The Faculty of Commerce at UCT has won a slew of Best Paper awards this conference season and the latest goes to Professor Jean-Paul van Belle‚ Director of the Centre for IT and National Development in Africa‚ in the Department of Information Systems.

Prof van Belle presented research conducted with his former IS Honours student‚ Charl van Zijl‚ at the 3rd International Conference on Innovation‚ Trade and Economics (ICITE) in Moscow earlier this week.

The paper‚ Organisational Impact of Enterprise Architecture and Business Process Capability in South African Organisations‚ consisted of positivist research among large and small organisations and a total of 460 questionnaires were sent out‚ netting 37 responses.

According to the abstract‚ organisations rely on Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) to provide them with strategic advantages. Many organisations use Enterprise Architecture (EA) as a way of leveraging their investments in ICTS and to ensure that the Information Systems do not create a bottleneck for organisational growth.

The key findings were that there was a strong empirical basis for many of the claimed benefits of EA‚ including facilitating business process automation and business agility. In addition EA was found to have long term cost reduction benefits and enterprise agility. Surprisingly‚ few differences were found between large and small organisations.

Story By : Carolyn McGibbon