Why designers responsible for websites of large organisations disregard basic web design principles

When a large organisation spends a notable proportion of its budget on creating a positive web presence, one would assume the web site to be well designed, usable and to provide a good user experience. This is not always true. In this case study we investigated a large telecommunications organisation based in Africa to determine the value it places on usability and user experience. We evaluated a core function of the web site through an eye tracking usability study and found severe usability problems. This led to an investigation into the reasons for this. Through interviews with web designers in the organisation, we discovered how they view the design process and why they believe that basic, documented design guidelines are not worth following. The results will help management of large organisations understand why web sites fail to achieve their goals and provide pointers on how to address this

The Society 5.0 landscape and research agenda

Different approaches are adopted in this paper to develop a conceptual Society 5.0 landscape overview as well as a roadmap and a preliminary research agenda. In the first place, we employed Social Network Analysis (SNA) on Twitter to identify the communities and communication around Society 5.0, followed by content analysis of two collected document repositories, one a set of academic publications and one a set of popular press articles on Society 5.0. We used the results of these investigations to develop a conceptual landscape overview of Society 5.0 using the themes that were identified during the analysis. The landscape model was subsequently used as a baseline to develop an initial research agenda for Society 5.0 studies. Anyone interested in doing research or adopting the Society 5.0 vision should benefit from our contributions.https://easychair.org/publications/EPiC/Computingam2023Informatic

Towards citizen-expert knowledge exchange for biodiversity informatics: A conceptual architecture

This article proposes a conceptual architecture for citizen-expert knowledge exchange in biodiversity management. Expert services, such as taxonomic identification, are required in many biodiversity management activities, yet these services remain inaccessible to poor communities, such as small-scale farmers. The aim of this research was to combine ontology and crowdsourcing technologies to provide taxonomic services to such communities. The study used a design science research (DSR) approach to develop the conceptual architecture. The DSR approach generates knowledge through building and evaluation of novel artefacts. The research instantiated the architecture through the development of a platform for experts and farmers to share knowledge on fruit flies. The platform is intended to support rural fruit farmers in Kenya with control and management of fruit flies. Expert knowledge about fruit flies is captured in an ontology that is integrated into the platform. The non-expert citizen participation includes harnessing crowdsourcing technologies to assist with organism identification. An evaluation of the architecture was done through an experiment of fruit fly identification using the platform. The results showed that the crowds, supported by an ontology of expert knowledge, could identify most samples to species level and in some cases to sub-family level. The conceptual architecture may guide and enable creation of citizen-expert knowledge exchange applications, which may alleviate the taxonomic impediment, as well as allow poor citizens access to expert knowledge. Such a conceptual architecture may also enable the implementation of systems that allow non-experts to participate in sharing of knowledge, thus providing opportunity for the evolution of comprehensive biodiversity knowledge systems.CA2016www.wits.ac.za/linkcentre/aji

Knowledge management in Society 5.0 : a sustainability perspective

Organizations require the means to navigate Society 5.0. This is a knowledge-intensive society where a sustainable balance must be created for social good through a system that integrates cyberspace and physical space. With significant data, information and insight exchange based on knowledge in people and machines, organizations need to make sense of the notion that knowledge assets are the central structuring elements for sustainable development. By considering the key aspects of knowledge management (KM) in Society 5.0 as they relate to sustainable development, organizations may leverage their KM capability and learning agility to successfully address the unique requirements of the new society, environment and goals for sustainable development. In this research, automated content analysis was applied to identify key KM aspects using the Leximancer software. A total of 252 academic papers were analyzed, identifying 10 themes related to key KM concepts in Society 5.0 as they pertain to sustainability. The KM concepts identified were described and mapped to the sustainability triple bottom line. They comprised three primary and three intersecting dimensions, i.e., the environment (planet), society (people) and economic performance (profit) in the socio-economic, eco-efficiency and socio-environmental domains. The most significant themes included “knowledge”, “human”, “companies”, “information” and “system”. Secondary themes included “innovation”, “development”, “resources”, “social” and “change”.https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainabilityam2023Informatic

