Globalisation and rapid environmental change have created many challenges for public and private organisations across Iraq as a developing country, particularly in the higher education sector. This includes, for example, decreases in government funding; increased demand for higher education; a need for economic transformation, and related competitiveness of organizations. Such challenges require exceptional leaders and strategic planning in order to take action to improve. In Iraq, the higher education sector is still one of the main foundations in progressing the knowledge economy. Studies into leadership style, strategic planning processes, and the importance of leadership and organisational culture to an organisation’s success have been used to assist both public and private Iraqi colleges in responding to the challenges they face. Although, some studies have examined the interaction between leadership and strategic planning, and leadership and organisational success, there has been no empirical study that has investigated how these three variables interact together. Thus, this study aimed, firstly, to identify the current leadership styles and strategic planning processes in the colleges and the challenges they faced, and to gain an understanding from the perspective of the senior leaders themselves as to how they might best respond to the current situation. Secondly, based on the participants’ experiences, knowledge and perceptions, the study aimed to identify implications for both practice and policy to help improve the colleges’ outcomes. The study involved a mixed-methods approach and was conducted in two stages. During the first stage, the researcher gathered quantitative data by administering a survey package to 129 leaders (deans, associate deans, and heads of departments) across both public and private colleges in the capital city of Baghdad. During the second stage, the researcher gathered qualitative data to more deeply explore the survey results by conducting individual interviews with a sub-sample of 21 leaders from both college types (ten public and 11 private). In the data analyses stages, both descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were applied to compiling tables and charts, and to test hypotheses, by employing the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS), Microsoft Excel, and NVivo. The results of study showed that both transformational and transactional leadership styles played a varied and vital role in the colleges’ strategic planning processes, and in turn their success. The fact that private colleges were ‘for profit’ and public colleges were ‘not for profit’, as well as their contrasting funding models, highlighted key differences between the two college types’ leadership and general modus operandi. While it was found that both transformative leadership and transactional leadership styles were necessary to address the challenges colleges faced in the Iraqi educational context, the impetus for change extended far beyond the need for professional development of leaders. The embracing of information communication technologies, and reliable Internet was seen as necessary in all aspects of the colleges’ work and provision for teaching and learning, and students’ success. This applied to both college types along with the need for closer adherence to government regulations and more focused government coordination of colleges’ administrative functions. Furthermore, implications for making successful improvements to practice also identified the need to manage the challenge of sociocultural influences on the appointments and promotions of leaders. It was concluded that a greater emphasis on teamwork and provision of incentives for staff, along with a ‘boost’ to pedagogy and practice, which could be provided through the adoption of information communication technologies and appropriate professional development strategies, would enhance the colleges’ ranks and the status of their qualifications. Also, theoretically, the study offers a value-add to leadership, strategic planning process, and organisational success literature in the form of a conceptual model that links these variables in the context of Iraqi higher education sector.
The present work presents design and implementation of an automated two-axis solar tracking system using local materials with minimum cost, light weight and reliable structure. The tracking system consists of two parts, mechanical units (fixed and moving parts) and control units (four LDR sensors and Arduino UNO microcontroller to control two DC servomotors). The tracking system was fitted and assembled together with a parabolic trough solar concentrator (PTSC) system to move it according to information come from the sensors so as to keep the PTSC always perpendicular to sun rays. The experimental tests have been done on the PTSC system to investigate its thermal performance in two cases, with tracking system (case 1) and without trackin
... Show MoreBotnet is a malicious activity that tries to disrupt traffic of service in a server or network and causes great harm to the network. In modern years, Botnets became one of the threads that constantly evolving. IDS (intrusion detection system) is one type of solutions used to detect anomalies of networks and played an increasing role in the computer security and information systems. It follows different events in computer to decide to occur an intrusion or not, and it used to build a strategic decision for security purposes. The current paper
Abstract
This paper represents a study of the effect of the soil type, the drilling parameters and the drilling tool properties on the dynamic vibrational behavior of the drilling rig and its assessment in the drilling system. So first, an experimental drilling rig was designed and constructed to embrace the numerical work.
