Papers by Alta Van der Merwe
Informatics, Apr 2, 2024
This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative... more This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY
This paper investigates how Data as a disruptive technology could be integrated into TOGAF. Given... more This paper investigates how Data as a disruptive technology could be integrated into TOGAF. Given the recent attention of Big Data and Data Science as disruptors, this paper investigates what the impact on the enterprise could be and how Enterprise Architecture (EA) should accommodate data to enable data-driven EA. There is no model currently available that investigates how Big Data can be incorporated into data-driven EA solutions. This study specifically focuses on how the TOGAF ADM could support a data-driven enterprise. Through document analysis and a systematic literature review, a specific adaption of the TOGAF ADM is proposed that indicates the influence that Data and Big Data has on each phase within the ADM.
Advances in technology bring some challenges to the organisation, for example within Information ... more Advances in technology bring some challenges to the organisation, for example within Information Systems (IS), organisations are facing challenges in dealing with the increased complexity posed by digitisation, distributed systems and business processes. Enterprise architecture (EA) was created to deal with these challenges, and the introduction of the EA discipline brought with it a new type of job, the enterprise architect, whose roles need clarity. The goal of this study was to investigate the role of enterprise architects in a mobile telecommunications organisation in South Africa. Following the interpretive epistemology and using the qualitative research approach, a case study was conducted using interviews as the data gathering technique. The research findings on the role of the enterprise architect revealed that the role of the enterprise architect is both managerial and technological in nature.
Lecture notes in business information processing, 2017
The value of corporate governance has received attention in the last decade after a number of inc... more The value of corporate governance has received attention in the last decade after a number of incidents where fraudulent activities resulted in close down of organizations. Many countries responded with stricter regulations. In this article we argue that the correct use of Business Process Management Systems (BPMS) in an organization may support good governance in an organization. Theories such as the theory of technologies from Orlikowski [15] play a central role in IS research to provide a web of meaning about a phenomenon under investigation. We discuss the potential of BPMS through the lense of Orlikowski’s theory of technologies. We also provide some insights on the use of BPMS to support good governance from a case study conducted. The findings suggest that automated business processes can result in improved corporate governance, as well as business value.
EPiC Series in Computing
Embedding artificial intelligence as part of an organisation’s analytics portfolio can lead to be... more Embedding artificial intelligence as part of an organisation’s analytics portfolio can lead to better data-driven business insight, optimised IT systems for greater reliability, and new AI-enabled innovations. However, organisations are struggling to achieve these potential benefits. This paper reviews 45 publications across the Basket of Eight and MIS Quarterly Executive. The study aims to highlight the state-of-the-art information systems research on organisational AI adoption and how to embed AI in organisations. A combination of manual analysis and augmented AI through topic modelling was utilised to conduct the systematic literature review. The literature review confirms that an AI-supported method to conduct a literature review is efficient, but human insight is still required. From the topic modelling analysis, four underlying research themes emerged: AI to support decision- making and its effect on the social side, design of AI solutions, bringing value to business and human...
EPiC Series in Computing
Different approaches are adopted in this paper to develop a conceptual Society 5.0 landscape over... more 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.
Locally Relevant ICT Research, 2019
The challenges of healthcare delivery in Africa are well documented. Advances in technology prese... more 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 postnatal 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.
Proceedings of Sixth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology, 2021
Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, 2018
Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologi... more Everywhere in the world, governments consider the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to drive improvements in service delivery with wide-ranging e-government initiatives. The health sector in particular faces the twin challenge of growing populations requiring services and dwindling resources in the face of reduced funding. Design thinking has over the last 20 years developed into a “design paradigm” that can assist service providers to craft solutions to problems that take into account the needs and views of stakeholders involved. Using a design science research approach underpinned by a pragmatist philosophy, this study develops a model for consolidating empathy input in a design thinking process.
Retaining profitable and high-value customers is a major strategic objective for many companies. ... more Retaining profitable and high-value customers is a major strategic objective for many companies. In mature mobile markets where growth has slowed, the defection of customers from one network to another has intensified and is strongly fuelled by poor customer experience. In this light, this research-in-progress paper describes a strategic approach to the use of Information Technology as a means of improving customer experience. Using action research in a mobile telecommunications operator, a model is developed that evaluates disparate customer data, residing across many systems, and suggests appropriate contextual actions where experience is poor. The model provides value in identifying issues, understanding them in the context of the overall customer experience (over time) and dealing with them appropriately. The novelty of the approach is the synthesis of data analysis with an enhanced understanding of customer experience which is developed implicitly and in real-time.
