Information Systems: A House Divided?

Is the IS discipline a single discipline that focuses on both behavioral (BIS) and technical (TIS) topics, or is it two disciplines split between these orientations? Current opinion emphasizes BIS and reinforces the notion that researchers practice research in disconnected silos as opposed to a relatively continuous web. Such silos do disservice to the diversity of scholarly interests, skew productivity expectations in favor of small subsets of journals that often exclude technical- and decision science-oriented journals, and run the risk of creating self-perpetuating journal groupings. Silos disadvantage IS researchers by making the discipline narrower in comparison to other business disciplines and contradict the nature of IS pedagogy that equally reflects technology and management. We applied social network and cross-citation analyses to a sample of 98 IS journals to examine the cohesiveness of IS and to understand the extent to which boundary-spanning journals maintain scholarly connections between the approaches. Distinguishing between weak and strong ties among journals, we found that a discipline that comprises both BIS and TIS journals is highly cohesive in terms of weaker ties and that many boundary-spanning journals are quite balanced in their citations to and from each orientation. However, we did not find that IS is uniformly cohesive. Even so, our findings imply that IS scholars with different interests can parse out distinct subsets of journals that are central to their interests. We demonstrate as much by examining the most central journals for three examples of IS scholars: those with a strongly behavioral approach, with sociotechnical interests, and with specialized interests, such as medical informatics. The most central journals for these three interests are distinct subsets of the IS discipline

Factors influencing the quality of decision-making using business intelligence in Hulamin-KZN.

Master’s degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban.The current study sought to investigate the factors that affect decision-making by use of business intelligence (BI). Specifically, the study was focused on information quality, system quality and BI service quality. Business intelligence uses organisational data, performs analytical functions and provides decision makers with high quality information to support decision-making. This quantitative study, based on the researcher’s experience of BI, was carried out in a selected manufacturing organisation which recently implemented business intelligence in KwaZulu-Natal. The study used a self-administered survey sent out to participants who used business intelligence so as to gather data on their perception of these variables on the quality of decision-making. All the employees of the organisation with sufficient report runs made the population of the study. The collected data came from different levels of employees, namely managers (47%) and nonmanagers (53%) with varying levels of BI experience. The results were imported into SPSS for analysis. The data showed that information quality had a positive significant impact on the quality of decision-making; system quality had a positive significant impact on the quality of decisionmaking; and BI service had a positive significant impact on the quality of decision- making. Thereafter, a conducted multiple linear regression analysis to determine the strength of these variances in influencing decision-making revealed that the three variables explained 65.7% of the variance in the quality of decision-making. Overall, the study found that high quality information, coupled with a high-quality system and good BI service, leads to a higher quality of decisionmaking, and that the impact of BI on decision-making is positive. This finding concurs reviewed literature

Managing Enterprise Systems Post Implementation through Competency Centers: An Inquiry into Assemblage and Emergence

Enterprise Systems (ESs) are more than a collection of people, technology, processes, and capabilities. The responsibilities of post implementation management of ES lie in the unit called the Competency Center (CC). The CC has a bidirectional relationship with ESs wherein the CC influences the shaping of ESs, and the CC is affected by the dynamic interaction between people, technology, process, and capabilities within the ES. These dynamic interactions keep the CC, fluid and always in-process. The general-use definition of the term “process” as used in the Enterprise Systems literature treats the notion as “repeatable processes” or replicable processes . However, arising from comparative case studies in four large organizations, I found that decision making, managing, and governing in the ES are not “replicable processes”, not reifications of structural variations over time when examined through the lens of the Assemblage Theory. Assemblage Theory incorporates the dynamic interplay of two continua: the first, territorialization, deterritorialization, and reterritorialization, and the second, material vs. expression. Although the notion of the terms formation, deformation, and reformation are suitable for understanding the processes these CCs encounter in a broad and general manner, they do not sufficiently describe the not-so-solid, never-quite-finished, always in-process or structuring referred to by Hopper (1996) as emergent regularities . In contrast to the notion of stable structures, this dissertation research adopts the language of Deleuzian assemblage of Territorialization, deterritorialization, and Reterritorialization. Although the four study organizations planned and intended to develop clearly defined competency centers, which would create formalized processes and procedures to manage the post implementation phase, none of the study organizations ever achieved the anticipated stability. Instead, the CCs exhibited the signs of being ‘in-process’ and ‘structuring’. The contribution of this research to the IS field is an understanding of the CCs as processes as opposed to structures and how CCs structuring impact the ESs in organizations

