Business Information Systems - Doctoral Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Browse
Recent Submissions
Item The role of e-leadership on remote decision making: key learnings from the COVID-19 pandemic(University College Cork, 2024) Alsqeah, Latifah; Adam, Frederic; Treacy, Stephen; Saudi Electronic UniversityThis thesis investigates the role of e-leadership competencies in decision-making processes within private businesses during the COVID-19 pandemic. The pandemic forced a rapid transition to remote work, necessitating a deeper understanding of how leaders adjust to virtual environments and employ e-leadership practices. Despite the growing relevance of remote work, empirical studies on e-leadership remain scarce, particularly in the context of decision-making—a core leadership responsibility. This research addresses this gap by exploring the importance and impact of e-leadership competencies on remote decision-making and the value propositions these competencies present. The primary objective of this study was to investigate how e-leadership competencies influenced decision-making among private-sector leaders in Saudi Arabia during the COVID-19 crisis. A qualitative field study was conducted through interviews with 19 leaders from various private sectors, including software development, logistics, oil mining, and training services. These interviews provided in-depth insights into how leaders faced the challenges of remote decision-making during the pandemic. The findings indicated that leaders recognised two key e-leadership competencies, e-communication and e-technology, as crucial for facilitating remote decision-making. These skills enabled managers to maintain clear and consistent communication with their staff, utilising advanced technology to manage remote work successfully. Critical competencies such as e-trust, e-team, and e-change were also recognised as essential, highlighting their significance in building trust, managing teams, and supporting change in a remote environment. Interestingly, 70% of participants considered e-social competency crucial, yet not all leaders agreed, indicating differing viewpoints on the role of social skills in e-leadership. Through this analysis, two theoretical models emerged from the findings: i. A preliminary model of e-leadership competencies’ impact on remote decision-making processes. ii. A preliminary model of the value propositions of remote decision-making. These models identified seven key impacts influencing decision-making in a remote work environment, alongside five primary value propositions related to remote decision-making. This research makes several significant contributions to the IS field and practice. Firstly, it empirically validates and extends Roman et al.'s (2019) e-competency framework by applying it to the context of remote decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic. This application resulted in the development of two preliminary models that explain the impact of e-leadership competencies on decision-making processes in remote work environments. Secondly, the study fills a significant gap in the literature by identifying new value propositions associated with remote decision-making. Lastly, the research broadens the understanding of e-leadership in the context of private businesses, offering practical implications for managing remote work during disruptions and contributing valuable insights to the literature on business continuity and e-leadership. This thesis provides a comprehensive analysis of how e-leadership competencies influence remote decision-making in a disrupted remote work environment. The findings highlight the essential role of e-competencies in navigating the challenges of remote work, offering both theoretical advancements and practical guidance for leaders facing similar situations in the future. As organisations continue to adapt to the evolving landscape of remote working, the insights from this study will prove valuable in understanding and enhancing the effectiveness of remote decision-making.Item Enabling strategic alignment in the sales and operations planning process(University College Cork, 2024) Shanahan, Alan Jeremiah (Jerry); Adam, Frederic; O'Reilly, Seamus; N/AOrganisations have struggled to leverage their Sales and Operations Planning (S&OP) processes to deliver the growth expectations of the business, as defined by their strategy. Despite the promise of Strategic Alignment (SA) built into the S&OP process definition, practice has shown that while organisations get value from balancing supply to demand, they struggle to make longer-term strategic decisions, due to not achieving strategic alignment. The purpose of this research was to investigate what factors and approaches could be identified to enable organisations to achieve ‘SA in S&OP’. The research journey, adopting a critical realist research philosophy, involved a number of steps supporting the development of an evolving conceptual framework. Insights from theory and practice were explored in an iterative manner before the final synthesis was concluded. An Integrative Literature Review (ILR) of existing literature, across a range of mixed method academic studies and practitioner publications, enabled the identification of key constructs and relationships. The resulting conceptual framework, associated research propositions and research questions, were then explored by a group of acknowledged experts in a Delphi field study. Returning to the academic literature the next step identified three relevant theoretical lenses to provide a theoretical grounding to the framework in the form of Contingency Theory (CT), Resource Based View (RBV) and Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) theories. Finally an intrinsic single case study allowed an in-depth investigation to determine to what extent the conceptual framework was reflective of best practice. The findings showed that four contingency variables (Education, S&OP maturity, S&OP scope, Strategic plan) support the building of five response variables (Product portfolio management, strategic projects management, strategic KPIs, Integrated business plan, assumptions management) to enable SA, demonstrated