THE INFLUENCE OF TECHNOLOGY ON ORGANISATIONAL STRATEGY: A STUDY OF THE NIGERIAN BANKING INDUSTRY.

Technology which is a key element of the external environment, develops and changes rapidly creating uncertainties and challenges that affect organizational strategy and its processes; thus, reducing the effectiveness of strategies and making strategic responses more difficult. This study therefore aimed at determining the influence that technology wields on organizational strategy and its processes in the Nigerian banking industry. It investigated the specific ways that technology affects the strategic management processes of strategy formulation, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation and control. A descriptive survey research design was employed in this study. The population of study consists of all the commercial banks in Nigeria. The unit of analysis for the study are five banking organisations selected mainly from Tier-1 Nigerian banks. The study relied mainly on primary data obtained through structured questionnaire administered to a purposively selected 125 respondents across the major strata and departments of the selected banks. The data collected was analysed and presented using descriptive methods. The statistical techniques employed are the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) and the regression analyses models. The hypotheses were tested using regression coefficients. The findings showed statistical evidence that technology is not only prevalent in the selected banks, but has become a vital requirement in the strategy formulation, implementation and control processes. Specifically, technology enhances the speed and quality of data gathering for strategy formulation as well as aids the implementation of specific market and product development strategies, and also enables the measurement and monitoring of organizational strategies. The study concludes that technology exerts significant influence on organizational strategy and has strong positive relationship with the organizational strategy processes. Thus, management of banking organisations should as a matter of policy invest in appropriate technology strategies and develop adequate technology capabilities and competences to cope with the imperatives of increased digitization and the effects of technology in order to remain competitive and successful in the industry

The Location Measurement Unit (LMU): An Application of Embedded Systems in Mobile Location Estimation

Embedded systems are commonly available in many electronic devices where they add special functionalities, features and high levels of efficiency to the general operation of these devices. Embedded systems consist of hardware, software, and an environment. The hardware comprises mainly the processing cores that are typically either microcontrollers or digital signal processors (DSP). The key characteristic of these systems, however, is being dedicated to handle a particular task. Since the embedded system is dedicated to specific tasks, design engineers can optimize it to reduce the size and cost of the product and increase the reliability and performance. This paper takes a deep look into the procedures for the design of embedded systems and the fields of application of these systems, with a special emphasis on a mobile network entity called the Location Measurement Unit (LMU) which is used for location measurements in 3G wireless networks

Autosomal-dominant corneal endothelial dystrophies CHED1 and PPCD1 are allelic disorders caused by non-coding mutations in the promoter of OVOL2

Congenital hereditary endothelial dystrophy 1 (CHED1) and posterior polymorphous corneal dystrophy 1 (PPCD1) are autosomal-dominant corneal endothelial dystrophies that have been genetically mapped to overlapping loci on the short arm of chromosome 20. We combined genetic and genomic approaches to identify the cause of disease in extensive pedigrees comprising over 100 affected individuals. After exclusion of pathogenic coding, splice-site, and copy-number variations, a parallel approach using targeted and whole-genome sequencing facilitated the identification of pathogenic variants in a conserved region of the OVOL2 proximal promoter sequence in the index families (c.-339_361dup for CHED1 and c.-370T>C for PPCD1). Direct sequencing of the OVOL2 promoter in other unrelated affected individuals identified two additional mutations within the conserved proximal promoter sequence (c.-274T>G and c.-307T>C). OVOL2 encodes ovo-like zinc finger 2, a C2H2 zinc-finger transcription factor that regulates mesenchymal-to-epithelial transition and acts as a direct transcriptional repressor of the established PPCD-associated gene ZEB1. Interestingly, we did not detect OVOL2 expression in the normal corneal endothelium. Our in vitro data demonstrate that all four mutated OVOL2 promoters exhibited more transcriptional activity than the corresponding wild-type promoter, and we postulate that the mutations identified create cryptic cis-acting regulatory sequence binding sites that drive aberrant OVOL2 expression during endothelial cell development. Our data establish CHED1 and PPCD1 as allelic conditions and show that CHED1 represents the extreme of what can be considered a disease spectrum. They also implicate transcriptional dysregulation of OVOL2 as a common cause of dominantly inherited corneal endothelial dystrophies