Business Information Systems

SMEs are heterogeneous population of firms whose contributions to private sector participation and economic development are wide which include but not limited to new products and services, improved designs and processes and adoption of new technologies. However, the picture is different in Nigeria where SMEs have been noted to perform below expectation over the years due to enormous challenges ranging from poor level of financial assistance, lack of infrastructural facilities, lack of competitive intelligence skill among workers, unfavorable environment and government policies among others. The paper attempts to bridge the gap between the current situation and the ideal through identification of strategies to enhance competitiveness among SMEs using appropriate technologies and business information, some of the strategies include: clustering, big data networking, economic globalization, specialization in a market niche to compensate for some of the disadvantages of small scale. Also, while there are more challenges to contend with by SMEs in Nigeria, the benefits in terms of access to new markets and knowledge can be enormous. Special attention is given to the role of information in business and in achieving competitiveness in SMEs while considering specific contexts outside Nigeria as a basis for adjudging the strength and weakness of Nigerian SMEs. The paper concludes with salient recommendations to pertinent issues beclouding the firms’ performance and productivity level in Nigeria.

Keywords— : clustering, business information, big data
Intelligence, big data, SMEs, Competitive Intelligence

The accounting information systems course is often viewed as difficult to teach because it contains topics that are less quantifiable and structured in comparison to courses in financial or managerial/cost accounting. Yet, many AIS instructors have developed successful teaching techniques that are suited to the AIS course. A creative teaching approach for the AIS course is that of role-playing organizations and their operations, especially for transaction cycles. In addition, cooperative learning can be nicely coupled with role playing because of their common emphases on social interdependence and shared learning. The benefits and guidelines for cooperative learning and role playing are presented and then illustrated with an example for a transaction cycle of an organization.

In this paper, we expose the legal theories underlying two important classes of Legal Core Ontologies and show how these ontologies inherit both limitations and benefits (such as explanatory power) of their underlying theories. We do that with the help of a real case study in which we have normative omission and collision of principles. We use this case study to conduct an ontological analysis of the support for judicial decision-making in LKIF-Core (representing Kelsen’s Pure Theory of the Law) and UFO-L (representing Robert Alexy’s Theory of Constitutional Rights). We show that UFO-L is able to articulate the semantics of the content of judicial decisions by making explicit the individual’s legal positions that are raised in argumentation along a legal process. The same cannot be said of LKIF-Core that is based on the Kelsenian stance and focuses on the representation of general norms (norm types) and subsumption of facts to these norms.

Data warehouses (DW) play a decisive role in providing analytical information for decision making. Multidimensional modeling is a special approach to modeling data, considered the foundation for building data warehouses. With the explosive growth in the amount of heterogeneous data (most of which external to the organization) in the latest years, the DW has been impacted by the need to interoperate and deal with the complexity of this new type of information, such as big data, data lakes and cognitive computing platforms, becoming evident the need to improve the semantic expressiveness of the DW. Research has shown that ontological theories can play a fundamental role in improving the quality of conceptual models, reinforcing their potential to support semantic interoperability in its various manifestations. In this paper we propose the application of ontological patterns, grounded in the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO), for conceptual modeling in multidimen-sional models, in or...

Project sponsorship is assumed to be critical to the success of information systems development and implementation. However, there is limited research on the effect of vendor-based sponsorship on the management of information technology (IT) projects. This paper contributes to that emerging body of evidence. Drawing on literature on psychological contract, management control and project sponsorship, the authors propose that vendor-based sponsors influence project performance in two main ways. One is to protect project quality by renegotiating contract with the client; and the other is to resource the project. Based on a survey of senior managers in IT services vendor organisations, it reports that project sponsorship improves the quality, but not the cost or timeliness, of vendor delivery of IT projects. The findings suggest that IT services vendors can improve their project delivery capability by appointing project sponsors.

There is a plethora of theories to explore the disciplines of business, management and sociology, with institutional theory being widely used to explore a range of research challenges. In the area of Information Systems (IS), the use of institutional theory remains in its infancy, with much potential for adoption. Much of the rationale underpinning the proposed research is that a systematic review and synthesis of the normative literature may support the direction of further research and the use of institutional theory in exploring pertinent research challenges facing the IS community. This study also serves to signpost cross-disciplinary research, and thus opens up a whole new research paradigm. Therefore, this article seeks to provide a bibliometric analysis and a comprehensive and systematic review of the literature pertaining to institutional theory to ascertain the current ‘state of play’ of the theory. Information on a series of variables was extracted after conducting a revie...

