Business

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 14

  • (2007) Orsatti, Joanne
    Thesis
    The professional profile of researchers is established through communication of scientific work practices, leading to the establishment of a scholarly identity. Understanding scholarly identities is currently addressed through a conceptualisation of research narrative mechanisms. Citation and citing practices are a central component of scientific communication work practices. Therefore understanding these formal communication practices of researchers through their citing behaviours may contribute to the building of scholarly identity. This study is undertaken to understand whether scholarly identity could be informed through the use of citation identities. Studies on the citation identities of individuals were conducted, using authors working in the area of Consciousness, which provided a diverse field of participants for the testing of citation analysis techniques. This is accomplished through methodological development and further examined using a combination of field-level and individual-level analyses. A new methodology was developed for the generation of citing identities, based on the calculation of the Gini coefficient and the citee-citation ratio of authors' citing profiles. The resulting relationship was found to have high levels of consistency across a heterogenous set of researchers. An exploration of identification of author characteristics was subsequently undertaken using the new methodology and existing citation analysis techniques. The techniques were successful in identifying departures from conventional citation practice, highlighting idiosyncrasies well, but otherwise understanding of scholarly identity through citation analysis was only marginally successful. A portion of the difficulty of achieving clarity was the complexity of the Consciousness author set, which was useful for establishing broad applicability of a new methodology, but poor for judging its successful application. In summary, definition of citing identity type offers possibilities for improving the understanding of scholarly identity, but will require further methodology development to reach its full potential.

  • (2004) Portocalis Van Toorn, Christine
    Thesis

  • (2008) Li, Junhua
    Thesis
    Many countries (especially developing countries) are plagued with critical healthcare issues such as chronic, infectious and pandemic diseases, a lack of basic healthcare programmes and facilities and a shortage of skilled healthcare workers. E-Health (healthcare based on the Internet technologies) promises to overcome some problems related to the reach of healthcare in remote communities. Electronic Health Record (EHR) (consisting of all diagnostic information related to a patient) forms the core of any E-Health system. Hence the success of an E-Health system is very much dependent on the success of the EHR systems. Although interest in automating the health record is generally high, the literature informs us that they do not always succeed in terms of adoption rate and/or acceptance, even in developed countries. The success of the adoption tends to be low for resource constrained (e.g. insufficient E-Health infrastructure) developing countries. As part of the effort to enhance EHR acceptance, readiness assessment for the innovation becomes an essential requirement for the successful implementation and use of EHR (and hence E-Health). Based on a thorough literature review, several research gaps have been identified. In order to address these gaps, this thesis (based on design science research methodology) presents E-Health Readiness Assessment Methodology (EHRAM). It involves a new E-Health Readiness Assessment Framework (EHRAF), an assessment process and several techniques for analysing the assessment data to arrive at a readiness score. The EHRAF (Model) integrates the components from healthcare providers’ and organisational perspectives of existing E-Health readiness evaluation frameworks. The process of EHRAM (Method) starts with the development of a set of hierarchical evaluation criteria based on EHRAF. This leads to the questionnaire development for data collection. The data is analysed in EHRAM using a number of statistical and data mining techniques. The instantiation part of the design science research involves an automated tool for the implementation of EHRAM and its application through a case study in a developing country.