The experimental work included implementation of the drill-string in different types of soil with different properties according to the difference in the grains size, at different rotational speeds (RPM), and different weights on bit (WOB) (Thrust force), in a way that allows establishing the charts that correlate the vibration acceleration, the rate of penetration (ROP), and the power
... Show MoreThe modern business environment has witnesses tremendous developments as a result of the globalization of markets and economic openness and technological as well as the acquisition of the issue of corporate governance of great importance regarding it as one of the global innovations trends of control provisions on the management of companies as result of these developments ,increasing on competition between economic unit ,thus a decrease in market share because they do not take into account the response to the requirements of customers ,which kept her to search a modern management accounting methods to help them keep up with the changes and the availability of information for the various adminis
... Show MoreThe reservoir characterization and rock typing is a significant tool in performance and prediction of the reservoirs and understanding reservoir architecture, the present work is reservoir characterization and quality Analysis of Carbonate Rock-Types, Yamama carbonate reservoir within southern Iraq has been chosen. Yamama Formation has been affected by different digenesis processes, which impacted on the reservoir quality, where high positively affected were: dissolution and fractures have been improving porosity and permeability, and destructive affected were cementation and compaction, destroyed the porosity and permeability. Depositional reservoir rock types characterization has been identified de
The necessities of steganography methods for hiding secret message into images have been ascend. Thereby, this study is to generate a practical steganography procedure to hide text into image. This operation allows the user to provide the system with both text and cover image, and to find a resulting image that comprises the hidden text inside. The suggested technique is to hide a text inside the header formats of a digital image. Least Significant Bit (LSB) method to hide the message or text, in order to keep the features and characteristics of the original image are used. A new method is applied via using the whole image (header formats) to hide the image. From the experimental results, suggested technique that gives a higher embe
... Show MoreA network (or formally a graph) can be described by a set of nodes and a set of edges connecting these nodes. Networks model many real-world phenomena in various research domains, such as biology, engineering and sociology. Community mining is discovering the groups in a network where individuals group of membership are not explicitly given. Detecting natural divisions in such complex networks is proved to be extremely NP-hard problem that recently enjoyed a considerable interest. Among the proposed methods, the field of evolutionary algorithms (EAs) takes a remarkable interest. To this end, the aim of this paper is to present the general statement of community detection problem in social networks. Then, it visits the problem as an optim
... Show MoreFencing sport coaches seek fencers who have high velocity and work hard to develop it through training. The research problem lies on when measuring movement abilities through some tests. Manual measurement does not give reasonable impartiality of timing because there is a time-frame between the movement of the fencer and the speed of the movement of the human time setter. Therefore, the authors sought to design an electronic vest to evaluate movement abilities in foil fencers. The study design was experimental, with 12 Iranian foil fencers of the national team, who were divided into two equal groups of 6 fencers. Moreover, there were 12 students from Physical Education and Sport Sciences that worked on the scientific f
... Show MoreIn networking communication systems like vehicular ad hoc networks, the high vehicular mobility leads to rapid shifts in vehicle densities, incoherence in inter-vehicle communications, and challenges for routing algorithms. It is necessary that the routing algorithm avoids transmitting the pockets via segments where the network density is low and the scale of network disconnections is high as this could lead to packet loss, interruptions and increased communication overhead in route recovery. Hence, attention needs to be paid to both segment status and traffic. The aim of this paper is to present an intersection-based segment aware algorithm for geographic routing in vehicular ad hoc networks. This algorithm makes available the best route f
... Show MoreIn real world, almost all networks evolve over time. For example, in networks of friendships and acquaintances, people continually create and delete friendship relationship connections over time, thereby add and draw friends, and some people become part of new social networks or leave their networks, changing the nodes in the network. Recently, tracking communities encountering topological shifting drawn significant attentions and many successive algorithms have been proposed to model the problem. In general, evolutionary clustering can be defined as clustering data over time wherein two concepts: snapshot quality and temporal smoothness should be considered. Snapshot quality means that the clusters should be as precise as possible durin
... Show More