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Proposes a continuous participative evaluation process built on the formative evaluation paradigm. The benefits of this approach are that all the primary or core stakeholders, i.e. the users, top management and the technical specialists involved in the task of delivering information systems benefits, participate in the evaluation and the subsequent decision making associated with the project. These stakeholders are consequently involved in moulding and realising an information system which is targeted to meet real business needs rather than just investment and project management criteria. This approach ensures that high quality information systems that deliver direct business benefits with which the user community can identify are implemented. It implies a new focus that encompasses concentrating on and understanding the business issues and how the information system will deliver real value to the organisation. It is the view of the authors that formative evaluation can help to maximise business value from information systems.Maximise information systems value

Although well over a thousand journal articles, conference papers, books, technical notes and theses, have been written on the subject of IT evaluation, only a relatively small subset of this literature has been concerned with core issues of what precisely is meant by the term 'value' and with the process of making (specifically) IT investment decisions. All too often, the problem and highly complex issue of value is either simplified, ignored or assumed away. Instead the focus of much of the research to date has been on evaluation methodologies and within this literature there are different strands of thought which can be classified as partisan, composite and meta approaches to evaluation. Research shows that a small number of partisan techniques are used by most decision makers with a minority using a single technique and a majority using a mixture of such techniques of whom a substantial minority use a formal composite approach. It is argued that in mapping the set of evaluation methodologies onto what is termed the investment opportunity space that there is a limit to what can be achieved by formal rational evaluation methods. This limit becomes evident when decision makers fall back on 'gut feel' and other non formal/rigorous ways of making decisions. It is suggested that understanding of these more complex processes and decision making, in IT as elsewhere, needs tools drawn from philosophy and psychology. Dan RemenyiDr Dan Remenyi has spent more than 25 years working in the field of corporate computers and information systems. He has worked with computers as an IS professional, business consultant and as a user. In all these capacities he has been primarily concerned with benefit realisation and obtaining the maximum value for money from the organisations information systems investment and effort. In recent years he has specialised in the area of the formulation and the implementation of strategic information systems and how to evaluate the performance of these and other systems. He has also worked extensively in the field of information systems project management specialising in the area of project risk identification and management. He has written a number of books and papers in the field of IT management and regularly conducts courses and seminar as well as working as a consultant in this area.

The aim of this paper is to review the current situation regarding plagiarism and ghostwriting, and to stimulate debate about how universities should respond to the rise in these forms of academic misconduct. The apparent upsurge in academic misconduct means that universities today face one of the greatest challenges to academic integrity they have had to deal with ever since the university system came into existence some 800 years ago. Plagiarism and ghostwriting are undermining the integrity of university degrees to an extent not seen before. Academia and fraud are not strangers. Universities have a long history of cheating of one sort or another, often associated with examinations, but also with research. In the past this cheating involved activities such as smuggling notes (commonly called ‘crib sheets’) into examinations, and consulting them even under the watchful eyes of invigilators. It also involved students obtaining sight of an examination paper in advance. The fraudulent creation of research results has also been an issue. However, in the 21st century, the opportunities for cheating have exploded. This has resulted in universities becoming more concerned about ensuring the integrity of their examination processes and the degrees they award. Our paper focuses on cheating in the writing of dissertations or theses required at undergraduate or postgraduate level, with an emphasis on plagiarism and ghostwriting. We do not propose a simple solution to these problems, as preventing or stopping cheating is not just a matter of catching the wrongdoers. Cheating is endogenous to the current university education system, and needs to be addressed in terms of not only prevention and detection but also how people who are found to engage in such misconduct are treated. We suggest that creative ways of promoting learning would help to minimise cheating at universities. It is also important to ensure that the issue is discussed openly among students and faculty staff.

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