Barriers to information technology governance adoption : a preliminary empirical investigation

The adoption of IT Governance (ITG) continues to be an important topic for research. Many researchers have focused their attention on how these practices are currently being implemented in the many diverse areas and industries. Literature shows that a majority of these studies have only been based on industries and organizations in developed countries. There exist very few researches that look specifically within the context of a developing country. Furthermore, there seems to be a lack of research on identifying the barriers or inhibitors to IT Governance adoption within the context of an emerging yet still developing Asian country. This research sets out to justify, substantiate and improve on a priori model developed to study the barriers to the adoption of ITG practice using qualitative data obtained through a series of semi-structured interviews conducted on organizations in Malaysia.

Engineering sustainable solutions program : critical literacies for engineers portfolio

Purpose While a number of universities in Australia have embraced concepts such as project/problem‐based learning and design of innovative learning environments for engineering education, there has been a lack of national guidance on including sustainability as a “critical literacy” into all engineering streams. This paper was presented at the 2004 International Conference on Engineering Education in Sustainable Development (EESD) in Barcelona, Spain, outlining a current initiative that is seeking to address the “critical literacy” dilemma. Design/methodology/approach The paper presents the positive steps taken by Australia's peak engineering body, the Institution of Engineers Australia (EA), in considering accreditation requirements for university engineering courses and its responsibility to ensure the inclusion of sustainability education material. It then describes a current initiative called the “Engineering Sustainable Solutions Program – Critical Literacies for Engineers Portfolio” (ESSP‐CL), which is being developed by The Natural Edge Project (TNEP) in partnership with EA and Unesco. Findings Content for the module was gathered from around the world, drawing on research from the publication The Natural Advantage of Nations: Business Opportunities, Innovation, and Governance in the Twenty‐first Century. Parts of the first draft of the ESSP‐CL have been trialled at Griffith University, Queensland, Australia with first year environmental engineering students, in May 2004. Further trials are now proceeding with a number of other universities and organisations nationally and internationally. Practical implications It is intended that ESSP‐CL will be a valuable resource to universities, professional development activities or other education facilities nationally and internationally. Originality/value This paper fulfils an identified information/resources need.

The role of information avoidance in everyday-life information behaviors

This paper presents the results from a study of information behaviors in the context of people's everyday lives as part of a larger study of information behaviors (IB). 34 participants from across 6 countries maintained a daily information journal or diary – mainly through a secure web log – for two weeks, to an aggregate of 468 participant days over five months. The text-rich diary data was analyzed using Grounded Theory analysis. The findings indicate that information avoidance is a common phenomenon in everyday life and consisted of both passive avoidance and active avoidance. This has implications for several aspects of peoples' lives including health, finance, and personal relationships.

Introducing a small and medium enterprises syllabi design: an enterprise systems hands-on approach

There is increasing attention to the importance of Enterprise Systems (ES) and Information Systems (IS) for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs). The same attention must be addressed in IS graduate curriculum. Studies reveal that despite healthy demand from the industry for IS management expertise, most IS graduates are ill-equipped to meet the challenges of modern organizations. The majority of contemporary firms, represented by SMEs, seek employees with a balance of business process knowledge and ES software skills. This article describes a curriculum that teaches Information Technology (IT) and IS managementconcepts in a SMEs context. The curriculum conceptualises a ‘learn-by-doing’ approach, to provide business process and ES software specific knowledge for its students. The approach recommends coverage of traditional content related to SMEs’’ operations, strategies, IT investment and management issues while providing an increased focus on strategic use of enterprise IT. The study addresses to an extent, the perennial challenge of updating IS curriculum, given the rapid pace of technological change.

Information literacy programs and research : an international review

This paper provides an overview of contemporary information literacy research and practice. While the content is highly selective, the intention has been to highlight international and Australian developments which have achieved significant recognition, which are representative of similar trends in other places, or which are unique in some way. There are three main foci in the paper. Firstly, an exploration of ways of interpreting the idea of information literacy. Secondly, a synthesis of various efforts to seek new directions in educational, community and workplace contexts, beginning with the major initiatives being undertaken in the United States. Thirdly, an introduction to some recent research, concluding with a summary of my own investigation into different ways of experiencing information literacy

Information literacy research : dimensions of the emerging collective consciousness

Information literacy researchers are beginning to develop a collective consciousness, a consciousness that represents the newly appearing territory of information literacy research. This paper analyses the information literacy research territory as it is represented by the emerging collective consciousness of information literacy researchers. Five dimensions of the collective consciousness are proposed: 1) the sectoral location of the research, 2) ways of seeing information literacy, 3) ‘what’ is being investigated; that is the research object, 4) ‘how’ the object is being investigated; that is the research approaches and paradigms, and 5) disciplinary influences. These dimensions are used to: 1) reveal the character of the information literacy research territory which is in early stages of construction; 2) show how different kinds of research approaches can shed different kinds of light on the object of research; and 3) demonstrate how the five dimensions work together in the development of new studies.