User modeling servers - requirements, design, and evaluation

Softwaresysteme, die ihre Services an Charakteristika individueller Benutzer anpassen haben sich bereits als effektiver und/oder benutzerfreundlicher als statische Systeme in mehreren Anwendungsdomänen erwiesen. Um solche Anpassungsleistungen anbieten zu können, greifen benutzeradaptive Systeme auf Modelle von Benutzercharakteristika zurück. Der Aufbau und die Verwaltung dieser Modelle wird durch dezidierte Benutzermodellierungskomponenten vorgenommen. Ein wichtiger Zweig der Benutzermodellierungsforschung beschäftigt sich mit der Entwicklung sogenannter ?Benutzermodellierungs-Shells?, d.h. generischen Benutzermodellierungssystemen, die die Entwicklung anwendungsspezifischer Benutzermodellierungskomponenten erleichtern. Die Bestimmung des Leistungsumfangs dieser generischen Benutzermodellierungssysteme und deren Dienste bzw. Funktionalitäten wurde bisher in den meisten Fällen intuitiv vorgenommen und/oder aus Beschreibungen weniger benutzeradaptiver Systeme in der Literatur abgeleitet. In der jüngeren Vergangenheit führte der Trend zur Personalisierung im World Wide Web zur Entwicklung mehrerer kommerzieller Benutzermodellierungsserver. Die für diese Systeme als wichtig erachteten Eigenschaften stehen im krassen Gegensatz zu denen, die bei der Entwicklung der Benutzermodellierungs-Shells im Vordergrund standen und umgekehrt. Vor diesem Hintergrund ist das Ziel dieser Dissertation (i) Anforderungen an Benutzermodellierungsserver aus einer multi-disziplinären wissenschaftlichen und einer einsatzorientierten (kommerziellen) Perspektive zu analysieren, (ii) einen Server zu entwerfen und zu implementieren, der diesen Anforderungen genügt, und (iii) die Performanz und Skalierbarkeit dieses Servers unter der Arbeitslast kleinerer und mittlerer Einsatzumgebungen gegen die diesbezüglichen Anforderungen zu überprüfen. Um dieses Ziel zu erreichen, verfolgen wir einen anforderungszentrierten Ansatz, der auf Erfahrungen aus verschiedenen Forschungsbereichen aufbaut. Wir entwickeln eine generische Architektur für einen Benutzermodellierungsserver, die aus einem Serverkern für das Datenmanagement und modular hinzufügbaren Benutzermodellierungskomponenten besteht, von denen jede eine wichtige Benutzermodellierungstechnik implementiert. Wir zeigen, dass wir durch die Integration dieser Benutzermodellierungskomponenten in einem Server Synergieeffekte zwischen den eingesetzten Lerntechniken erzielen und bekannte Defizite einzelner Verfahren kompensieren können, beispielsweise bezüglich Performanz, Skalierbarkeit, Integration von Domänenwissen, Datenmangel und Kaltstart. Abschließend präsentieren wir die wichtigsten Ergebnisse der Experimente, die wir durchgeführt haben um empirisch nachzuweisen, dass der von uns entwickelte Benutzermodellierungsserver zentralen Performanz- und Skalierbarkeitskriterien genügt. Wir zeigen, dass unser Benutzermodellierungsserver die vorbesagten Kriterien in Anwendungsumgebungen mit kleiner und mittlerer Arbeitslast in vollem Umfang erfüllt. Ein Test in einer Anwendungsumgebung mit mehreren Millionen Benutzerprofilen und einer Arbeitslast, die als repräsentativ für größere Web Sites angesehen werden kann bestätigte, dass die Performanz der Benutzermodellierung unseres Servers keine signifikante Mehrbelastung für eine personalisierte Web Site darstellt. Gleichzeitig können die Anforderungen an die verfügbare Hardware als moderat eingestuft werden

Exploring knowledge sharing through social media among members of the African Community of Practice.

Doctoral Degree. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg.This study sought to examine the extent of social media use for knowledge sharing among members of the African Community of Practice (AfCoP), a distributed community of practice of development practitioners. It also sought to find the factors affecting knowledge sharing through social media among AfCoP members. The study followed a pragmatic approach using mixed methods to collect data through a survey, semi-structured interviews and content analysis on the AfCoP knowledge sharing platform. The study revealed that social media is providing new ways through which tacit and codified knowledge is shared in distributed communities. Several types of social media were found to support various knowledge sharing activities including learning, networking, collaboration and expert location. Social Capital and Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) factors were found to play an important role in knowledge sharing behaviours among AfCoP members. Social interaction ties, trust, norms of reciprocity, identification, shared language and shared vision significantly correlated with the knowledge sharing intentions of AfCoP members and the quality of knowledge shared on the AfCoP platform. Perceived usefulness also correlated with both knowledge sharing intentions of members and the quality of knowledge shared on the platform, while perceived ease of use correlated with the quality of knowledge shared on the AfCoP platform. Members were also motivated to participate on the AfCoP knowledge sharing platform by a desire to improve their career practices and to encounter professional opportunities on the platform. The challenges members encountered in their pursuit of sharing knowledge on the AfCoP platform included: lack of time and an unwillingness to exert the necessary effort to meaningfully participate on the platform, lack of participation, insufficient incentives for participation and lack of financial guarantee for the sustainability of AfCoP. The study demonstrates that social media can bridge challenges of distance and physical location through facilitating the sharing of tacit and explicit knowledge despite one’s location. To encourage knowledge sharing through social media, social capital and TAM factors must be addressed. The study also adds to empirical evidence on the role of social media in facilitating knowledge sharing among development sector practitioners from an African context