Jabu Mtsweni

The quest towards a winning Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technology adoption strategy

Although Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technologies present enterprises with a significant amount of business benefits; enterprises are still facing challenges in promoting and sustaining end-user adoption. The purpose of this paper is to provide a systematic review on Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technology adoption models, challenges, as well as to provide emerging statistic approaches that purport to address these challenges. The paper will present four critical Enterprise 2.0 adoption elements that need to form part of an Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technology adoption strategy. The four critical elements were derived from the ‘SHARE 2013 for business users’ conference conducted in Johannesburg, South Africa 2013, as well as a review of the existing literature. The four adoption elements include enterprise strategic alignment, adoption strategy, governance, and communication, training and support. The four critical Enterprise 2.0 adoption elements will allow enterprises to ensure strategic alignment between the chosen Enterprise 2.0 collaboration technology toolset and the chosen business strategies. In addition by reviewing and selecting an appropriate adoption strategy that incorporates governance, communication and a training and support system, the enterprise can improve its ability towards a successful Enterprise 2.0 adoption campaign.

The potential benefits of mobile microwork services in developing nations: Research opportunities and challenges

Unemployment is one of the main hindrances to socio-economic development in developing nations. At the same time, the prominent adoption and use of digital technologies, especially mobile devices have changed the status quo in Africa with regard to digital divide, communication, and information access. Nevertheless, most parts of Africa and other developing countries are still lagging behind when it comes to the swiftness of implementing technologies that have the potential of addressing pressing issues such as unemployment. On-demand mobile microwork services, which are a subset of the crowdsourcing paradigm, are some of the initiatives that are under-explored, particularly for dealing with issues of unemployment. This research paper explores the potential benefits of such services as one possible contribution for dealing with joblessness in developing nations where mobile devices are easily accessible and used. Furthermore, the paper presents some of the pertinent research opportunities and challenges that need to be considered when dealing with mobile microwork services.

The adoption of crowdsourcing platforms in South Africa

Crowdsourcing has increasingly become a popular phenomenon where organisations solicit the help of the public to accomplish activities that are usually performed by employees. These activities can range from scientific problems to menial tasks that are sometimes too mundane for employees. A lot of organisations in different countries have adopted and embraced this phenomenon with gusto. South Africa being the African continents most developed economy is also embracing crowdsourcing. However, the adoption of crowdsourcing initiatives has been slow, especially amongst public organisations, due to various reasons, such as lack of awareness. This research paper reports on the investigation conducted pertaining to the adoption of crowdsourcing platforms in South Africa. The primary research methods used for the study included a systematic literature review and document analysis. The results from the study suggest that the most prominent crowdsourcing platforms in South Africa deal with funding. However, there is still a lack of information pertaining to the status and number of users benefiting from the adopted and/or deployed platforms.

Engineering RESTful semantic services on the fly

Real-world implementations of semantic services that could enable seamless integration of heterogeneous systems on the fly are deficient. This could be attributed to the complexity of heavy-weight semantic technologies, which mostly have a steep learning curve. As a consequence, the evolvement of modern approaches that purport to simplify the engineering of such services is a necessity. In this short paper, we present a work-in-progress model-driven approach that seeks to simplify and speed up the process of engineering RESTful semantic services. The suggested approach promotes automatic transformation of platform independent service models to partial service implementation and semantic descriptions to realize functional RESTful semantic services. The proposed solution is demonstrated and evaluated through a simple use-case scenario.

Toward a service creation framework: a case of intelligent semantic services

Semantic Web Services are touted as one possible solution for some of the challenges experienced with Web services; such as lack of automatic service discovery and consumption. Ideally, semantic services are meant to facilitate automatic business service provisioning and consumption on the Web. These services are enriched with semantics, which are derived from ontologies. Nevertheless, semantic-based services are scarcely adopted and utilised by service providers and consumers respectively. Some of the reasons noted in literature for this lack of adoption and usage include issues such as lack of real-life prototypes that are meant to demonstrate the benefits of semantic services; lack of integrated service creation frameworks; and unified development platforms that are purported to guide and promote simple engineering of semantic services. Thus, in this short paper our aim is on the proposal and presentation of a conceptual multi-layered and yet integrated service creation framework called iSemServ. The framework is intended to guide, simplify, and accelerate the process of engineering intelligent semantic services.