Query expansion using term relationships in language models for information retrieval

Language Modeling (LM) has been successfully applied to Information Retrieval (IR). However, most of the existing LM approaches only rely on term occurrences in documents, queries and document collections. In traditional unigram based models, terms (or words) are usually considered to be independent. In some recent studies, dependence models have been proposed to incorporate term relationships into LM, so that links can be created between words in the same sentence, and term relationships (e.g. synonymy) can be used to expand the document model. In this study, we further extend this family of dependence models in the following two ways: (1) Term relationships are used to expand query model instead of document model, so that query expansion process can be naturally implemented; (2) We exploit more sophisticated inferential relationships extracted with Information Flow (IF). Information flow relationships are not simply pairwise term relationships as those used in previous studies, but are between a set of terms and another term. They allow for context-dependent query expansion. Our experiments conducted on TREC collections show that we can obtain large and significant improvements with our approach. This study shows that LM is an appropriate framework to implement effective query expansion.

An architecture for enhanced assurance in e-health systems

Notwithstanding the obvious potential advantages of information and communications technology (ICT) in the enhanced provision of healthcare services, there are some concerns associated with integration of and access to electronic health records. A security violation in health records, such as an unauthorised disclosure or unauthorised alteration of an individual's health information, can significantly undermine both healthcare providers' and consumers' confidence and trust in e-health systems. A crisis in confidence in any national level e-health system could seriously degrade the realisation of the system's potential benefits. In response to the privacy and security requirements for the protection of health information, this research project investigated national and international e-health development activities to identify the necessary requirements for the creation of a trusted health information system architecture consistent with legislative and regulatory requirements and relevant health informatics standards. The research examined the appropriateness and sustainability of the current approaches for the protection of health information. It then proposed an architecture to facilitate the viable and sustainable enforcement of privacy and security in health information systems under the project title "Open and Trusted Health Information Systems (OTHIS)". OTHIS addresses necessary security controls to protect sensitive health information when such data is at rest, during processing and in transit with three separate and achievable security function-based concepts and modules: a) Health Informatics Application Security (HIAS); b) Health Informatics Access Control (HIAC); and c) Health Informatics Network Security (HINS). The outcome of this research is a roadmap for a viable and sustainable architecture for providing robust protection and security of health information including elucidations of three achievable security control subsystem requirements within the proposed architecture. The successful completion of two proof-of-concept prototypes demonstrated the comprehensibility, feasibility and practicality of the HIAC and HIAS models for the development and assessment of trusted health systems. Meanwhile, the OTHIS architecture has provided guidance for technical and security design appropriate to the development and implementation of trusted health information systems whilst simultaneously offering guidance for ongoing research projects. The socio-economic implications of this research can be summarised in the fact that this research embraces the need for low cost security strategies against economic realities by using open-source technologies for overall test implementation. This allows the proposed architecture to be publicly accessible, providing a platform for interoperability to meet real-world application security demands. On the whole, the OTHIS architecture sets a high level of security standard for the establishment and maintenance of both current and future health information systems. This thereby increases healthcare providers‘ and consumers‘ trust in the adoption of electronic health records to realise the associated benefits.

Identifying and delineating information experience as a research domain : A discussion paper

A line of information and information literacy research has emerged that has a strong focus on information experience. Strengthened understanding, profiling and theorising of information experience as a specific domain of interest to information researchers is required. A focus on information experience is likely to have a major influence on the field, drawing attention to interpretive and experiential forms of research.

State of the art and future challenges for information literacy research

This short paper focuses on strategic issues and important research questions.

Information sharing with key suppliers : a contingency approach

This paper focuses on information sharing with key suppliers and seeks to explore the factors that might influence its extent and depth. We also investigate how information sharing affects a company’s performance with regards to resource usage, output, and flexibility. Drawing from transaction cost- and contingency theories, several factors, namely environmental uncertainty, demand uncertainty, dependency and, the product life cycle stage are proposed to explain the level of information shared with key suppliers. We develop a model where information sharing mediates the (contingent) factors and company performance. A mail survey was used to collect data from Finnish and Swedish companies. Partial Least Squares analysis was separately performed for each country (n=119, n=102). There was consistent evidence that environmental uncertainty, demand uncertainty and supplier/buyer dependency had explanatory power, whereas no significance was found for the product life cycle stage. The results also confirm previous studies by providing support for a positive relationship between information sharing and performance, where output performance was found to be the most strongly related