e‐Maintenance Framework for Strategic Asset Management in Tertiary Institutions

Tertiary institutions require buildings such as its senate building, classrooms, laboratories, administrative rooms, hostels and other offices in order to function. Providing and maintaining these buildings require a lot of planning and capital investment. The study examined the prospects of using e‐ Maintenance platform for strategic asset management in tertiary institutions. This study noted that adequate maintenance of the building infrastructural base of tertiary institutions is crucial for sustainability in the face of dwindling funds in the education sector. In order to automate the e‐ Maintenance process for strategic maintenance of the institution’s building maintenance, a use case diagram, system block diagram, sequence diagram and activity diagram were designed and presented in this study. Three (3) main users are essential in the sequence of operation of the e‐Maintenance platform. These users represent the building occupants, the facility manager and the management personnel; for effective oversite and performance monitoring. The methodology of this research includes using the combination of HTML, CSS and the C‐Sharp programming language for the interface design and server side scripting while MySQL was the database platform used for storing and retrieving the data used for the application. In conclusion, the study developed an e‐Maintenance framework for strategic asset management in tertiary institutions. Keywords Asset management Automation Construction industr

M-Commerce Implementation in Nigeria: Trends and Issues

Nigeria was described as the fastest growing telecoms nation in Africa and the third in the World. The country had experienced a phenomenal growth from a teledensity of 0.49 in 2000 to 25.22 in 2007. This trend has brought about a monumental development in the major sectors of the economy, such as banking, telecoms and commerce in general. This paper presents the level of adoption of ICT in the banking sector and investigates the prospects of m-Commerce in Nigeria based on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis. Findings revealed that all banks in Nigeria offer e-Banking services and about 52% of the offer some forms of m-Banking services. The banks and the telecoms operators have enormous potentials and opportunities for m-Commerce but the level of patronage, quality of cell phones, lack of basic infrastructure and security issues pose a major threat to its wide scale implementation

Knowledge Discovery in Online Repositories: A Text Mining Approach

Before the advent of the Internet, the newspapers were the prominent instrument of mobilization for independence and political struggles. Since independence in Nigeria, the political class has adopted newspapers as a medium of Political Competition and Communication. Consequently, most political information exists in unstructured form and hence the need to tap into it using text mining algorithm. This paper implements a text mining algorithm on some unstructured data format in some newspapers. The algorithm involves the following natural language processing techniques: tokenization, text filtering and refinement. As a follow-up to the natural language techniques, association rule mining technique of data mining is used to extract knowledge using the Modified Generating Association Rules based on Weighting scheme (GARW). The main contributions of the technique are that it integrates information retrieval scheme (Term Frequency Inverse Document Frequency) (for keyword/feature selection that automatically selects the most discriminative keywords for use in association rules generation) with Data Mining technique for association rules discovery. The program is applied to Pre-Election information gotten from the website of the Nigerian Guardian newspaper. The extracted association rules contained important features and described the informative news included in the documents collection when related to the concluded 2007 presidential election. The system presented useful information that could help sanitize the polity as well as protect the nascent democracy

A Framework for e-Commerce Implementation: Nigeria a Case Study

The advent of the Internet has transformed the business environment in no small measure and has influenced the ways and manner businesses are transacted. This platform has brought about enhanced electronic and mobile business transactions. However, the advent of e-Commerce, m-Commerce or i-Commerce has placed a premium on the participating organisations or nations in terms of provision of the basic infrastructure for a secure, seamless and trusted business environment through the electronic media. This paper presents an exploratory study of the prospects of e-Commerce implementation and the factors inhibiting its growth. A set of questionnaire was designed, administered and analysed based on political, economic, social and technological (PEST) analysis. The PEST analysis is to help review the current practices with a view to developing a framework for Nigeria and other developing nations in Africa. Findings revealed that the Automatic Teller Machine (ATM) is the most widely used medium of e-Payment in Nigeria, which is not very suitable for e-Commerce implementation. Similarly, the Internet penetration is still abysmally low and is one of the major threats to e-Commerce implementation. However, the nascent democracy enjoyed in Nigeria is faced with some teething problems, but it promised with time, relative political stability, direct foreign investment, improved economical atmosphere, improved social services and technological development more than ever witnessed in the country. Therefore, a viable framework for Nigeria and Africa would be such that involves the private and public partnership (PPP). This consortium is expected to provide the platform for access to the Internet and popularize the use of e-Payment among other things

Manufacturing sector performance and economic growth in Nigeria

Abstract : The paper attempted to examine the impact of manufacturing sector output on economic growth in Nigeria from 1981 to 2016. The study employed secondary data sourced from the Central Bank of Nigeria statistical bulletin for Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and the Granger causality techniques on RGDP, manufacturing capacity utilization (MCU), manufacturing output (LMO), government investment expenditure (GINVEXP), money supply (LM2) and interest rate (INR). Evidence of long-run and short-run relationships among the variables was established. The results showed that MCU has positive influence on RGDP while LMO also affects RGDP positively. It also showed that GINVEXP has negative effects on RGDP whereas LM2 influenced RGDP positively. Moreover, the result indicated a unidirectional causality between RGDP and MCU, LMO and LM2. Based on the above, the study suggest government should intensify efforts to promote socio-economic infrastructural, macroeconomic and institutional framework in Nigeria to provide favourable environment for external and domestic institutions interactions; so harnessed mobilized funds effectively towards productive manufacturing sector

