A cloud business intelligence security evaluation framework for small and medium enterprises

Cloud business intelligence has practical importance in data management and decision-making, but the adoption and use among South African small and medium enterprises remain relatively low compared to large business enterprises. The low uptake persists irrespective of the awareness and acceptance of the benefits of Cloud business intelligence in the business domain. Cloud business intelligence depends on the cloud computing paradigm, which is susceptible to security threats and risks that decision-makers must consider when selecting what applications to use. The major objective of this study was to propose a security evaluation framework for Cloud business intelligence suitable for use by small and medium enterprises in small South African towns. The study utilised the exploratory sequential mixed-method research methodology with decision-makers from five towns in the Limpopo Province. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used to analyse the data. The findings show that the level of adoption of Cloud business intelligence in the five selected towns was lower than reported in the literature, and decision-makers were eager to adopt and use safe Cloud business intelligence, but this was hindered by their inability to evaluate security in these applications. Factors preventing the adoption of Cloud business intelligence were decision-makers’ limited knowledge of the applications and security evaluation, the inability to use industry security frameworks and standards due to their complexities, mistrust of cloud service providers in meeting their obligations when providing agreed services, and lack of security specialists to assist in the evaluation process. Small and medium enterprises used unapproved security evaluation methods, such as relying on friends who were not information technology security specialists. A security evaluation framework and checklists were proposed based on the findings of the study and the best practices of the existing industry frameworks and standards. The proposed security evaluation framework was validated for relevance by information technology security specialists and acceptance by small and medium enterprise decision-makers. The study concluded that the adoption and use of Cloud business intelligence were hindered by the lack of a user-friendly security evaluation framework and limited security evaluation knowledge among decision-makers. Furthermore, the study concluded that the proposed framework and checklists were a relevant solution as they were accepted as useful to assist decision-makers to select appropriate Cloud business intelligence for their enterprises. The main contribution of this study is the proposed security evaluation framework and the checklists for Cloud business intelligence, for use by decision-makers in small and medium enterprises in small South African towns in the Limpopo Province.School of ComputingPh. D. (Information Systems

Feeling Safe on a Fluffy Cloud “ How Cloud Security and Commitment Affect Users™ Switching Intention

Why do users quit using an IT system? This paper focuses on the last sequence of the Information Systems lifecycle, namely the termination phase. The authors discuss the termination phase in the context of social-psychological findings on real world rela

Vista: April 18, 2013

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Cultivating Affinity and Influence Through Digital Communications: Insights to Enhance Millennial Workforce Engagement

Since the turn of the century, the U.S. has undergone significant cultural events and societal changes which have shaped the millennial generation as they came-of-age and transitioned into adulthood. From the 2008 financial recession crisis to the COVID-19 pandemic that began in March of 2020 and increasing diversification driven by transnational migration, these milestone events and changes have influenced how millennials think, behave, and act. Unlike prior generations, millennials are younger, more diverse, and aging into the dominant U.S. workforce cohort. This is an important topic because firms must recalibrate how to secure employee loyalty from the evolving millennial generation to reduce attrition and better compete in a quickly changing market. The purpose of this research is to study how technology firms can cultivate affinity and apply persuasive messaging in marketing and communication tactics to influence how millennial employees find value, connection, and engagement with their employers. This research seeks to address the gap that lies between what technology firms seek to establish (cultivate affinity and loyalty) and why (secure workforce retention). Persuasive communication tactics, informed by scholarly psychology and marketing research to influence perceptions or behaviors, can answer how. Analyses will inform a best practice guide on how to develop strategic communication plans and messages to foster value, connection, and engagement between evolving diverse millennial employees and their technology firm employers.Master of Arts in Digital Communicatio

Living with Suicide: Collective Narrative Practice with People Experiencing Ongoing Suicidality

Introduction: Thousands die by suicide each year, and many more live with suicidal thoughts, feelings and acts. Suicide and suicidality are often conceptualised as symptoms of pathology, with the focus on treating mental illness and research participants recruited from healthcare settings. Little research has focused on what it is like to live with ongoing suicidality in the community or on how people narrate suicidality. This study aimed to explore how people live with suicidality over time, with the intention of creating collective resources from people’s narratives. Methods: A collective narrative project with contributors recruited via a community group and informal networks. Each contributor had ongoing experience of suicidality. Data was collected in interviews and group workshops. Data was analysed using dialogical narrative analysis. Collective resources are being produced from the shared narratives, in collaboration with contributors. Findings: Living with suicide was often characterised by experiences of abuse, neglect, rejection and discrimination, across multiple domains in life. People experience suicidality as a response, and sometimes a resistance, to suffering. Shame and stigmatised identities were central to people’s narratives of suicidality. Finding ways to be accepted and valued as a ‘whole’ person counteracted the diminishing effects of shame and stigma. People narrated epistemic injustice as a result of dominant framings of suicide as pathological. Finding value in lived experience and advocating for change were meaningful narratives offering ‘reasonable hope’ to participants. Conclusion: Stigma and epistemic injustice were powerful forces in people’s narratives of suicidality. A more relational understanding of suicidality as a response to unjust suffering and a resistance to dominant narratives of suicide as pathological are key to creating a more socially just approach to suicidality. Future research should adopt collective and participatory methods to co-create ways of responding to suicidality with people who have lived experience

