Ephrem Eyob

E-government: breaking the frontiers of inefficiencies in the public sector

E-government is becoming the preferred tool to enhance seamless government services among its customers and government agencies. It is becoming the next wave of technology applications in the public sector as e-business or e-commerce in the private sector is maturing. This paper uses the 2002 survey of the International City or County Management Association (ICMA) and analyses various issues confronting county and municipality governments in their quest to enable their business processes to become efficient, accurate and ultimately satisfy their clients. However, progress among the survey respondents is mixed. Localities with more resources had more success in e-government implementation, resulting in more government efficiency, as compared to jurisdictions located in rural and large inner cities that lack adequate funding and the technical wherewithal.

Globalisation and the Nigerian banking industry: efficiency and legitimacy considerations in the adoption of electronic banking (e-banking) services

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate about how local events interact with global pressures in contemporary times. The paper adopts an interpretive approach to study e-banking services in Nigerian banks. We integrate ideas and concepts from both institutional theory and strategic management to study the reformation of the Nigerian banking system. Strategic management suggests that organisational actions are largely influenced by economic and efficiency reasons while institutional theory argues that organisational actions are motivated by legitimacy considerations where organisations compulsively conform to some widely-held beliefs and expectations of the appropriate ways of doing things within the organisation and its environment.

Reengineering higher education: the case of an African institution

Strong tertiary education is seen as a critical success factor in the development of society at large in the developing world, of which most nations of Africa feature prominently. Although several countries embark on educational reforms and promise access to higher education for all, various problems, including distance, lack of resources and the complexity of delivery, are major hindrances to the process itself. The lack of enabling technologies has denied the potential fruits of higher education to some deserving and qualified citizens of developing countries. The problem can be alleviated by a more effective use of current educational assets coupled with distance education knowledge diffusion. Distance education (DE) is one such use of current educational assets through the infusion of information technology. Implementing DE in an effective manner relies on the process itself, the methodologies, techniques and tools. The various centres of delivery and classrooms must be connected: via radio, telephone, computer or other electronic means. This study explores the process of reengineering higher education through DE and proposes a Systems Development Life Cycle (SDLC) approach that addresses the major technological, political and economic issues faced during implementation.

Quality service: estimating software reliability for global system for mobile communications (GSM) Funtone

In this paper, we examined the reliability of Funtone software and its impact on quality service to the user. As Global System for Mobile (GSM) software is relatively new in the market and the level of awareness of its quality service is low; the need for quality assessment of these services cannot be overemphasised. We have estimated the distribution of time interval between failures variable to follow a Poisson process with the parameter, λ. The intervals between failures follow an exponential distribution and from this, we estimated the reliability of the software indirectly the quality service of Funtone. Furthermore, we carried out a Monte Carlo simulation; the result is in total agreement with what has been predicted by Poisson and exponential distributions.

TCP buffer tuning and multiple socket connections to support high-performance services and standards for data transportation

Sometimes the throughput of a single Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) connection can be disappointing. Slow connectivity in the internet is a highly frustrating experience to the end user; it also leads to waste of human and network resources. Network performance is a multi-faced problem and research has shown that tuning the parameters of TCP communication and the TCP configuration of the communication devices can lead to significant performance improvements. In this paper, a TCP/IP client-server software is proposed to examine how to adjust socket buffer sizes to maximise transfer rate for each socket connection and decide the maximum number of concurrent socket connections to maximise throughput of data transmission from one computer to another. The research findings, from the data collected for this research, concludes that optimising both socket buffer size and the number of connections, significantly improves data transportation services. To support high data rate transmission services, especially for a virtual private network, a standard, specifying appropriate communication parameters including number of socket connections, socket buffer size and TCP window size, is suggested.

Efficiency analysis and standardisation of input output measures: the case of public institutions of higher education in Virginia

We use data envelopment analysis (DEA) to standardise the measure of the relative efficiency of public colleges and universities in Virginia. Our analysis is performed using performance indicators on 15 public institutions. The DEA model identifies efficient schools (efficient frontier) based on some input and output data selected among the performance indicators. Inefficiencies of the other institutions are measured, explained, and suggestions for possible improvements of the models are provided. The DEA model results can be used as a guide for policy formulation by decision makers and as standardisation measures of inputs and outputs for colleges and universities.

An Excel based approach to optimise trade-offs between freight expediting and safety stock inventory costs

In this paper, we present an Excel based methodology for the computation of two optimal policy quantities, order size and reorder point of a (Q, r) inventory system under uncertainty when backorder costs are independent of the amount of the backorder and dependent on whether there is a shortage. It is shown that the total cost curve for the backorder model is a concave-convex function. Solving the problem using a spreadsheet solver would not necessarily yield the optimal solution. It is first necessary to identify the convex and concave domains prior to the application of Excel Solver to determine the optimal solution of the model. This approach is flexible and capable of handling different lead time demand distributions as well as the more realistic scenario when both the demand and lead times are randomly distributed. The methodology is illustrated with a simple problem.