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UCT RESEARCH REPORT 2012
Department of
Information Systems
Head of Department: Dr Lisa Seymour
Department Profile
Research continued to be high on the agenda of the IS
department’s deliverables. Professor Ojelanki Ngwenyama
joined the Department on a part-time basis and received
his new NRF (B) rating. With the successful re-evaluation
application of Professor Hart, the Department increased
its NRF-rated researchers to eight. In terms of research
publications, the department succeeded in its goal of
increasing the quality of its outputs with a substantial
increase in output in DHET-accredited journals.
We graduated 5 PhDs in December (a record for the
Department) and 10 master’s students. One member of
staff, Elsje Scott, was awarded her PhD in 2012 and 3
more academics intend submitting by June 2013. Our
overall postgraduate profile is strong with 49 Postgraduate
diploma and 49 Honours students graduating in 2012.
The Department now runs four postgraduate diplomas
in Information Systems, Computer Forensics, Enterprise
Systems and BPM and Business and Systems Analysis
(BASA) respectively. In addition to record numbers of
postgraduate student graduations, the department
maintains a strong and steadily increasing cohort of
registered postgraduate students. In 2012, the department
had 38 registered doctoral students and 42 registered
master’s students. This is in addition to the 65 honours
students who are also required to submit an individual
research project.
The department also secured its first major multi-year
research contract through the UCT-Samsung Mobile
Innovation Laboratory (R1+ million in annual funding
in terms of a three-year agreement), the Department’s
Digital Forensics Unit hosted South Africa’s first Digital
Forensics Conference and the CITANDA Community IT
project in Vrygrond has precipitated some relevant ICT for
development research studies.
Departmental Statistics
Permanent Staff
Professors
2.5
Associate Professors
4
Senior Lecturers
6
Lecturers
3
Administrative and Clerical Staff
5
Total
20.5
Honorary Staff
Emeritus Professors
2
Students
Doctoral
38
Master’s
42
Honours
65
Postgraduate Diploma
159
Undergraduate
2614
Total
2918
Research Fields and Staff
Professor Irwin Brown
IS in developing countries; IS management; Grounded
Theory in IS research.
Associate Professor Wallace Chigona
ICT for national development; community informatics; and
mobile technology for development.
Dr Eric Cloete
Computer architectures and software; information systems
management; image processing; electronic commerce.
Emeritus Professor Mike Hart
Strategic use of IS; key management issues in IS; business
intelligence; data mining and analytics.
Associate Professor Kevin Johnston
ICT strategy and alignment; use of ICT in business; ICT
management issues; open source software.
Associate Professor Michael Kyobe
Strategic IT planning; IT alignment; computer security
and utilisation of IT to leverage knowledge management;
enterprise and IT governance.
Dr Elsje Scott
Object-orientated programming and methodologies;
efficient teaching methods for programming concepts; IS
project management, with the specific focus on student
group projects using C# as programming language
.