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(2020)ThesisInformation Technology (IT) outsourcing is a common practice, being adopted in many organisations in different industries and sectors of the worldwide market. Much of the research into IT outsourcing has focused on the use of IT outsourcing within private sector organisations, with less attention being paid to the use of IT outsourcing by government and the public sector. Relationships in IT outsourcing are of interest, juxtaposed against the older contracts in IT outsourcing; contracts and relationships are complementary, not substitutes. The purpose of this Study is to understand the differences between government versus private sector IT outsourcing, focusing on relationships. The researcher developed a classification of ‘tendencies’ in government IT outsourcing, characteristics that are more pronounced in government than in private sector IT outsourcing. Relational Exchange Theory was used to structure IT outsourcing into attributes, inherent characteristics that support the performance of the relationship (Goles and Chin, 2005). The researcher conducted an online survey, completed by government IT outsourcing managers, giving responses converted into tendency-attribute ‘combinations’ and analysed using statistical tests. The attributes were calculated using differing sample sizes, as some respondents abandoned the survey part-way through. Out of sixty combinations there were eighteen that were statistically significant at the 5% level. Most combinations came from Commitment, Consensus, Flexibility and Trust attributes. There are five tendencies out of ten that were strongly associated with these combinations. Some combinations appeared as if the scores have a bivariate distribution, but no clear evidence of bimodal distribution of the demographic variables was found. The low response rate to the survey was concerning; there was bias and sampling errors, there was inconsistent interpretation of the constructs, and there were respondent concerns about confidentiality. There is a need to investigate the four attributes, the five tendencies, and the demographics.
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(2013)ThesisServices in general and healthcare services in particular require proper planning and design so as to address patients concerns and improve outcomes. In this context, mobile phone s wide spread penetration coupled with its versatility is transforming it as a significant delivery channel for healthcare services. Mobile Health (mHealth- healthcare using mobile phones) is expected to enhance the access to healthcare especially, in the developing world. Following the House of Quality (HoQ) for service design, the literature search identified significant gaps in comparatively assessing mHealth with the other conventional services. Such an analysis is important for the large scale adoption of mHealth. To fill this gap, the current research has carried out a quantitative comparison of healthcare services, an important element of HoQ. The study explores the broad research questions: whether service alternatives are distinguishable from each other and if so, what factors contribute to the differentiation. A multiple discriminant analysis (MDA) is performed to understand patients perceptions of various healthcare services: public hospital (PH), general practitioner (GP), traditional medicine (TM) and B2C mHealth service in a developing country. Ubiquity, interaction quality and value have been identified to have significant influence on the patients attitude towards health care services. mHealth is perceived by the patients as far more easy to use, useful and valuable than other service alternatives. These insights are incorporated into the HoQ model for healthcare service design. mHealth is found to be an effective alternative to serve the developing world where populations are marginally deprived of even basic healthcare services. Theoretical and practical relevance of these findings are analysed and some directions are provided for future research.
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(2014)ThesisMobile phones, especially smartphones, are increasingly receiving attention from public health scholars for delivery of healthcare services for lifestyle diseases like diabetes and smoking because of their ease of access, low cost and ubiquity. Through literature review, significant gaps regarding acceptance studies for use of mobile phones for health behavior change were identified. These gaps include the following: all studies on mobile interventions for smoking cessation have been SMS/MMS/Call based; none of the studies include System Framework/Design component for developing behavior change services; lack of studies on multi-intervention services for behavior change using Smartphones; none of the studies have explored user acceptance of mobile based smoking cessation services. The current research has been carried out to address some of these gaps while exploring the broad research questions: a) How to develop a Persuasive Technology framework and thereby design a Smartphone based multi-intervention mobile phone (mhealth) service for behavior change (in this case, smoking cessation) using the framework? b) What are the factors affecting the user acceptance of a Smartphone based multi intervention service for disease prevention through behavior change like smoking cessation? To answer the first question, Hevner's framework for design science research and Persuasive System Model has been used for developing and designing a Smartphone based multi-intervention service for smoking cessation. For the second question, the Unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT) model has been applied for exploring factors like performance expectancy (users' belief that service will improve the process of quitting smoking), effort expectancy (the degree of ease of use), social influence (if others believe they should use the service) and facilitating conditions (the degree of users' belief that an organizational and technical infrastructure exists to support system use) affecting the acceptance of a Smartphone based multi-intervention service for smoking cessation. The results show that the above mentioned factors have significant influence on behavior intention of user, leading to acceptance of mobile based smoking cessation service. These insights therefore need to be incorporated while designing effective mHealth services. Theoretical and practical relevance of these findings have accordingly been analysed and presented in the current research.
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(2013)ThesisIn an organizational context, policies are a collection of high-level, operation and management goals and/or rules which are used to define the expected behaviours and processes of organizational actors. Hence policies are concerned with ordinary, non-exceptional business processes and how organizational actors perform these processes. However, in every organization, unexpected events do occur from time to time which require deviation from established policies, and currently there is very little known in the literature on how the actors can proceed under such situations. This thesis aims to propose a method which includes a multi-step framework to design and develop applications that can assist organizational actors in deviating from policies while facing unexpected or exceptional situations by allowing collaborative policy-based information systems to identify policy deviations by its users, present them with alternate actions and behaviors to attain the required outcomes and, when necessary, allow them to deviate from the policy and perform a non-conforming action. This study has been conducted by following Hevner’s framework for design science research which suggests obtaining awareness of the problem from the environment, putting forward suggestions to solve the problem, contributing to the pool of study through publications and evaluating the solution to validate the generalizability and correctness of the solution. The outcomes from this research are, a policy deviation framework based on existing literature and a multi-step policy deviation method which can assist organizational actors in detecting and deviating from policies when necessary. The methods proposed in this study have been evaluated using hypothetical scenarios based on real policies and through randomly generated simulations, and has been shown to be both applicable and effective. In terms of contributions to research, the fields of CSCW, software agents, decision making, as well as policy based planning and management can benefit significantly from this work.
