and interviews are the highly used compared to other research approaches and data collection instruments. Furthermore, it pointed out the low employment of theories in EA studies. The study is contributing to the body of knowledge by providing a foundation for novice researchers in the area of EA through detailed discussions of research methodologies and theories which are expected to support them in designing future studies

ERP Systems in Croatian Enterprises

Successful implementation of the ERP system enables the management to integrate all business processes and functions, thus increasing the company\u27s competitive advantage in today\u27s turbulent market. Considering potential benefits of ERP system implementation, companies decide to invest significant financial resources and time to implement ERP system. However, there are still a number of projects of ERP system implementation that failed due to various critical success factors, which are quoted in the literature. Since the application of ERP systems is one of the key indicators highlighted by the European Commission under the Digital Agenda for Europe (EU 2020), which sets the European Union\u27s (EU) growth targets by 2020, it is important to make the analysis of the status of the ERP system use in the Republic of Croatia. Given that critical factors of the successful ERP implementation are investigated to a lesser extent in the Republic of Croatia, the aim of this paper is to find out which companies in the Republic of Croatia consider the most important critical success factors, taking into account the specificities of business in relation to the developed countries, and possible differences in attitudes among large companies and medium and small businesses. For this purpose, an online questionnaire survey was carried out and a comparative analysis among large companies and medium and small enterprises was conducted using the Mann-Whitney U test

The role of organisational culture during the implementation of internal succession planning within Malaysian research universities

Succession planning is not new to academia and many institutions have supported these programs for years. Few, however, have adopted formal succession planning strategies that are both strategic and deliberate and encompass the full spectrum of succession planning activities. However, less is understood about the role of culture on succession planning within public universities in Malaysia. Nevertheless; there is an absence of a comprehensive conceptual model of the culture-succession relationship in the literature that includes the impact of moderators such as national culture. A mixed mode design was adopted by the study where qualitative data was first collected, analyzed and then used to develop a survey instrument for the quantitative phase of the study. The study surveyed 375 academic staff of the five research universities in Malaysia, and the results were analyzed using the IBM SPSS for Windows and PLS-SEM. A structural model was built to identify the relationship between the organisational culture and succession planning and the moderating effect of the national culture in public research universities. The study's findings showed that succession planning is still new to public universities in Malaysia and training and development are still unstructured. Although there was a positive and significant relationship between organisational culture and succession planning, whereas, findings suggested national culture showed a moderating effect on the relationship of organisational culture and succession planning. The model can help to analyze organisational culture in order to change the Malaysian public universities’ strategy to implement succession planning