PhD Part time Candidate:-  Steve Hansen

Thesis title:-

"An Investigation into Models and Methodologies for effective adoption and 
implementation of Web Information System Applications"

Abstract

This thesis investigates how design methodologies can combine with management 
and administration models to promote the development and implementation of 
effective web information systems applications. Included in this investigation is an 
investigation into problems of performance and application integration, management 
and administration structures, web application communication and reporting "hooks", 
along with current application integration standards. 

For effective adoption and diffusion of web applications in the overall organisation's 
information and web information systems, the thesis put forward the strengths of  
decentralised management and user-centric design methodologies. The thesis also 
puts forward that adoption is enhanced with "user ownership", and demonstrates that 
this can be promoted at the application level with the inclusion of knowledge 
management and collaborative integration "hooks". Typical hooks being for user-
user-system messaging, integrated reporting both for performance and for 
decentralised system management, and application integration interfaces. Drawing on 
supporting disciplines of client server architecture, knowledge management, systems 
design, technology adoption, organisational management and current web engineering 
design methodologies, the thesis also demonstrated that the particular needs and 
corresponding design methodologies of large user-based, web information systems are 
distinct from the parent disciplines and need to include various additional elements 
and considerations.

A series of application and systems models are developed and tested with an 
experimental (and subsequently a corporate application) web information system 
called PlatformWeb. This experimental system of now more than 35,000 lines of 
code, covers a wide range and number of users (over 22,000) and is comprised of 
various integrated modules. This system is used to examine adoption and application 
design models/methodologies in general and is used also in examining issues relating 
to performance, user ownership, user-centric design and the development of 
decentralised integrated management systems. In addition the experimental system is 
used to examine particular performance problems in such as "spiked" peak and 
"bursty" load applications where the system will overload at certain (predictable or 
unpredictable) times and due to practical resource utilisation limitations in an 
organization, "grunt" power is not available.

 
In this presentation, the current work in this thesis will be presented, this includes an 
overview of the modelling (in basically UML formats), a discussion of the 
experimental results and implementations and some interesting future directions. 
(The thesis itself is now in the process of formal writing up with an addition further 
analysis of performance data obtained in June)