Evolving a new community through Tuckman model and WhatsApp messaging platform

Tuckmans model identified forming, storming, norming and performing as four fundamental stages of group development; a new community like an extended group will not achieve optimal effectiveness unless it attains the stage of performing and interdependence [1]; therein lies one of the challenges of metropolitan housing schemes in developing countries [2]. Concerted efforts by governments of Lagos state, Nigeria at meeting deficiency in housing needs has yielded little returns in the long-run because of inability of homeowners and residents of new housing estates to take responsibilities for shared facilities; especially when estates were built by government and sold out in mortgage schemes. This exploratory study looks into how a new community of 144 new apartments evolved over 18 months with WhatsApp as a collaborative messaging tool for 180days and its impact on shared facilities maintenance. Group WhatsApp conversation was extracted and analysed for themes consistent with Tuckmans model. The research outcome shows significant usefulness of WhatsApp towards establishing a performing community — a community with common focus where resources are allocated efficiently, communicates effectively with processes in place to ensure final objectives are achieved; a community with common sense of responsibilities towards sustaining shared facilities.

Developing a cyber threat intelligence sharing platform for South African organisations

Cyberattacks are on the increase in severity, complexity and frequency, negatively affecting the citizens, government, and businesses. Adversely, the security and Defence role-players in developing countries, such as South Africa, are short of the required capacity and capability to adequately defend and protect the national cyberspace against these fast moving and persistent threats and attacks. Be that as it may, the South African cyberspace still requires national attention and protection by the mandated role-players, such as the Defence force and its industry partners. Thus, within the cyber domain, the various Defence force role-players can no longer rely on traditional solutions to detect, defend, and respond to the forever changing cyber threats and cyberattacks. In order to reduce cybersecurity risks and strengthen cyber resilience of the nation, strategic cybersecurity information sharing in the Defence environment is becoming a necessity. Thus, the contribution from this paper is a systematic discussion and demonstration of a conceptual cyber threat intelligence sharing model and platform that could stimulate and enable different stakeholders within the Defence environment to seamlessly and collaboratively aggregate, analyse, and timely share contextual and actionable cyber-threat intelligence that could lead to a resilient cybersecurity posture and better protection of the national cyberspace.

iSemServ: towards the engineering of intelligent semantic-based services

The emergence of Semantic Web Services is stimulating the need for modern enterprises to efficiently and rapidly develop and deliver machine-processable and machine-interpretable value-added services in order to automate a variety of tasks on the Web. However, semantic-based services are scarcely adopted and utilised as there are few real-life examples that demonstrate the possibilities and benefits of such services. Furthermore, there is a lack of service creation frameworks and technical platforms that purport to guide and promote simple, flexible, rapid, and unified engineering of semantic-based services. In addition, current semantic service platforms do not support the construction of semantic services that are intelligent beyond the application of ontologies. In this position paper, preliminary efforts that seek to address the challenges of simplifying and speeding-up the engineering process of intelligent semantic services are presented. The goal of the work presented in this paper is about providing service providers, designers, and consumers with simple, unified, and yet simple tools that can aid in the technical implementation of intelligent semantic-based services. The main contributions envisioned from this research is a conceptual service creation framework called iSemServ and a technological service creation platform, which is intended to simplify and support the phases of building intelligent semantic services in an integrated manner. The proposed research adopts a quantitative approach with the main focus on model-building, prototypes, laboratory experiments, and computer-based simulations.

Beyond the convenience of the internet of things: Security and privacy concerns

The significant growth of the Internet of Things (IoT) is revolutionizing the way people live by transforming everyday Internet-enabled objects into an interconnected ecosystem of digital and personal information accessible anytime and anywhere. As more objects become Internet-enabled, the security and privacy of the personal information generated, processed and stored by IoT devices become complex and challenging to manage. This paper details the current security and privacy challenges presented by the increasing use of the IoT. Furthermore, investigate and analyze the limitations of the existing solutions with regard to addressing security and privacy challenges in IoT and propose a possible solution to address these challenges. The results of this proposed solution could be implemented during the IoT design, building, testing and deployment phases in the real-life environments to minimize the security and privacy challenges associated with IoT.

Towards a context-aware multi-channel messaging model for African banks: Preliminary investigations

Technological advancements have provided Banks several means of sending messages to their customers. In the context of business-to-customer interaction, Single Channel Messaging (SCM) model is prominently used by most Banks in Africa. SCM is restricted to one communication medium and messages are not sent based on urgency or priority. The ultimate aim of this research study is to propose and implement a model for Multi-Channel Messaging (MCM) that addresses the weaknesses of SCM. However, in this paper we only present and motivate the proposed conceptual MCM model. Unlike SCM, MCM uses different modes of communication to pass on information to Bank customers. Depending on the importance of a message, MCM provides mechanisms for choosing a channel, amongst available options, that matches the messages urgency or priority. The suitability of the Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) as an implementation approach is highlighted as it offers a robust, loosely coupled and scalable strategy for realising the requirements of MCM.