Australian Computer Society: ACS Digital Library
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A Content Analysis of Australian IS Early Career Job Advertisements
No full textThe purpose of this paper is to develop an understanding of the knowledge, skills and competencies demanded of early career information systems graduates in Australia. Job advertisements from 2006 were collected and investigated using content analysis software to determine the frequencies and patterns of occurrence of specific requirements. There was a high demand for technical knowledge and competencies as well as communication skills. A core cluster of IS knowledge and skills emerged which appear to be in demand across a wide variety of jobs. Issues raised include the role of entry level positions in the preparation of their incumbents for future more senior positions. The findings add an Australian perspective to the literature on information systems job ads and should be of value to educators
Business Benefits from Enterprise Systems Implementation in Small and Medium-sized Enterprises
Get PDFThe market for enterprise systems (ESs) continues to grow as business becomes increasingly global and competitive. Increasingly, the market focus for ES vendors is on small businesses. The purpose of this study is to provide a unique ES vendor/consultant perspective on (a) the business benefits small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) expect from their ES investment and (b) to examine current practices of ES implementation in SMEs through a conceptual framework that considers the organisational, process and strategic context of the implementation. This study does so with interview data collected from ES vendors, ES consultants and IT research firms, who are the key players in the New Zealand ES industry. A distinctive contribution of this research is the vendor/consultant perspective as the unit of analysis, rather than the SME perspective commonly used in similar research. The vendor/consultant perspective offers a comprehensive viewpoint that extends across numerous SMEs in a variety of industries. Findings from interviews with these professionals indicate that although many ES implementations are several years old now, SMEs have only recently started tracking benefits through analytical processes in expectation to realise business value from their ES investment. The results also identify how ES implementation practices are adapting to be more suitable to the SME sector, an important market for ES vendors given the saturation of the large enterprise market for ES implementation
ICT Governance and What to Do About the Toothless Tiger(s): Professional Organizations and Codes of Ethics
Get PDFInformation and Communication Technology (ICT) has been with us for many years and in the past ten years there has been a growing interest in something called “ICT Governance” as a means of reducing information system disasters. There have been national organizations formed, professional organizations have organized sub-committees to address ICT Governance and it has even been called a “discipline”. The unwrapping of this concept, like many concepts, has several inconsistent interpretations and ineffective implementations in industry. In some cases the concept has been modified to meet a particular sectors needs. This broadening of concepts to fit individual needs is not new and sometimes is quite useful. There is however a fundamental mistake in the narrowness of most interpretations of ICT Governance which make it less likely that it will achieve its ultimate goals. I believe this mistake can and should be addressed by professional computing organizations. In what follows I will examine the various approaches to ICT governance, the difficulty it tries to address and I will argue for what I consider its critical limitations. I will than show how professional organizations can address the weakness of ICT governance using tools they already have at hand
The Decision Disconnect
Get PDFIf the practice of ethics amongst the members of an enterprise and their ideal identity conflict with those of the governing membership in structure, assumptions, dynamic or learning, then we have a decision disconnect that will constrain the success of that enterprise: a governance issue. Understanding the pervasive role of ethics in leading ICT in the enterprise is vital for effective practice of enterprise ICT governance. Hitherto there has been comparatively little critical attention paid to the problem of understanding how the value systems that shape decision-making comprehensively impact the appropriate practice of governance and management in ICT. In this paper, I argue that the value systems at play within the enterprise are central and intrinsic drivers for shaping control and influence. I conclude with a framework for making sense of the complex relationship between ethics, governance and the enterprise, to assist the practitioner in focusing on those planning factors that may be moderated for effective governance. I draw on the findings from the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics’ (in partnership with the Australian Computer Society) examination of ethics and regulation in the ICT industry (Lucas and Weckert, 2008) to highlight the particular problem of ethics and governance of ICT people. This paper is significant as the unambiguous establishment of the criticality of value systems in the practice of governance in the enterprise, and particularly the ICT enterprise.
