Mohd Hasan Selamat

The impact of technological factors on information systems success in the electronic‐government context

Purpose – This study is being conducted in order to investigate the influence of technological factors on up‐stream model of Delone and McLeans IS success dimensions.Design/methodology/approach – Using a survey method, data were gathered from 201 users from four electronic government (EG) agencies in Malaysia. The technological factors were represented by IS competency, IS facilities, IS integration, IS structure and user support. The IS success dimensions used in the study were systems quality, information quality, perceived usefulness, and user satisfaction.Findings – The findings indicate that all the technological factors are significantly correlated with the four IS success dimensions. Further analyses also found that IS competency and IS facilities were the two highest predictors of IS success, followed by IS integration. The study concludes that the technological factors investigated were very important in ensuring the successful utilization and implementation of information systems in the EG agen...

Knowledge Sharing Interactions in Collaborative Software Maintenance Environment

In collaborative Software Maintenance (SM) environment, knowledge sharing is vital to ensure various parties have the necessary information to perform SM tasks. However, patterns of knowledge sharing interactions within the networked organization of SM Community of Practice (CoP) and factors that influence these interactions are yet to be established. We study the dialogues captured in the Software Configuration Management (SCM) tool used by a global SM organization and use Pajek, a Social Network Analysis (SNA) tool, to map the interactions among users and maintenance personnel. The results revealed technical, planning and domain information as most shared information. Network bottlenecks are also identified, which evolves around a key development manager, a development team leader and a systems analyst. Also, there are lack of direct interactions between programmers and domain knowledge providers. As such, the SM environment could benefit from process automations on selected tasks of the above bottleneck areas to ensure knowledge are shared across the board.

Modification of standard function point complexity weights system

Function Point (FP) is a software size measure, which includes the standard FP and many different models derived from it. The standard FP method created by Albrecht in 1979 is currently known as the International FP User group (IFPUG) version, which consists of three main parts: The first part is five components, and the second is the complexity weights that include three levels of complexity; simple, average, and complex. The third part is the general system characteristics of software projects, which consists of 14 technical complexity factors. Although, FP was widely used as a software size measure, but it still suffers from many weaknesses. One of which is the subjectivity in the weights system. In this paper a new FP weights system was established using Artificial Neural Networks. This method is a modification of the complexity weights of FP measure (IFPUG version). The final results were very accurate and much suitable when they were applied on real data sets of software projects.

Software Quality Models: A Comparative Study

In last decade, researchers have often tried to improve the usability, portability, integrity and other aspects of software in order for it to be more users friendly and gain user trust. Several approaches and techniques have been proposed to reduce the negative effects of software size and complexity. Moreover, several software quality models were proposed to evaluate general and specific type of software products. These models were proposed to evaluate general or specific scopes of software products. The proposed models were developed based on comparisons between the well-known models, in order to customize the closed model to the intended scope. These comparisons are leak of criteria that is conducted based on different perspectives and understanding. Therefore, a formal method of comparison between software quality models is proposed. The proposed method is applied on a comprehensive comparison between well-known software quality models. The result of the proposed method shows the strength and weaknesses of those models.

An Investigation into Methods and Concepts of Qualitative Research in Information System Research

This paper is an initial review of literature, investigating qualitative research, to show its relevance in information system disciplines. Qualitative research involves the use of qualitative data, such as interviews, documents, and participant observation data, to understand and explain social phenomena. Qualitative research can be found in many disciplines and fields, using a variety of approaches, methods and techniques. In Information Systems (IS), there has been a general shift in information system research away from technological to managerial and organizational issues, hence an increasing interest in the application of qualitative research methods. Frequently used methods are the action research, case study, ethnography and grounded theory. Review of each research approaches in qualitative methods, will be discussed. Important considerations in the methods are identified, and cases for each research method are described. Then we will present some benefits and limitations of each method. Based on the result, a framework of an action research was proposed and might be useful in starting a research project in information system using qualitative method.

Collaborative Knowledge Management Systems for Learning Organisations

A knowledge management system (KMS) is a concept that can be used for creating knowledge repositories, improving knowledge access and sharing as well as communicating through collaboration, enhancing the knowledge environment and managing knowledge as an asset for an institution or organisation. In this paper, we propose a collaborative KMS framework for learning organisations (LOs) and discuss components in the framework that will help organisations to increase productivity and quality as well as to gain return on investment from a KMS. These components are KMS functionality, architecture, taxonomy, psychological, sociocultural and audit.

Fast Discovery Of Long Patterns For Association Rules

The most time consuming process in discovering association rules is identifying the frequent patterns especially in the cases when the database contains long patterns. An algorithm called Flex for identifying frequent patterns especially efficient when the patterns are long is proposed by successive construction of the nodes lexicographic tree. The vertical counting strategy to facilitate fast discovery is used in support computation. The experimental result shows that Flex outperform Apriori, a well-known and widely used algorithm for patterns discovery.

A framework of collaborative knowledge management system in open source software development environment.

The global economy crisis reveals the advantages of Open Source Software (OSS). Software developers benefit not only from reduced cost of acquisition, but also access to source code and components. In this aspect, knowledge sharing among developers are immensely important in all facets of System Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Feller and Fitzgerald (2000) raised the critical questions on what life-cycle underpins the OSS model and what is the best methodology to support the OSS as well as what toolkit support OSS methodology. This paper shall discuss the formulation of Knowledge Management System (KMS) framework for sharing knowledge in OSS using SDLC from the planning phase until the maintenance phase. An initial fact finding survey was conducted on selected OSS developers in Malaysia to analyze the current usage and acceptance of OSS. The results are quite unexpected, with many OSS developers are still not fully using OSS tools in SDLC stages. The proposed KMS model is envisaged to allow OSS Community-of-Practice to share the OSS knowledge for the whole SDLC.

Propositional satisfiability algorithm to find minimal reducts for data mining

A fundamental problem in data mining is whether the whole information available is always necessary to represent the information system (IS). Reduct is a rough set approach in data mining that determines the set of important attributes to represent the IS. The search for minimal reduct is based on the assumption that within the dataset in an IS, there are attributes that are more important than the rest. An algorithm in finding minimal reducts based on Propositional Satisfiability (SAT) algorithm is proposed. A branch and bound algorithm is presented to solve the proposed SAT problem. The experimental result shows that the proposed algorithm has significantly reduced the number of rules generated from the obtained reducts with high percentage of classification accuracy.

Systematic review of web application security development model

In recent years, web security has been viewed in the context of securing the web application layer from attacks by unauthorized users. The vulnerabilities existing in the web application layer have been attributed either to using an inappropriate software development model to guide the development process, or the use of a software development model that does not consider security as a key factor. Therefore, this systematic literature review is conducted to investigate the various security development models used to secure the web application layer, the security approaches or techniques used in the process, the stages in the development model in which the approaches or techniques are emphasized, and the tools and mechanism used to detect vulnerabilities. The study extracted 499 publications from respectable scientific sources, i.e. the IEEE Computer Society, ACM Digital Library, Google-Scholar, Science Direct, Scopus, Springer Link and ISI Web. After investigation, only 43 key primary studies were considered for this review based on defined inclusion and exclusion criteria. From the review, it appears that no one development model is referred to as a standard or preferred model for web application development. However, agile development models seem to have gained more attention, probably due to the multiple stakeholders that are involved in discussing security viewpoints, rather than a few members of the development team. It appears also that there is consistency in the use of the threat-modeling technique, probably due to its effectiveness in dealing with different kinds of vulnerabilities.