Implementation of hospital-wide computer information system :a case study of this change process

This case study examines the impact of a computer information system as it was being implemented in one Ontario hospital. The attitudes of a cross section of the hospital staff acted as a barometer to measure their perceptions of the implementation process. With The Mississauga Hospital in the early stages of an extensive computer implementation project, the opportunity existed to identify staff attitudes about the computer system, overall knowledge and compare the findings with the literature. The goal of the study was to develop a greater base about the affective domain in the relationship between people and the computer system. Eight exploratory questions shaped the focus of the investigation. Data were collected from three sources: a survey questionnaire, focused interviews, and internal hospital documents. Both quantitative and qualitative data were analyzed. Instrumentation in the study consisted of a survey distributed at two points in time to randomly selected hospital employees who represented all staff levels.Other sources of data included hospital documents, and twenty-five focused interviews with staff who replied to both surveys. Leavitt's socio-technical system, with its four subsystems: task, structure, technology, and people was used to classify staff responses to the research questions. The study findings revealed that the majority of respondents felt positive about using the computer as part of their jobs. No apparent correlations were found between sex, age, or staff group and feelings about using the computer. Differences in attitudes, and attitude changes were found in potential relationship to the element of time. Another difference was found in staff group and perception of being involved in the decision making process. These findings and other evidence about the role of change agents in this change process help to emphasize that planning change is one thing, managing the transition is another.

Partnership, politics and public administration: a case study of the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources

Efforts to reform the public sector reflect the social, political and economic environment within which government must function. The recent demands by the public for more consensual decision-making, as well as more efficient, effective and responsive public service, have resulted in a number of reform initiatives, including an emphasis on partnership development. The purpose of this thesis is to examine partnership arrangements within the public sector. Specifically, the thesis will assess the value of partnerships and their impact on government by examining six partnership arrangements involving the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources (OMNR). The OMNR, having recently been awarded the 1992 Institute of Public Administration of Canada Award for Innovative Management, on the theme of partnership development, is being lauded as an example for other government agencies considering similar alliances. The thesis begins by introducing the concept and practice of partnership within the public sector in general and the OMNR specifically. Descriptive analysis of six OMNR partnerships is provided and a number of criteria are used to determine the success of each of these arrangements. Special attention is paid to the political implications of partnerships and to those attributes which appear to contribute to the successful establishment and iii maintenance of partnership arrangements. The conclusion is drawn that partnerships provide the government with an opportunity to address public demands for greater involvement in decision-making while accommodating government's limited financial resources. However, few truly collaborative partnerships exist within the public sector. There are also significant political implications associated with partnerships which must be dealt with both at the political and bureaucratic levels of government. Lastly, it is argued that while partnerships within the OMNR are experiencing some difficulties, they constitute a genuine attempt to broaden the base of decision-making and to incorporate the concerns of stakeholders into resource management.

Generating Relation Algebras for Qualitative Spatial Reasoning

Basic relationships between certain regions of space are formulated in natural language in everyday situations. For example, a customer specifies the outline of his future home to the architect by indicating which rooms should be close to each other. Qualitative spatial reasoning as an area of artificial intelligence tries to develop a theory of space based on similar notions. In formal ontology and in ontological computer science, mereotopology is a first-order theory, embodying mereological and topological concepts, of the relations among wholes, parts, parts of parts, and the boundaries between parts. We shall introduce abstract relation algebras and present their structural properties as well as their connection to algebras of binary relations. This will be followed by details of the expressiveness of algebras of relations for region based models. Mereotopology has been the main basis for most region based theories of space. Since its earliest inception many theories have been proposed for mereotopology in artificial intelligence among which Region Connection Calculus is most prominent. The expressiveness of the region connection calculus in relational logic is far greater than its original eight base relations might suggest. In the thesis we formulate ways to automatically generate representable relation algebras using spatial data based on region connection calculus. The generation of new algebras is a two pronged approach involving splitting of existing relations to form new algebras and refinement of such newly generated algebras. We present an implementation of a system for automating aforementioned steps and provide an effective and convenient interface to define new spatial relations and generate representable relational algebras.