Big data driven decision making model: a case of the South African banking sector

The quest to develop a Big Data Driven Decision Making framework to support the incorporation of big data analytics into the decision-making process resulted in the development of a decision making model. The study was conducted within the banking sector of South Africa, with participants from three leading South African banking institutions. The conducted research followed the design science research process of awareness, suggestion, development, evaluation and conclusion. This study developed a theoretical Big Data Driven Decision Making model which illustrates the decision-making process in banking using big data. The study further determined the organizational supports that need to be in place to support the big data analytics decision-making process.http://sacj.cs.uct.ac.zaInformatic

The Role of Service Oriented Architecture as an enabler for Enterprise Architecture.

Organisations are being challenged to ensure that IT delivers on business requirements, but more importantly to ensure that IT can provide greater differentiation and competitive advantage in the context of business, as opposed to the traditional supporting role that many IT professionals have become accustomed to. There needs to be a drastic change in the relationship between IT and business, in order to address the challenges that organisations are currently experiencing and will be experiencing in the future. This change can only be achieved when IT can demonstrate real business value to organisations. SOA, EA and the relationship between them provide a means to achieve the relationship between IT and business by providing a means of defining and implementing business capabilities. This research focused on investigating the guidelines that are needed for SOA to enable EA, in order to provide practical steps that organisations can use for the alignment of SOA and EA

Building empathy for design thinking in e-Health : a Zimbabwean case study

The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology present an opportunity to address some of these challenges in a cost-effective manner. Notwithstanding these advances, many initiatives fail to deliver the desired benefits, with a lack of citizen engagement cited as one of the reasons for this failure. Design thinking is an approach to innovation that places human needs at the centre of design by gaining empathy with those for whom the designs are initiated. This paper reports on the empathy building conducted in trying to understand the needs of mothers seeking post-natal care in a low-income neighbourhood in Zimbabwe. Through interviews, observations, journals, and using service-dominant logic theory to analyse the output, a picture emerges of the lives of the mothers and babies, and their interaction with the healthcare system. Working in teams with mobile application developers and nurses, the mothers participate in a workshop that produces points of view that define problems the teams would like addressed, using technology in a design thinking exercise. This paper reports on the work of hospital midwives, and chronicles the lives of several mothers in the eight weeks after giving birth. It also sets out four design challenges based on the points of view derived from the design thinking workshops.http://www.springer.comseries/7899hj2019Informatic

Editorial

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An IT strategic decision-making framework in the midst of disruptive technologies

Technological disruption enabled by the internet revolution has resulted in an exponential increase in the growth of new technologies and the resultant technology disruptions in the workplace. Disruptive technologies are changing the rules of competition in organisations. Most chief information officers agree that there could be significant value in utilising new technology to create a competitive advantage in an agile world; however, in practice, the adoption and implementation of newer technology occur relatively slowly. There is very little research on factors influencing strategic IT decisions from a perspective of disruptive technologies. The objective of this study was to investigate critical factors that guide strategic IT decision-making in an agile business context. Using a literature review, various factors that had an influence on strategic IT decision-making in organisations were identified. The factors were extended and confirmed with data from semi-structured interviews resulting in the Framework for IT decision-making and a model for the classification of IT systems, which provide CIOs with comprehensive guidelines to make strategic IT decisions in the midst of disruptive technologies.http://sacj.cs.uct.ac.zaam2023Informatic

Mapping a design science research cycle to the postgraduate research report

Design science research (DSR) is well-known in different domains, including information systems (IS), for the construction of artefacts. One of the most challenging aspects of IS postgraduate studies (with DSR) is determining the structure of the study and its report, which should reflect all the components necessary to build a convincing argument in support of such a study’s claims or assertions. Analysing several postgraduate IS-DSR reports as examples, this paper presents a mapping between recommendable structures for research reports and the DSR process model of Vaishnavi and Kuechler, which several of our current postgraduate students have found helpful.http://www.springer.com/series/78992018-11-18hj2018Informatic