Computing and Information Systems - Theses
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ItemExplaining difficulties in realisation of benefits from ERP systems in developing countries( 2007)Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system adoptions by organizations in developing countries such as China, India, Thailand and Sri Lanka have struggled to achieve their intended benefits. The objective of this thesis is to explain why such adoptions have failed to produce intended benefits. To do this, a model is developed that integrates (a) the factors that affect realization of benefits from ERP systems in developed countries, and (b) Hayami's technology-transfer model. With respect to the latter, Hayami argues that misfits related to three factors - culture, institutions, and resources – often inhibit effective adoption of imported technologies in developing countries. The contribution of this thesis is the theoretical model developed using literature and empirical data from the seven in-depth case studies, four in Sri Lanka and three in three developed countries (Australia, Canada and Sweden). No prior published study has proposed a mechanism through which country-contextual factors such as culture and institutions lead to reduced organizational benefits from ERP systems in organisations in developing countries. The mechanism proposed in this study is that (a) misfits between deeply rooted factors such as culture, institutions and resources on the one hand, and assumptions impounded in the western-developed software on the other, often reduce the level or outcomes for the benefit drivers such as ERP module integration, functional fit, and effective use, and (b) that these less-than-desired outcomes, in turn, lead to reduced benefits from ERP systems for organizations in developing countries. By opening up what has hitherto been a "black box" relationship between culture, institutions, and resources on the one hand, and reduced organizational benefits from ERP systems on the other, the model proposed in this thesis lays a foundation for theory testing and further research.
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ItemPredicting the priority of email messages using stylistic features( 2001)LASSIE (Learning Apprentice System for Sorting Incoming Email) is an email management tool that has been constructed in order to demonstrate a possible solution to the problem of email overload. It is designed to help users manage their incoming messages more efficiently by sorting the messages according to their level of urgency. This thesis discusses the motivation and requirements for such a system, and describes the design, implementation, and evaluation of LASSIE. We identify stylistic features that are good indicators of message urgency, describe how these features can be extracted from plain text messages, and present an algorithm for inferring the relationship between these attributes and the message urgency for any individual user. We discuss the considerations involved in constructing a practical email management tool and describe the design decisions that were made in constructing LASSIE. The results of a user trial indicate that LASSIE is able to achieve a high level of predictive accuracy and is readily adopted by users, although improvements in its long-term performance are desirable.
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ItemProgram instrumentation for the detection of software anomalies( 1985)This thesis examines the automated detection of program errors through the insertion of software instruments into the source to flag anomalies at run-time. Anomalies are located using data flow analysis and pointer checking. Explicit state variables are eliminated using the address and size of an object as keys to an implicit state variable. Expressions are functionally instrumented, that is, instrumented without decomposition. Dead definitions are characterized by a new statement-based dead-on-all-paths criterion. Inefficient definition anomalies are flagged for live definitions which are dead on most paths. The handling of objects whose parts are in many states is elucidated. The utilization of reference-only states to detect parameter anomalies for certain languages is proposed. The pointer range error and the accompanying concept of ‘base’ are invented. All of these innovations are original contributions to the field. The software tool DDF was written by the author to apply the above ideas to the C programming language.