... information sharing, and availability of technical standards on the acceptance ofinter-organisational anti/counter ... Benbasat et al., 1987), the case study method presented an effective approach to facilitate ... The cost per injury and per fatality were estimated at $46,903 and ...

In this paper a concept will be proposed about a hypergraph-based formalism for representing enterprise architecture. The paper presents a formal model using TOGAF and hypergraph theory. Hypergraphs provide a flexible mathematical structure to describe complex relationships in an enterprise architecture , mirroring the dependencies among components, and exploring integrity and consistency issues. The proposed approach extends the analytical potential for discrepancy checking in complex enterprise architecture structures. The approach can be utilized for EAM-based analysis of information systems.

The purpose of this study is twofold. First, we examine the effects of using database technology in the classroom on students' acquisition of database knowledge and performance on relation normalization tasks. Second, we solicit sstudnets' views on this methodology to determine their satisfaction. Our results suggest that designing an active learning exercise tha allows students to interact with a database management system during class improves knowledge acquisition, the ability to apply knowledge, and satisfaction with the course and the instructor.

Business information system is an area of the greatest significance in any business enterprise today. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) projects are a growing segment of this vital area. These software systems are designed and installed by ERP vendors. Most current research on the subject concerns only managerial issues. This study is to probe the performance of ERP software in terms of the three crucial technical factors that determine the success or failure of a given ERP software. To probe these research issues, an exploratory case study was conducted with a survey and interview at a large organization with an ERP system. The statistical analysis of the collected data supports the three hypotheses of the study, leading to the conclusion that the crucial technical factors for ERP implementation are the same in literature and in the companies with successful ERP implementation. The future research study will involve other technical aspects of ERP implementation for enhancing its p...

Business process management is one of the core drivers of business innovation and is based on strategic technology and capable of creating and successfully executing end-to-end business processes. The trend will be to move from relatively stable, organization-specific applications to more dynamic, high-value ones where business process interactions and trends are examined closely to understand more accurately an application’s requirements. Such collaborative, complex end-to-end service interactions give rise to the concept of Service Networks (SNs). This book chapter surveys business process management, concentrating on business transactions, and introduces a business transaction language to realizes a novel business transaction model that enables end-to-end service constellations to behave according to agreed-upon transaction criteria. The objective of the BTL is to provide the environment to build robust and successful mission-critical SBAs, using a fusion of concepts from application integration, transaction-based and business process management technologies.

The dramatic increase in the number of SMEs has been considered as the backbone of economies. Although literature has been rich in studies on organisational learning (OL), most of the research mainly focuses on large organisations, leaving small and medium enterprises (SMEs) marginalised. Accordingly, this paper seeks to redress the balance through investigating the impact of business information systems (BIS) on OL and identifying the main factors that enhance OL in SMEs in the Egyptian context. The main purpose of this research is to propose a conceptual model for OL which contains Organisational Dimensions (OD); namely Organisation Culture (OC), Management Support (MS), Group, and Personal Behaviour (PB) Dimensions; namely Human, Follower, and Time as the main factors that affect OL. BIS was introduced as a mediator for the model. The study used a questionnaire as a tool for data collection, where 410 employees at SMEs were surveyed. Research hypotheses were tested, and data was statistically analysed using SPSS.

Institutional theory has proven to be a central analytical perspective for investigating the role of social and historical structures of information systems (IS) implementation. However, it does not explicitly account for how organisational actors make sense of and enact technologies in their local context. We address this limitation by exploring the potential of using institutional theory with sensemaking theory to study IS implementation in organisations. We argue that each theoretical perspective has its own explanatory power and that a combination of the two facilitates a much richer interpretation of IS implementation by linking macro- and micro-levels of analysis. To illustrate this, we report from an empirical study of the implementation of an Electronic Patient Record (EPR) system in a clinical setting. Using key constructs from the two theories, our findings address the phenomenon of implementing EPRs at three levels: the organisational field, the organisational/group, and ...