Personality Identification from Social Media Using Deep Learning: A Review

Social media helps in sharing of ideas and information among people scattered around the world and thus helps in creating communities, groups, and virtual networks. Identification of personality is significant in many types of applications such as in detecting the mental state or character of a person, predicting job satisfaction, professional and personal relationship success, in recommendation systems. Personality is also an important factor to determine individual variation in thoughts, feelings, and conduct systems. According to the survey of Global social media research in 2018, approximately 3.196 billion social media users are in worldwide. The numbers are estimated to grow rapidly further with the use of mobile smart devices and advancement in technology. Support vector machine (SVM), Naive Bayes (NB), Multilayer perceptron neural network, and convolutional neural network (CNN) are some of the machine learning techniques used for personality identification in the literature review. This paper presents various studies conducted in identifying the personality of social media users with the help of machine learning approaches and the recent studies that targeted to predict the personality of online social media (OSM) users are reviewed

Designing the domestic Internet of Things using a practice-orientated perspective

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of sensing, actuating and networked objects, often discussed as delivering efficiency through machine determined, automated decision making and action to achieve ‘Smartness’ in a logistically based paradigm. When applied to the domestic space these values are touted as beneficially controlling lighting, heating and entertainment to improve efficiency and comfort, while reducing costs. This approach follows the external goods of effectiveness, reducing everything to an objective value/cost proposition; however, the home is a subjectively experienced space incorporating differing values, so this reductive perspective overlooks a wider spectrum of inhabitant’s concerns relating to their daily activities and the domestic space. Furthermore, this approach can supplant involvement in domestic activities by treating these as computable problems to solve, alienating users through automation, a lack of transparency and poor understanding of the reasoning behind machine decision making. Existing attempts to address this topic indicate Techno-Centric approaches impact on understanding and engagement with the domestic space; Human-Centric perspectives focus on supporting people’s subjective experiences by prioritising their activities, sense-making and sensory experiences within the design process; Beyond Human-Centric IoT perspectives broaden this understanding to propose non-hierarchical, flat ontologies for the IoT and the implications this has on integrating human/non-human agency in the IoT, generally and domestically. This supported an approach utilising Practice Theory, a development of organising concepts for theorising social life, with sociality dependent on activities conducted with materials to develop a coherent sense of self and which understands place as a meshwork of human/non-human agency. Practice Theory is applied within a Design Research approach using a synergistic Participatory Action Research (PAR) / Participatory Design (PD) process. Exploring Domestic Practices contextualised the IoT through a range of methods including interactive installations, interviews and design workshops, uncovering participant attitudes towards the IoT, generating Practice Themes and specific examples of practices and constituent elements. These acted as User Generated Values (UGV) in a Values-Led PD process to inform the project pathway and the conceptualisation of a Practice-Oriented IoT through PAR’s Action-Reflection spirals. Additionally, a parallel PD process explored the effective communication of UGV within Professional Design Practice (PDP) workshops with the intent of reducing communicative distance between end-users and developers, supporting communication of user’s attitudes towards the IoT and Practice within PDP through inclusion as guiding values. Models of the IoT balancing Practice and technical concerns, workshops and toolkit were developed iteratively, leading to an outcome modelling the IoT and Practice within a flat ontology. Through this, and by embedding Practice within the IoT itself, IoT agency was reframed from automation towards assistiveness in Practice and IoT values shifted from efficiency in external goods of effectiveness towards internally derived goods of excellence, supporting skill development, engagement and reflection on action. This identifies the value of using PAR and PD to consider people’s values, goals and existing practices when developing the domestic IoT. This was particularly valuable in exploring Practice to understand people’s activities in the home and contextualise attitudes towards the IoT. This informed the development of a framework balancing the IoT’s technological nature with people’s activities and values, a system guided by Practice elements reciprocally informing and supporting participant engagement in dynamically developing domestic practices

Pinching sweaters on your phone – iShoogle : multi-gesture touchscreen fabric simulator using natural on-fabric gestures to communicate textile qualities

The inability to touch fabrics online frustrates consumers, who are used to evaluating physical textiles by engaging in complex, natural gestural interactions. When customers interact with physical fabrics, they combine cross-modal information about the fabric's look, sound and handle to build an impression of its physical qualities. But whenever an interaction with a fabric is limited (i.e. when watching clothes online) there is a perceptual gap between the fabric qualities perceived digitally and the actual fabric qualities that a person would perceive when interacting with the physical fabric. The goal of this thesis was to create a fabric simulator that minimized this perceptual gap, enabling accurate perception of the qualities of fabrics presented digitally. We designed iShoogle, a multi-gesture touch-screen sound-enabled fabric simulator that aimed to create an accurate representation of fabric qualities without the need for touching the physical fabric swatch. iShoogle uses on-screen gestures (inspired by natural on-fabric movements e.g. Crunching) to control pre-recorded videos and audio of fabrics being deformed (e.g. being Crunched). iShoogle creates an illusion of direct video manipulation and also direct manipulation of the displayed fabric. This thesis describes the results of nine studies leading towards the development and evaluation of iShoogle. In the first three studies, we combined expert and non-expert textile-descriptive words and grouped them into eight dimensions labelled with terms Crisp, Hard, Soft, Textured, Flexible, Furry, Rough and Smooth. These terms were used to rate fabric qualities throughout the thesis. We observed natural on-fabric gestures during a fabric handling study (Study 4) and used the results to design iShoogle's on-screen gestures. In Study 5 we examined iShoogle's performance and speed in a fabric handling task and in Study 6 we investigated users' preferences for sound playback interactivity. iShoogle's accuracy was then evaluated in the last three studies by comparing participants’ ratings of textile qualities when using iShoogle with ratings produced when handling physical swatches. We also described the recording and processing techniques for the video and audio content that iShoogle used. Finally, we described the iShoogle iPhone app that was released to the general public. Our evaluation studies showed that iShoogle significantly improved the accuracy of fabric perception in at least some cases. Further research could investigate which fabric qualities and which fabrics are particularly suited to be represented with iShoogle