by strategic discussions and ultimately strategic decision making. An intangible growth mindset developed from the iterative monthly cycle of striving to achieve a fit between the contingency and response variables, leveraging a set of S&OP principles, is an essential ingredient to achieving SA. This research makes a key contribution to practice in providing guidance for organisations on how to achieve ‘SA in S&OP’, based on a theoretically grounded framework, expanding the utility of the theories of CT, RBV/DCV.Item To build an information systems (IS) security controls integration and implementation roadmap for optimal security maturity(University College Cork, 2023) Akerele, Iretioluwa; Neville, Karen Mary; Woodworth, SimonWith the advancement of technology for conducting business, organisations rely on information technology (IT) and information systems (IS) to enhance their business and create new opportunities. The main security goal of organisations globally is to reduce threats and vulnerabilities before they become a potential risk. As the world is connected digitally and IS security threats are unending, it is necessary for organisations to implement IS security controls to enhance their security posture and to protect their intellectual property and sensitive data. New and emerging technologies have led to the introduction of security tools and solutions to reduce the potential risks of cyber threats and attacks. To contribute to literature and industry practice by addressing the gaps in the IS community and enhancing organisation’s security posture to reduce potential risks, this research aims to build an IS security controls integration and implementation roadmap for optimal security maturity. The roadmap consists of six steps to guide organisations to identify their IS security controls, prioritise and use the controls, integrate the controls and implement actions, where necessary. To achieve the above objective, the researcher adopted the interpretivist paradigm and qualitative approach to gather in-depth insights into the gaps and current practice in the IS security domain. The qualitative approach used in this research comprises of four methods which are surveys, interviews, focus group sessions and document analysis. An initial assessment was conducted with 55 IS security professionals using a survey to ascertain the types of IS security controls that are used in their organisation. A field study was conducted for key informants in IS security across 13 sectors to ensure comprehensive data gathering that captures the richness of the findings. A focus group session was also conducted with 8 IS security practitioners to validate the outcome of some of the IS security controls from the interview. In addition, best practice documentation was reviewed, analysed, and compared with the IS security controls identified in this research. The findings of this research are summarised as follows. i) There is a lack of synergy between the IS academic community and industry practice in the research and usage of IS security controls. This finding was presented using an IS security landscape and framework. ii) The integration of IS security controls show that there are high and low priority controls in organisations. There are several limitations affecting the full integration of controls. These include cost, organisational sector, size, and context. iii) The design of security solutions is affected by challenges like security incidents and compliance issues. Additionally, some good practices that have helped organisations in designing security solutions were identified. The good practices are linked to the controls required for effective IS security implementation. This research contributes to the IS security literature by investigating the current state of the IS community with regards to information security and IS security; suggesting a balance between research and practice to tackle the prevalent threats in information security; identifying the domain areas in academic literature where more work is required and making suggestions to the IS community to contribute to these areas in solving bigger information security challenges faced in sectors. A final contribution of this research is an IS security roadmap that shows the integration of the IS security controls using a six-step process. The IS security roadmap addresses the research questions and overall objective of the research. The researcher proposes that the roadmap is applicable to any organisation, irrespective of its size and sector.Item The silhouette of Digital Transformation Leadership: theorising the practitioner voice(University College Cork, 2023) McCarthy, Patrick; Sammon, David; Alhassan, Ibrahim; Munster Technological UniversityTransforming organisations is a multifaceted process, steeped with complexity requiring a lot of moving parts to align together so that the transformative process can be synchronised, gather momentum be understood and appeal to all groups of stakeholders. If that set of circumstances can be achieved, you have a good chance that it can be a be success. Digital Transformation has been around for a decade or so, and while it is difficult to put a universal description on it, we can say that because its transformative in nature it has the potential to affect organisations at a functional level and cross functionally whereby the impact is on people, processes, technology, and data. The implementation of Digital Transformation has created many challenges for all types of organisations in all sectors large and small local and global. While there is reasonable coverage relating to Digital Transformation, especially around technologies, architecture, and data, it is around Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) and especially the key aspects associated with leading a digital transformation initiative that has posed difficulties for many organisations’ leadership teams. We see when reviewing the current literature around digital transformation (DT) there is a lack of research into identifying characteristics and critical success factors (CSFs) associated with leading a Digital Transformation (DT) initiative and also around Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) itself, where there is a complete absence of literature for academia and for practice concerning what a digital transformation Leader requires when leading out on a digital transformation programme. This research study is focused on identifying the defining characteristics and the critical success factors (CSFs) for leading a Digital Transformation (DT) implementation. Furthermore, this research focuses on the role of Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) and the defining characteristics required for leadership for academia and practice when implementing a digital transformation programme. The research follows the building theory from using a grounded approach, involving the use of a key informant methodology. The data gathering method deployed is that of the ‘key informant technique’ to conduct open semi-structured interviews. The data is then analysed using open, axial, and selective coding (OAS) techniques in order to inductively identify the defining characteristics and critical success factors for implementing digital transformation (DT). Secondly the research also focuses on identifying the defining characteristics for Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) for both theory and practice. This study contributes to Digital Transformation research by providing a conceptual model of six defining characteristics for ‘doing’ Digital Transformation and nine CSFs for Digital Transformation (DT). It also provides a conceptual model for Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) for theory and practice which illustrates the mapping of the eight defining characteristics of Digital Transformation Leadership (DTL) from literature to the ten defining characteristics of Digital transformation Leadership (DTL) from practice.Item Utilising organisational mindful routines to mitigate patient risks during a crisis: a view from within(University College Cork, 2022) Flynn, Ger; Nagle, Tadhg; Fitzgerald, Ciara; Historical Society of the Episcopal ChurchModern healthcare is complex, encompassing numerous interconnecting elements such as people, technology, data and organisational routines to safeguard patient safety and maintain public confidence. Crises are disruptive phenomena that present a restricted amount of time to respond, testing the reliability and appropriateness of these interconnecting elements to their extreme. Organisational Mindfulness (OM), is accredited for developing awareness in volatile, uncertain, and complex circumstances such as healthcare delivery and its application is promoted as a method of achieving high reliability (Weick et al., 2008; Davidson and Begley, 2012; Bennett and Lemoine, 2014; Svalgaard, 2018). Positioned at the intersection of crisis management and resilience, this study links crises, OM, organisational routines, and the role of data for pre-empting and containing crises situations. Organisational routines are conceptualised as sources of stability. However, when organisations are suddenly faced with a crisis, organisational routines that contain mindless elements may weaken the organisations resilience diminishing the reliability of the response to the disruption. Where an organisations’s core function is healthcare then unreliable responses to a crisis can be detrimental to the safety of the patient. This study explores the multimodality of processes by which organisations respond and adapt to a catastrophic event including improvising. Positioned within the genre of personally relevant research, the core motivation of the thesis is driven by a desire of the author (the National Clinical Head of Medical Devices - HSE) to enhance organisational resilience to mitigate the risk to the patient. The methodologies of ‘inquiry from the inside' (Paper One and Paper Three) and Analytic Autoethnographic (Paper Two) are used to contextualise crises, providing rich insight to the disruption caused from living the experience. 'The outcome of this research provides a deep understanding of all the contrasting crises that threatened the safety of the patient. The thesis contributes eight OM routines with mindful data as the foremost novel contributions. Paper One highlights where a crisis was triggered by hidden endogenous elements that culminated in a mindless decision to replace ultrasound scanners. The study offers a routine practice contribution by highlighting the dangers and benefits of the mindless routine, ‘Learned Helplessness’. ‘Learned Helplessness’ routine uncovered through OM analysis had devastating effects on patient safety but paradoxically also allowed the organisation to function during the crisis. In addition, the study reveals the 'Technology Scapegoating' routine, which highlights the dangers of impulsiveness to place technology as the source of error, rather than people. Paper Two illustrates where the characteristics of the first wave of the COVID-19 crisis suddenly made an organisational process inappropriate, generating unprecedented disruptions that posed an extreme risk to patient safety. The concept of the ‘Pursuit of Certainty’ routine is offered as a mindful routine contribution suggesting that process deviations guided by OM during crises can improve the reliability of the organisation achieving its objective. Paper Three contributes mindful data where a resilient data supply chain focused appropriate actions necessary to manage the essential elements within the critical care environment during the third wave of COVID-19. The concept of ‘mindful data’ ensures the right data is captured from the right people, and in an accurate fashion, reducing the risk of errors or failures in its provision and use. The outcome of the study on crises highlights the devastating effects on patient safety that mindless routines can have if not uncovered within an organisation. Motivated by a desire to enhance organisational resilience to mitigate patient risks during crises, this study contributes eight OM routines to achieve this objective. This study on crises highlights the reliable agility offered by mindful routines and the benefit of purposeful mindful data for coping with the many adverse evolving challenges that sudden crises present.