Enabling

The business and Information Technology (IT) alignment issue has become one of the top ten IT management issues since 1980. Since then IT has strived to achieve alignment with business goals and objectives through many efforts. Enterprise Architecture (EA) to provide the foundation of IT in an organization and has been extensively covered in the past two decades with most of the efforts focusing on Technology Architecture, Information Architecture and Application Architecture and less emphasis on Business Architecture (BA). This research developed an approach with supporting methodology to develop a comprehensive BA, and to address and improve business / IT alignment following a qualitative research methodology. The research was based on 1. the proposition that a comprehensive BA is required to enhance Business IT alignment, and 2. that the BA should be developed before the Information Architecture, Application Architecture, and Technical Architecture. The key deliverable of the res...

Background: Medication Non-adherence in the treatment of patients with Tuberculosis (TB) is a major challenge in community-based clinical therapeutics. This has been attributed, in part, to duration and complexity of treatment regimens and toxic side-effects, which facilitates disease transmission with emerging resistance to anti-TB drugs. This study was undertaken to assess level of adherence to treatment and identify social determinants moderating medication-adherence guided by the PRECEDE framework among patients receiving treatment in Southwest zone of Nigeria. Method: This was a cross-sectional survey design conducted as a community-based study with 226 consenting patients receiving second-line drug treatment based on data obtained from all DR-TB OPD Health facilities within Southwest , Nigeria. The study adopted total enumeration sampling technique. Data analysis was performed using IBM SPSS version 22. Univariate and multivariate Regression analysis was conducted to validate the association between the independent variables (Reinforcing and Enabling factors) and outcome variables (medication-adherence and appointment keeping behavior). The test of significance was set at 5% for all statistical procedures. Results: Male participants in this study was 61.3%. Mean treatment-adherence prevalence was 84.75% (20.34±3.37 measured on 24-point scale). Social/Environmental factors correlated positively with treatment-adherence (r=0.165; p<0.01). Enabling factors with OR=1.44 (95% CI=1.08-1.92, p=0.013) predicted treatment-adherence more significantly than reinforcing factors for participants in this study. Conclusion: Patients' level of treatment-adherence was fair. Special attention should be given to enabling and reinforcing factors during patient education through social learning and structural support, which the study identified as inadequate, to optimize treatment-adherence in DR-TB patients.

The debut of National Transformation 2050 validates that Malaysia is committed in standing tall amongst the developed nations. Over the years, numerous transformation programs have been introduced to enhance the wellbeing of the nation and its people. Among the agenda is to overcome challenges in public services delivery which include the improvement of services by the counter service team and frontliners as well as the enhancement of reliability and integrity, issues of productivity, and many more. Public servants are an important source of innovation for an organisation that needs to be continuously nurtured. To accelerate the outcome, engagement was reportedly found to be the key enabler for sustainable success in any change or transformational-related event. Fostering employee engagement will nurture many prodigious advantages such as augmenting people’s innovative mindset and will greatly enhance the likelihood for a successful transformation program to happen. Along with the d...

Today’s perishable food supply chains must be resilient to handle volatile demands, environmental restrictions, and disruptions in order to meet customers’ requirements. The enablers of the perishable food supply chain have not yet been explored. In this paper, a bibliometric systematic literature review has been conducted to identify the articles related to the perishable food supply chain. Next, with these identified articles, a map is created with bibliographic data using Vosviewer network visualization software, and then the enablers were identified by conducting keyword co-occurrence analysis. Later, a total interpretive structural modeling (TISM) is employed to analyze the interrelationships among enablers and then determine each enabler’s hierarchies, further representing them in a diagraph. Finally, the identified enablers are classified using cross-impact matrix multiplication applied to classification (MICMAC) analysis, and the graph is plotted. The results obtained from t...

There have been many R&D efforts in recent years to develop computer environments that directly enhance group problem-solving productivity. An example of such efforts is the computer-based Virtual Teaming Technology (VTT) currently being developed at the Knowledge-based Engineering Systems Research Laboratory (KESRL). The core software environment for KESRL&#39;s VTT is called SWIFT (System Workbench for Integrating and Facilitating Teams) and is based on the knowledge processing technology (KPT) previously developed at KESRL to support various engineering design tasks. SWIFT is a flexible environment which enables the rapid development of collaborative applications, linking workers in distributed environments, of many domains. This paper presents the overall system architecture of SWIFT, and introduces the current and future R&D efforts at KESRL in realizing SWIFT for significant industrial applications.