School of Information Technology

E-privacy concerns are among the online transactions risks that influence the use of e-services and e-government services. Whilst there have been studies that have analysed the impact of e-privacy on the willingness of people to utilize the Internet, especially in e-commerce, there has been limited research in relation to e-government services for a specific demographic group. This study has examined the impact of e-privacy risk concerns on the acceptance of e-government services in Oman using an integrated model. The model is based on Liu et al."s (2005) privacy-trust-behavioral intention model, the broader technology acceptance literature, and recent work on e-privacy awareness and protection. The research used both quantitative and qualitative approaches: data collection by questionnaire and a series of semi-structured interviews. The sampling frame for the study was civil services government employees in Oman. The model was tested using partial least squares and the results were compared to those obtained from the interview data. The study found that e-privacy awareness significantly impacts the level of e-privacy risk concerns. Social norms and perceived usefulness were found to play a significant role in influencing the intention to use e-government services. The study also found that e-privacy concerns and perceptions of the protection available against risks influence citizens" intentions to use e-government services via their influence on the perceived trustworthiness of these services. Thus trustworthiness is a factor that could be an obstacle to successful e-government services project implementation. Therefore the thesis recommends that governments pay greater attention to the role of e-privacy concerns and put in place security and e-privacy controls. Citizens should then be made aware of these in order to build the required level of trust and confidence in these services. 7. E-government sites would provide valuable services for me. 1

Driven by the incredible pace of technological change the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) vendors have led the charge in promoting industry based technical certifications. Today, there are a plethora of instructor led, intensive, short courses that provide training in an ICT vendor’s product and prepare participants to sit a certification exam. Increasingly, vendors are developing expanded certification programs suitable for inclusion in high school, college and university courses. Although these programs are attractive to students and educational institutions, there are obstacles to be overcome and risks to be evaluated when attempting to integrate a certification program within a traditional offering. This paper examines these issues in detail.

The security of computer systems that store our data is a major issue facing the world. This research project investigated the roles of ease of use, facilitating conditions, intention to use passwords securely, experience and age on usage of passwords, using a model based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of technology. Data was collected via an online survey of computer users, and analyzed using PLS. The results show there is a significant relationship between ease of use of passwords, intention to use them securely and the secure usage of passwords. Despite expectations, facilitating conditions only had a weak impact on intention to use passwords securely and did not influence actual secure usage. Computing experience was found to have an effect on intention to use passwords securely, but age did not. The results of this research lend themselves to assisting in policy design and better understanding user behavior.

Passwords have long been the preferred method of user authentication, yet poor password practices cause security issues. The study described in this paper investigates how user perceptions of passwords and security threats affect intended compliance with guidelines and explores how these perceptions might be altered in order to improve compliance. It tests a research model based on protection motivation theory [24]. Two groups of internet users were surveyed, one of which received password security information and an exercise to reinforce it. This study suggests effective ways that trainers or employers can improve compliance with password guidelines. In particular, training programs should aim to enhance IS security coping appraisal. The research model proposed in this study has also been shown to be a useful model for explaining IS security behavioral intentions.

End user development of applications forms a significant part of organizational systems development. This study investigates the role that developing an application plays in the eventual success of the application for the user developer. The results of this study suggest that the process of developing an application not only predisposes an end user developer to be more satisfied with the application than they would be if it were developed by another end user, but also leads them to perform better with it. Thus, the results of the study highlight the contribution of the process of application development to user developed application success. for many positions (Jawahar & Elango, 2001). In a survey to determine the types of applications developed by end users, Rittenberg and Senn (1990) identified more than 130 different types of applications. More than half of these were accounting related, but marketing, operations, and human resources applications also were represented heavily. The range of tasks for which users develop applications has expanded as the sophistication of both software development tools and user developers has increased, which has led to a degree of convergence with corporate computing so that the tasks for which UDAs are developed are less distinguishable from tasks for corporate computing applications (McLean, Kappelman, & Thompson, 1993). In addition to the traditional tasks that UDAs have been developed to support, Web applications are becoming increasingly common (Nelson & Todd, 1999; Ouellette, 1999).

This study explored the possible role of four factors in the relationship between end user developers' perceptions of their applications and their perceptions of the tools used to create them. Satisfaction with a user developed application was found to be significantly correlated with satisfaction with the tool used to create the application regardless of the provision of feedback about the application, or level of spreadsheet development knowledge. Previous experience with another spreadsheet development tool did however appear to influence the relationship, suggesting that end user developers would benefit from experience with a variety of development tools.

The human cognitive system possesses a finite processing capacity, which is split into channels for various modalities, and learning can be inhibited if any of the cognitive channels is overloaded. However, although the amount of e-learning materials is increasing steadily, the design of instructional material has been largely based on intuition rather than cognitive principles. This research investigated if it is possible to improve the effectiveness of an established e-learning system by the application of cognitive design principles. And if so, does the increased development time and resources yield a substantial effect on learning. Quantitative data collecting during the experiment supported the cognitive principles based design and demonstrated that significantly better quiz scores were obtained in transfer and retention tests when compared against a more traditional design. The results of the study also indicate that the cognitive principles based design was both practical and feasible to apply in terms of necessary resources.

DeLone and model of information systems success has received much attention among researchers. This study applies an adaptation of the full DeLone and McLean model, for the first time, in the user developer domain. Of the nine hypotheses derived from the model, four were found to be significant and the remainder not significant. There was strong support for the proposed relationships between perceived system quality and user satisfaction, perceived information quality and user satisfaction, user satisfaction and intended use, and user satisfaction and individual impact. This study indicates that user perceptions of information systems success play a significant role in the user developed application domain. There was, however, no relationship between user developers' perceptions of system quality and independent experts' evaluations, and user ratings of individual impact were not associated with organizational impact measured as company performance in a business simulation. Further research is required to understand the relationship between user perceptions of information systems success and objective measures of success, and to provide a model of information systems success appropriate to end user development.

This paper presents a new policy language, known as functionality-based application confinement policy language (FBAC-PL). FBAC-PL takes a unique approach to expressing application-oriented access control policies. Policies for restricting applications are defined in terms of the features applications provide, by means of parameterised and hierarchical policy abstractions known as functionalities. Policies also include metadata for management and the automation of policy specification. The result is a novel scheme for application confinement policy that reuses, encapsulates and abstracts policy details, and facilitates a priori policy specification: that is, without having to rely solely on learning modes for creating policies to restrict applications. This paper presents the policy language, and illustrates its use with examples. A Linux-based implementation, which uses FBAC-PL, has demonstrated that this approach can overcome policy complexity and usability issues of previous schemes.

The way in which instructors work has changed markedly since the introduction of learning management systems (LMS). This paper uses Goodhue and technology-to-performance chain (TPC) as a starting point to explore the roles of task-technology fit (TTF) and level of LMS use in the performance impacts of LMS for instructors. A mixed method approach was used: an initial quantitative study followed by collection of additional in-depth data using open ended questions. The results showed that whilst TTF has a direct influence on instructors' perceptions of the impacts of the LMS on their performance, level of utilization is either not associated with performance impact or is associated with performance impact in ways that are not readily captured by simple linear modelling.