The proposed framework provides a systems-thinking basis for practitioners to explicitly plan and design for the dynamic interrelationship of values, people, process, and purpose in enterprise governance. The framework advocates recognition, planning and design for requisite diversity for all system components
Supporting SME Collecting Organisations: A Business Model Framework for Digital Heritage Collections
Get PDFIncreasing numbers of heritage collecting organisations such as archives, galleries, libraries and museums are moving towards the provision of digital content and services based on the collections they hold. The collections sector in Australia is characterised by a diverse range of often very small organisations, many of which are struggling with the transition to digital service delivery. One major reason for this struggle is the lack of suitable underlying business models for these organisations as they attempt to achieve a sustainable digital presence. The diverse characteristics of organisations within the collections sector make it difficult, if not impossible, to identify a single business model suitable for all organisations. We argue in this paper that the development of a flexible e-business model framework is a more useful strategy for achieving this goal. This paper presents a preliminary framework based on the literature, utilising the Core + Complement (C+) Business Model Framework for Content Providers initially developed by Krueger et al. (2003) and outlines how the framework will be refined and investigated empirically in future research within the Australian collections sector
Collaborative and Competitive Strategies in Virtual Teams of e-Entrepreneurs: A pan-European Perspective
Get PDFRecent advances in Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and the advent of the Internet have facilitated the emergence and growth of collaborative strategies amongst small e-Businesses (Matlay & Westhead, 2005). In addition, during the last decade or so, team-led entrepreneurship has been identified as a highly profitable alternative to single founder entrepreneurship. Recent research suggests that growth oriented, small e-Businesses operating in international e-Markets are more likely to be founded and managed by teams of e-Entrepreneurs (Matlay & Westhead, 2007). In increasingly globalised and hyper-competitive markets, "virtual teams" of e-Entrepreneurs search, discover and exploit new entrepreneurial opportunities. This type of entrepreneurial team consists of geographically dispersed entrepreneurs who are led by common entrepreneurial interests and interact electronically in order to promote interdependent strategies and fulfil entrepreneurial goals. In this article, an illustrative longitudinal case study of a pan-European virtual team of 24 e-Entrepreneur members is used to evaluate emergent collaborative and competitive strategies in small e-Businesses that are lead and managed by members. Collaborative and competitive strategies of e-Businesses are identified and related outcomes are analysed. Future research opportunities are suggested and pertinent policy recommendations are offered
Electronic Commerce publications and research in Australia: Implications of the Research Quality Framework
No full textAustralian universities and academics will soon see a major change in the way research is reported and funded. It is expected that by 2008, according to the most recent timetable (Bishop 2006), the Research Quality Framework (RQF) will be implemented. The result of the announcement has been an increased activity within universities focusing on the proposed criteria. The proposed RQF will seek to have research assessed according to quality and impact. Part of both quality and impact relates to where research is published. For academics it will be increasingly important to target high quality journals if the research is to be rated as high quality. The question this raises for Information Systems academics is where do we publish for maximum impact? The Information Systems (IS) field is diverse with researchers working in many areas and a publication outlet for one area may not be relevant for another. One area where many Australian IS researchers have focused their research interest is the field of electronic commerce (e-commerce). The research reported in this paper identified the publication outlets that would be regarded as amongst the highest quality for researchers wishing to publish e-commerce research. The authors analysed e-commerce research papers by Australian researchers published in the period 2000 to 2005. The results describe where Australian researchers are publishing in this field. The paper also provides guidance to those working in the e-commerce field on which journals and conferences to target to ensure their work rates highly in terms of the RQF
A Citation Analysis of Australian Information Systems Researchers: Towards a New ERA?
Get PDFCitation analysis is a potentially valuable means of assessing the contributions of researchers, in Information Systems (IS) as in other disciplines. In particular, a combination of raw counts and deeper analysis of citation data can deliver insights into the impact of a researcher's publications on other researchers. Despite this potential, the limited literature in the IS discipline has paid very little attention to the use of citation analysis for this purpose.
Meanwhile, the federal department responsible for education funding has convinced successive federal governments to develop research quality measures that can be used as a basis for differential funding. The Howard Government's proposed Research Quality Framework (RQF) has been abandoned, but a number of aspects of it survive within the Rudd Government's Excellence in Research for Australia (ERA) initiative. The ERA also appears likely to involve a highly formalised process whereby 'research groupings' within individual universities will be evaluated, with (as yet unclear) impacts on the distribution of research funding.
Funding agencies have an interest in score-keeping, whether or not their enthusiasm is shared by Australian researchers. It is therefore highly advisable that Australian disciplines, and especially less well-established and powerful disciplines like Information Systems, achieve a clear understanding of their performance as indicated by the available measurement techniques applied to the available data.
This paper reports on citation analysis using data from both the longstanding Thomson/ISI collection and the more recently developed Google Scholar service. Few Australian IS researchers have achieved scores of any great significance in the Thomson/ISI collection, whereas the greater depth available in Google Scholar provides a more realistic picture.
Quality assessment of the Thomson/ISI collection shows it to be seriously inappropriate for relatively new disciplines generally, and for IS in particular. Yet the Howard Government had selected the Thomson/ISI collection as the data-source for citation analysis for the now-abandoned RQF, and the Rudd Government appears likely to re-select it for the ERA.
It is critical to the ongoing accessibility of research funding by Australian IS researchers that steps be taken to ensure that decision-makers are made very well aware of the inadequacies of the ISI data collection, and that alternative, more appropriate processes for impact assessment be developed
What is an ICT Professional anyway?
Get PDFThe intention of this paper is to instigate ongoing discussion surrounding the connected topics of ICT professionalism and the ICT profession. Part of that discussion needs to include suggestions of ‘the way forward’ for the development and recognition of an ICT professional body and the way it should govern/support/protect the professionals within