OMICS: A Journal of Integrative Biology, 2021
Governments and publics in Europe and around the world have turned to innovation in response to t... more Governments and publics in Europe and around the world have turned to innovation in response to the manifold economic, environmental, and societal challenges we are facing. However, innovations often end up in what is popularly termed as the ''valley of death'' between upstream creation and downstream product development and implementation. Consequently, the benefits of innovation do not always reach the citizens. In addition, critically informed governance of innovations matter because it allows steering of innovations in response to the values and end points desired by society. With the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed the rise of digital health and new information and communications technologies (ICTs). The pandemic underscored the need for innovation governance between global North and the global South. We report and discuss, in this study, the development of the innXchange innovation wheel to improve innovation creation and management, using a case study of cooperation between Europe and Africa. The innovation wheel offers best practice guidance and framework to build capacity for innovation dimensions such as partnership mobilization, evaluation, and monitoring, not to mention innovation literacy. The framework emphasizes active engagement of all key stakeholders from the very beginning, also referred to as ''systematic early dialog.'' We propose the incorporation of systematic early dialog as the best practice guidance in global South and global North cooperation for health care and ICT innovation. The framework is a novel instrument to help overcome the current barriers in planetary health innovation management and consequently, bring breakthrough discoveries in ICTs and innovative ideas to the people.
The African Journal of Information and Communication (AJIC), 2016
This article proposes a conceptual architecture for citizen-expert knowledge exchange in biodiver... more 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.
South African Journal of Education, 2015
Although many South African teachers have access to the internet, they often refrain from using a... more Although many South African teachers have access to the internet, they often refrain from using available online resources to improve the quality of their own teaching. In an attempt to promote Mathematics teachers' effective use of online resources, we developed a web-based platform. This article reports on the first phase of a broader project that focuses on Mathematics teachers' perceptions about and needs for utilising technology in the classroom. Twenty-two teachers participated in this mixed-method pilot study. To obtain qualitative data, we facilitated a Participatory Reflection and Action (PRA) workshop and for the quantitative part of our study, we implemented a questionnaire. The Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT) were selected for the theoretical framework. With regard to effort expectancy, participating teachers found the use of technology overwhelming, resulting in a need for further training. No evidence was found of social influence affecting the participants' acceptance of technology. The participants proved to have access to sufficient equipment. However, their perceptions of their own limited skills weighed heavier than external facilitating conditions. As a result, participating teachers were hesitant to utilise technology in their teaching.
South African Journal of Higher Education, 2007
The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the desired outcomes of the Nation... more The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between the desired outcomes of the National Plan for Higher Education and the funding formula. It further wants to explore the current situation regarding specific challenges in higher education, namely increased participation, broadened social base of students and equity, as well as a lowering of the dropout rate and an increase in graduate outputs. The question is also asked whether the funding formula is successful in being a goal-oriented and performance-based mechanism supporting and even driving institutions of higher education in obtaining the goals as stated in their institutional plans. The author also reflects on recent developments regarding the funding formula.
Abstract: Despite the large number of career-related services available on the Internet, few offe... more Abstract: Despite the large number of career-related services available on the Internet, few offer professionally based long-term career development services. Factors such as life-long learning and the growth of the Internet has influenced the popularity of career counselling services that are delivered over the Internet. In designing and developing these web enabled career guidance services, the developers should not only consider career guidance principles but also include web design principles. In this paper we identified a list of ...
Open source software (OSS) has gained prominence worldwide, largely due to cost savings and secur... more Open source software (OSS) has gained prominence worldwide, largely due to cost savings and security considerations. This has caused a change in the IT sector and has led to the migration of desktops from proprietary to OSS. The problem for organisations wanting to adopt OSS is the difficulty in planning and implementation of migration projects, with migration processes often being designed from scratch. Process reference models (PRMs) are reusable process model structures. They capture the common activities, roles and ...
South African Computer Journal
Technological disruption enabled by the internet revolution has resulted in an exponential increa... more 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 interview...
Sustainability
Organizations require the means to navigate Society 5.0. This is a knowledge-intensive society wh... more 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 pertai...
AMCIS 2015 Proceedings, Puerto Rico, 13 - 15 August 2015. Due to copyright restrictions, the atta... more AMCIS 2015 Proceedings, Puerto Rico, 13 - 15 August 2015. Due to copyright restrictions, the attached PDF file only contains the abstract of the full text item. For access to the full text item, please consult the publisher's website
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Papers by Alta Van der Merwe