Strategic Information Systems Alignment: A Longitudinal Investigation

The alignment between business and information systems’ strategies (strategic IS alignment) has occupied researchers’ and practitioners’ interest over the past two decades. This is due to the belief that strategic IS alignment positively affects business performance. However, despite the concerted effort in seeking to understand the alignment phenomenon, executives in organizations continue to complain of the difficulty in achieving and sustaining alignment. This may be due to a lack of a comprehensive model of alignment that takes into account its dynamic nature and the factors that affect it over time. Therefore, this study seeks to add to our accumulated knowledge by proposing a functional form for the alignment trajectory and identifying some factors that may affect or predict the dynamic changes between organizations’ alignment trajectories. The study used longitudinal data drawn from several public databases and developed and tested a random coefficients model of strategic IS alignment. The results indicate that alignment is a nonlinear, dynamic phenomenon that is affected by prior IS success, and change in CIO, organizational size, and industry uncertainty. The findings suggest that prior IS success is associated with high initial magnitudes of strategic IS alignment and low rates of change in the strategic IS alignment trajectory. In addition, the findings suggest that CIO turnover is associated with higher initial levels of strategic IS alignment and high (and negative) rates of change in the strategic IS alignment trajectory. The results also show that larger organizations are associated with higher magnitudes of strategic alignment and that firms in stable industry environments, on average, have higher initial magnitudes of strategic IS alignment than firms in uncertain industry environments

The Political Economy of U.S. Military Strategy

Rapid economic growth in emerging economies since the end of the Cold War has driven debate on American ‘relative decline’; the relative diminution of US material capabilities with respect to other states. Such relative decline poses potential constraints on US power and has thus manifested itself in arguments over the economic merits of the United States’ expansive military commitments. Contributing to this literature, my thesis answers the following question: does American military strategy generate economic benefits? I argue that that there is significant evidence to suggest that US military strategy has influenced international economic relationships in ways beneficial to US national interests. Principally, my analysis shows American military strategy acts as a ‘underwriter’ for the extant international economic system. I explore two logics associated with this. Firstly, a general ‘status quo’ logic which sees military power as both a guarantor and promoter of specific structural configurations of the international political economy. And secondly, a more specific ‘utility’ logic operating on other states either bilaterally or multilaterally. This pathway assumes that US military strategy, particularly its security guarantees, may alter the utility of other states decisions in America’s favour. This thesis also shows that specific results often prove far more tentative and circumstantial than commonly articulated by scholars in the literature. Nearly all specific and ‘utility’ pathways through which the United States is hypothesized to derive economic benefit suffer from foundational generalisability issues, irrespective of methodology. This suggests that specific avenues and instances of US military strategy influencing international economic relationships are not likely to be a reliable or prudent source of future policy making. Rather, the principal political-economic influence to consider is the role US military power plays in underwriting the contemporary American centred international order, which is the prerequisite for other specific pathways to emerge.Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC

Interaction Analysis in Smart Work Environments through Fuzzy Temporal Logic

Interaction analysis is defined as the generation of situation descriptions from machine perception. World models created through machine perception are used by a reasoning engine based on fuzzy metric temporal logic and situation graph trees, with optional parameter learning and clustering as preprocessing, to deduce knowledge about the observed scene. The system is evaluated in a case study on automatic behavior report generation for staff training purposes in crisis response control rooms

Bayesian Multilevel Analysis of Binary Time-Series Cross-Sectional Data in Political Economy

In this dissertation project, I propose a Bayesian generalized linear multilevel model with pth order autoregressive errors: GLMM-AR(p)) for modeling inter-temporal dependence, con-temporary correlation, and heterogeneity of unbalanced binary Time- Series Cross-Sectional data. The model includes two unnested sources of clustering in the unit- and time-dimensions for analyzing heterogeneities and contemporal corre- lation which are salient in the era of globalization. Group-level variations are further explained with unit- and time-specific characteristics. For handling dynamics in pol- itics and political economy, I apply the autoregressive error specification to analyze serial correlation which may not be fully captured by the selected covariates. Two applications on civil war and sovereign default demonstrate how the proposed model controls for multiple potential confounders. It also improves reliability of statistical inferences and helps forecasts by more efficiently using the information in data. The first application focuses on the causal relationship between ethnic minority rule and civil war onset. The GLMM-AR(p) model helps study those background factors which affect the relationship under investigation. The second applied study considers how regime duration affects sovereign default conditional on regime type by putting the national policy-making regarding repaying external debt into the international context. To model the heterogeneous vulnerability or sensitivity of the developing countries to global shocks, I extend the GLMM-AR(p) model to analyze time-specific unit-varying effects

Interaction Analysis in Smart Work Environments through Fuzzy Temporal Logic

Interaction analysis is defined as the generation of situation descriptions from machine perception. World models created through machine perception are used by a reasoning engine based on fuzzy metric temporal logic and situation graph trees, with optional parameter learning and clustering as preprocessing, to deduce knowledge about the observed scene. The system is evaluated in a case study on automatic behavior report generation for staff training purposes in crisis response control rooms

Theories for Session-based Governance for Large-scale Distributed Systems

PhDLarge-scale distributed systems and distributed computing are the pillars of IT infrastructure and society nowadays. Robust theoretical principles for designing, building, managing and understanding the interactive behaviours of such systems need to be explored. A promising approach for establishing such principles is to view the session as the key unit for design, execution and verification. Governance is a general term for verifying whether activities meet the specified requirements and for enforcing safe behaviours among processes. This thesis, based on the asynchronous -calculus and the theory of session types, provides a monitoring framework and a theory for validating specifications, verifying mutual behaviours during runtime, and taking actions when noncompliant behaviours are detected. We explore properties and principles for governing large-scale distributed systems, in which autonomous and heterogeneous system components interact with each other in the network to accomplish application goals. This thesis, incorporating lessons from my participation in a substantial practical project, the Ocean Observatories Initiative (OOI), proposes an asynchronous monitoring framework and the process calculus for dynamically governing the asynchronous interactions among distributed multiple applications. We prove that this monitoring model guarantees the satisfaction of global assertions, and state and prove theorems of local and global safety, transparency, and session fidelity. We also study and introduce the semantic mechanisms for runtime session-based governance and the principles of validation of stateful specifications through capturing the runtime asynchronous interactions.EPSRC grants EP/G015481/1; Queen Mary University of Londo

2005-2006 Catalog

This catalog lists available courses for the 2005-2006 term.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/course_catalog/1000/thumbnail.jp

2004-2005 Catalog

This catalog lists available courses for the 2004-2005 term. The College Catalog is a document of record issued in September 2004. The Catalog contains current information regarding the College calendar, admissions, degree requirements, fees, regulations and course offerings.https://crossworks.holycross.edu/course_catalog/1119/thumbnail.jp