Please find below a list of possible topics (in order of preference) for research project.
Topic 1 - ICT Risk Mitigation and BCP planning in Public Organisations
The incidence of severe weather events such as flooding, cyclones and fire, as well as threats posed by phenomena such as global terrorism require businesses to increasingly evaluate their risk exposure and devise risk-mitigation strategies. While much literature already exists on Business Continuity Planning (BCP), I am particularly interested in investigating the subject of BCP within the context of public organisations in order to understand whether the highly political climates which exists within government agencies has any adverse impact on this critical activity of BCP.
I am of the view that the findings from such a study could inform future BCP initiatives within government. Additionally I envisage the primary research to also include a self-evaluation matrix of some description which would assist managers in performing a high-level risk analysis of their existing operations.
Moreover, my current role within the Queensland government requires me to devise proposals for ICT solutions which include considerations of such elements as data redundancy, site fail-over as well as information security.
Some initial information sources located on this topic include:
- Applying business intelligence innovations to emergency management (Schlegelmilch& Albanese, 2014)
- Enterprise-wide Business Continuity (Baker, 2012)
- Ensuring IT service continuity in the face of increasing threats (Nair, 2014)
- (Australian_Bureau_of_Statistics, 2016)
Topic 2 - The Centralisation of Organisational Data
It could be suggested that a large percentage of organisations possess a variety of legacy information systems with stand-alone databases which are unable to communicate with each other directly, yet hold data that is critical to organisation-wide functions. The situation contributes to a significant loss of productivity as the same data is required to be manually keyed in to several systems, often resulting in a loss of data-quality due to human error. Indeed I witness this very same situation on a daily basis in my current role within a large government organisation.
While a comprehensive Enterprise Resource System (ERP) would address the problem, this is simply not a viable solution for most organisations due to the extreme high cost, long timeframes and disruption to the organisation during its implementation.
Thus I propose a study to undertake an investigation in Operations Orchestration and Data Warehouse solutions that unify data from several stand-alone IS systems into a centralised database. Such an initiative would significantly improve the quality of organisation-wide reporting, product development, strategic planning and capacity planning capabilities. It would also be far more cost effective than an ERP system and hence I would suggest that research on such a topic would be potentially valuable to all IT managers and CIO's globally.
Some initial information sources located on this topic include:
- Information Integration in the Enterprise (BERNSTEIN & HAAS, 2008)
- Dipping a Toe into Data Lakes (Halter, et al., 2016)
- UNDERSTANDING THE LINK BETWEEN INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY CAPABILITY AND ORGANIZATIONAL AGILITY (Lu & Ramamurthy, 2011)
Topic 3 - The Adoption of Cloud Computing in the Public Sector - Information Privacy and Data sovereignty Considerations
The rapid rise of cloud-based infrastructure services from behemoths such as Microsoft (Azure) and Amazon (AWS), coupled with unclear global legislation and jurisdiction associated with data stored in the cloud, have brought with it complex issues around privacy, security and data sovereignty. This is especially true for public organisations who deal with sensitive information belonging to citizens.
I propose a study to investigate the adoption of cloud-computing by governments globally in order to highlight the positive and negative experiences of significant ICT Cloud implementation projects. I am of the view that such information would assist public organisations globally in leveraging the low-costs associated with cloud-based infrastructure, while at the same time being cognisant of the very real concerns associated with privacy and Data sovereignty.
Some initial information sources located on this topic include:
- An investigation of the challenges and issues influencing the adoption of cloud computing in Australian regional municipal governments (Ali, et al., 2016)
- CLOUD COMPUTING: DIFFERENCES IN PUBLIC AND PRIVATE SECTOR CONCERNS (Hasty, et al., 2012)
- Navigating through the dark cloud to get to the silver lining (Subbiah& Priest, 2014)
- The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD, 2016)