  • (2006) Hu, Ganglan
    Thesis
    This study aims to explore the decision-making criteria for requirements selection in market-driven software development projects in China. Requirements selection decisions are made by reconciling the conflicting stakeholders’ value propositions into a mutually-agreed set through the negotiation and communication process between stakeholders. Firstly, this study identified decision-making criteria according to different stakeholders’ value propositions, and then evaluated the importance of the criteria when making the decisions of requirements selection. Moreover, the study determined the degree to which the stakeholders from business, product, and project perspectives influence the decision-making process. Furthermore, the study explored the communication between major stakeholders in requirements selection process, as a foundation to support and guide the process. A Delphi survey was applied in this study. Opinions from experienced industrial experts were obtained to achieve reliable consensus among them on the criteria and relative importance of the criteria in requirements selection process. The Delphi survey in this study included four phases of data collection by a series of intensive questionnaires interspersed with controlled opinion feedback and follow-up interviews. 132 Experts from 11 companies were recruited by following the rigid procedure to ensure the validity and reliability of the research. The study indicated that criteria from the business perspective had a major influence on decision-making of requirements selection, while project- and product-perspective criteria were relatively lower in priority. However, there were some inconsistencies among the opinions of the recruited experts regarding the importance of the criteria. The inconsistencies may result from a number of different factors, for example; different software development projects; different size, culture, organizational structure or maturity level of the companies; or different working positions of the experts surveyed. In addition, the study found three different types of communication in requirements selection in the companies surveyed. Further, Chinese culture was believed to have effects on the communication process between stakeholders. While informal communication was highlighted in Chinese context, the Chinese culture of strictly hierarchical communication could lead to problems in the communication process. Further research is recommended to gain deeper insight into these issues.

  • (2009) Shamsedin Tekieh, Razieh Sadat
    Thesis
    Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are becoming increasingly engaged in B2B interactions. The ubiquitousness of the Internet and the quasi-reliance on electronic document exchanges with larger trading partners have fostered this move. The main technical challenge that this brings to SMEs is that of business document integration: they need to exchange business documents with heterogeneous document formats and also integrate these documents with internal information systems. Often they can not afford using expensive, customized and proprietary solutions for document exchange and storage. Rather they need cost-effective approaches designed based on open standards and backed with easy-to-use information systems. In this dissertation, we investigate the problem of business document integration for SMEs following a design science methodology. We propose a framework and conceptual architecture for a business document integration system (BDIS). By studying existing business document formats, we recommend using the GS1 XML standard format as the intermediate format for business documents in BDIS. The GS1 standards are widely used in supply chains and logistics globally. We present an architecture for BDIS consisting of two layers: one for the design of internal information system based on relational databases, capable of storing XML business documents, and the other enabling the exchange of heterogeneous business documents at runtime. For the design layer, we leverage existing XML schema conversion approaches, and extend them, to propose a customized and novel approach for converting GS1 XML document schemas into relational schemas. For the runtime layer, we propose wrappers as architectural components for the conversion of various electronic documents formats into the GS1 XML format. We demonstrate our approach through a case study involving a GS1 XML business document. We have implemented a prototype BDIS. We have evaluated and compared it with existing research and commercial tools for XML to relational schema conversion. The results show that it generates operational and simpler relational schemas for GS1 XML documents. In conclusion, the proposed framework enables SMEs to engage effectively in electronic business.

  • (2009) Ying, Weir
    Thesis
    Software agents and multi-agent systems (MAS) have grown into a very active area of research and commercial development activity. There are many current emerging real-world applications spanning multitude of diverse domains. In the context of agents, ontology has been widely recognised for their significant benefits to interoperability, reusability, and both development and operational aspects of agent systems and applications. Ontology-based multi-agent systems (OBMAS) exploit these advantages in providing intelligent and semantically aware applications. In addressing the lack of support for ontology in existing methodologies for multi-agent development, this thesis proposes a design methodology for the building of such intelligent multi-agent applications called MOMA. This alternative approach focuses on the development of ontology as the driving force of the development process. By allowing the domain and characteristics of utilisation and experimentation to be dictated through ontology, researchers and domain experts can specify the agent application without any knowledge of agent design and lower level programming. Through the use of a structured ontology model and the use of integrated tools, this approach contributes towards the building of semantically aware intelligent applications for use by researchers and domain experts. MOMA is evaluated through case studies in two different domains: financial services and e-Health.

  • (2013) Motamarri, Saradhi
    Thesis
    Services 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.

  • (2014) Ghorai, Koel
    Thesis
    Mobile 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.

  • (2013) Bakshi, Aishwarya
    Thesis
    In 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.