Suchergebnisse

It is widely acknowledged that there is a shortage of software developers, not only in South Africa, but also worldwide. Despite reports, in mostly quantitative studies, of a gap between the industry needs and software development education, the view the industry has of the new graduates and the problems, challenges and solutions in respect of software development education has not been explored in detail. This article reports on a mixed methods study of the relevance of software development education from the perspective of the industry. The analysis reveals some interesting views held by the industry, as well as by the different generations on their new recruits and the problems and challenges that are faced. The following solutions to the problems are suggested: teamwork; projects and experience; work-integrated-learning and mentoring; technical and soft skills; keeping up to date; career guidance; introspection; and generational awareness.

Web Services (WS) technology does not allow automatic discovery and execution of services in the current distributed and complex business environments. Semantic Web Services (SWS) overcome this limitation by adding semantic descriptions to WS, enabling automatic discovery, selection, composition and execution of services for intelligent interoperable machine-to-machine interactions over the World Wide Web (WWW). These capabilities of SWS are useful in distributed environments such as that of e-government. On the other hand, existing SWS solutions assume the existence of dedicated service providers of WS to be semantically described. However, government operations and processes may require a certain amount of prior re-engineering (conceptualization, design, modeling, specification, etc.). This study proposed an infrastructure for Semantic Web Services-enabled e-government that integrates Business Process Modelling (BPM) and Semantic Annotation into existing SWS solutions as tools for the modeling and engineering of SWS for non-automated government operations and processes. The proposed infrastructure leverages SWS technology in e-government while enabling continuous re-engineering and automation of government processes. The study presents an example of the application of the proposed infrastructure with emphasis on the modeling and semantic annotation of business processes for SWS design

The ultimate goal of e-Governance is to reach the stage of seamless service delivery in one-stop e-Government. This raises the engineering issues of integration, reusability, maintenance, and interoperability of autonomous e-Government systems of government departments and agencies. Therefore, appropriate methodologies that consistently address the aforementioned engineering issues throughout clearly defined e-Government development phases are needed. This chapter provides the design and specification, of a framework that amalgamates features from maturity models, software engineering and Semantic Web domains for semantic-enabled development of e-Government systems. Firstly, the methods and techniques used for the planning, design, and implementation of e-Government systems worldwide are investigated; a critical analysis is carried out to identify their advantages and disadvantages, as well as their contribution towards addressing the aforementioned engineering issues. Secondly, the proposed framework is drawn and specified. Finally, support tools including a business process model, an alignment matrix of stages and phases of development, and a weighting matrix of the intensity of semantic activities at various phases of development is drawn and described.

Semantic Web technologies are increasingly being adopted in egovernment to describe and specify e-government services, aiming at their semantic integration and interoperability. However, current research does not provide guidelines on how domain ontology describing government's domain knowledge can be formally represented to enable their automatic processing by computers. This paper presents a case study of transforming domain ontology in Sub Saharan Africa and the developing world at large, into its formal version in e-government processes, aiming at (1) providing e-government developers from developing countries as well as Sub Saharan Africa, with simple activities for practicing semantic knowledge representation in e-government projects, (2) promoting the development of egovernment systems that can be easily integrated and maintained, as well as (3) strengthening the adoption of Semantic Web technologies in e-government projects in developing countries

Changes in organisations due to various factors such as technological advancements or competition may bring the effect of change to certain business processes. This in turn invokes business process re-engineering (BPR) and causes a re-look and restructuring of an organisation's strategy. The first decade of South Africa's democracy saw extensive restructuring of Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) through mergers. HEIs were combined into two, three or more campuses that were previously stand alone universities to form one university. The effects of these mergers on the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) side of the MHEIs saw the restructuring and redirecting of previously individual ICT infrastructures to combined and larger ones. This paper discusses mergers of South African HEIs as an application of BPR and assesses its impact on strategy. It also positions SDMs as artefacts that can assist during this process. The study was of a qualitative nature and employed the interviewing survey technique as the data gathering strategy