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(2010)ThesisAccording to the knowledge based view of organisation, knowledge is an important productive resource that provides organisations competitive advantages. It is also argued that no single organisation has the full-range of expertise to survive. New knowledge is acquired not only from internal knowledge resources but also from sources outside the organisation’s boundaries. Thus, inter-organisational knowledge sharing is important for organisations to gain new knowledge. Many organisational relationships have been created to transfer knowledge. The customer-supplier relationship as part of the supply chain is a special type of inter-organisational relationship that is highly knowledge-intensive. Many of the critical failures in supply chain management are the consequence of poor knowledge sharing activities with organisation partners. One of the barriers to knowledge sharing is the lack of intention to share knowledge. The lack of intention to share knowledge as a starting point for knowledge sharing is even more important in customer supplier relationship because knowledge sharing is not normally viewed as one of the main targets by supply chain partners and therefore may not receive appropriate attention. Unlike knowledge transfer activities in other types of inter-organisational alliances, knowledge transfer between supply chain partners is generally not targeted and is less guaranteed. Thus, intention to share knowledge with its supply chain partners is of particular interest for an organisation. The focus of this study is to investigate the intention to share knowledge in customer-supplier relationships. The study aims to identify factors influencing this intention to share knowledge between supply chain partners by focusing on a simple two-level supply chain. In order to achieve this aim, a research model is developed based on the relevant theories of knowledge sharing in existing literature and then tested and extended through multiple case studies. The resulting integrated conceptual model about the intention to share knowledge in supply-chain relationships makes an important contribution to the literature as well as to knowledge sharing in practice.
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(2010)ThesisFraud is a matter of grave social and economic concern. For organisations, Accounts Payable (AP) fraud remains the most common type of fraud because it dominates most payment functions which are facing lots of challenges. Failure to adequately protect against fraud exposes an organisation to increased vulnerability in terms of fraud related risks. Traditional anti-fraud approaches (e.g. Strategic Fraud Detection Approach, red flag techniques, etc.) are widely accepted but demand very detailed knowledge about the fraud, IT security domain and the specific business environment. The main purpose of the research is to develop an improved approach for proactively preventing and detecting fraud in accounts payable. The approach is broadly characterized by: (1) Using IT techniques to facilitate the protection of accounts payable. (2) Providing an extensive set of red flags and IT control practices by conducting literature review and empirical study. (3) Modelling the fraud and information security knowledge on a very concrete and highly granular level. Led by the literature and based on the Strategic Fraud Detection Approach developed by Albrecht et al. in 2001 which was refined in 2003a, a model-based fraud prevention and detection approach has been proposed with two major reference models for AP: Fraud Risk Model and IT Control Model. The models provide an extensive set of fraud indicators together with corresponding control practices. Based on the existing audit projects sourced from the researcher's work company, relevant AP transactions data from nine different industries were analyzed to evaluate and discuss the applicability and practicability of the developed models. Finally, the issues relating to the design works (the approach and the models) have been justified and further refined. The approach advocates the use of models to improve efficiency in relation to risk assessment and the control implementation process. The approach also contributes new knowledge to the already existing knowledge base in terms of anti-fraud methodologies and techniques. Whilst at the same time, further providing benefit to the business world with practical solutions for preventing and detecting fraud in accounts payable.
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(2010)ThesisDue to the increased adoption of the Internet over the last decade, business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce has become a popular medium for consumers to purchase products or services. However, despite a growth in e-commerce, it is difficult to succeed in online businesses because customers can easily switch between competitors and it is difficult to gain consumers' trust online. Trust is a complex and multifaceted issue that must be addressed from multiple angles. Previous research on trust has attempted to understand consumers' attitudes, intentions, and behaviours that are related to trust in online shopping. However, few studies have provided a comprehensive understanding of the multi-dimensional nature of the trust construct such as the impacts of different trust dimensions on e-loyalty, inter-relationships among trust dimensions, and antecedents of different trust dimensions. The objective of this research is to fill the gaps by investigating the factors that affect different types of trust, the relationships among different types of trust and the importance of the trust issues in forming e-loyalty in the online environment. Led by the literature, a research model was proposed and hypotheses were developed to explore the answers to the research questions. Data was collected through a web-based survey in Chinese markets and Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) with Partial Least Squares (PLS) was used to analyse the data. Empirical results showed that all three dimensions of trust had impacts on e-loyalty. Dispositional trust had an impact on institutional trust, and institutional trust had an impact on interpersonal trust. Among the factors that influence interpersonal trust, store reputation and information quality not only had significantly impacts on interpersonal trust, but also mediated the relationships between other antecedents and interpersonal trust. This research contributes to the body of knowledge on trust by exploring the nature of trust with a multi-dimensional scale. Another theoretical contribution is the provision of a comprehensive understanding of the trust antecedents in e-commerce. Furthermore, this research benefits the companies doing e-businesses by allowing them to better understand how to improve consumers' trust in the online environment and thus to retain and attract more loyal customers and succeed in online businesses.