E-Democracy:A Requirement for A Successful E-Voting and E-Government Implementation in Nigeria

Reducing poverty by 50% through the use of information and communication technology (ICT), which is the primary objective of the millennium development goals (MDGs) requires a lot of innovations such as the implementation of e-Government, e-Democracy, e-Learning, e-Voting, eJudiciary, and e-Health to mention but a few. Participatory democracy is a major requiremer1t for achieving the MDGs, particularly, where majority of the citizenry is disenchanted with the electioneering or democratic processes or governance. This paper reviews the rate of ICT diffusion and the global ranking of the e-Government initiatives of some African countries. The paper also presents the Nigerian National IT policy, the general views of some randomly selected electorates concerning e-Voting, the voting pattern in the past elections, and the likely motivating factors for eVoting in the country as well as the necessary requirements that will facilitate the successful implementation of both e-Voting and e-Government initiatives. Similarly, the paper presents a model for e-Democracy implementation for increased trust and participation in government. Findings revealed that the apathy between electorates and government arose from lack of trust, probity, transparency and accountability. Although, a reasonable percentage of the respondents supported to the adoption of e-Voting, it is equally evident from the level of diffusion of IT facilities: Internet and telephone, that there is still need for improved infrastructure. The position of Nigeria in Africa and the world on global e-Government ranking is abysmally low and does not justify the enormity of material and human resources available in the country. For a successful adoption of e-Voting and e-Government, grassroot mobilization through e-Democracy should be encouraged. Government should as a matter of urgency look into the inadequate basic infrastructures that stimulates ICT diffusion and encourage interaction between the electorates and the elects through the adoption of e-Democracy, which in turn encourages probity, transparency, accountability and participation in governanc

Decision Support System for Final Year Project Management

Abstract— In a university system, the final year project is a synthesis of all the knowledge the students have acquired throughout the different years of their stay in the university. This knowledge must be used to solve a specific problem. Finding and selecting the appropriate project topic and supervisor to supervise the students, presently is in most cases very subjective. This paper presents a web based decision support system that automates efficiently the management of final year projects. The main contribution of the research is to recommend project supervisors and project topic based Naïve Bayes prediction. The decision support framework is web based, developed using JSP (Java-Server Pages), which integrates machine-learning algorithms to allocate final year projects and supervisor. The developed system has been able to provide a platform that maximizes the potentials of students and faculties particularly to solve industry and community related problems. This research has provided a platform to improve the quality of final year research project in the higher institutions of learning. It has also provided a rich platform for available project prototypes and help to eliminate the problems peculiar to lack of automation in final year project management and decision making

AN EMPIRICAL ANALYSIS OF CUSTOMER SATISFACTION WITH MOBILE NETWORK SERVICE FOR COMPETITIVE BUSINESS ADVANTAGE

Positioning for effective competitive advantage requires taking actions informed by the result of business data analysis. Business Intelligence provides the platform with which Information and knowledge is used to improve business operation. This exploratory study examines customer satisfaction as the basis of competitive advantage enjoyed by information network service providers and those responsible for decision making in related organizations. The aim is to statistically analyse data and complement this with Text mining, in order to have an holistic way of drawing inferences from both structured and unstructured data for the purpose of decision making. Two method of analysis were used to find the level of customer satisfaction. They include, descriptive method, which involves the use of SPSS15.0 and K-means clustering algorithm used to mine the unstructured part of the data gathering instrument (questionnaire). Questionnaire is used as the primary means of data gathering. The finding of this study reveal that competitive intelligence related inferences bring about a better customer service relationship between the network service providers and their customers and therefore improve the profits of the organizations involved

An Investigation of the Factors Motivating Students’ Stay in Private Universities’ Hostels

Provision of housing accommodation to students of higher institutions has been a great challenge over the years. Various efforts had been made both by the government and private individuals/organisations to assuage this situation but astronomical increase in the number of students gaining admission into the available institutions has all the time dwarf these efforts. This study therefore examined the factors motivating students to stay in the hostels. Questionnaires were administered on 325 students in the Bells University of Technology and Crawford University. The data collected were analysed using frequency distribution and mean. . The study found that electricity supply, peer/friendship influence, security, parental influence and water supply are mostly the factors motivating students to stay in the hostel. Following these findings, the study recommends that hostel providers should take critical look into and incorporate these factors that motivate students to stay in the hostel. This study is expected to serve as a guide to new hostel providers

Financing Women Entrepreneurs and Employment Generation – a Case Study of Microfinance Banks

Women are becoming increasingly important in the socio-economic development of both developed and developing economies. This is because they account for a significant percentage of the operators of Small and Medium Scale Enterprises (SMEs) in virtually all aspects of the globe.Despite these success stories emanating from these economies, the Nigerian case have not been encouraging. The Nigerian women have for decades engagedin survivalist activities due to little or no encouragement from the government and the organised private sectors.This study examined, among others, the impact of financing women entrepreneurs and employment generationamong these groups within the Nigerian state. The study reports that financing women entrepreneurs hasincremental effects on employment generations and their efforts also results in multiple employment generations through improvement in their business activities, thereby increasing the numbers of selfemployed individuals in the country. The study recommends governmental intervention through the enactment of adequate policies tailored toward the encouragement and empowerment of women entrepreneur