Abstract
A literature review of Critical Success Factors (CSFs) was conducted and found a number of papers on a variety of related topics, but no definitive research into the specific area of Critical Success Factors for Centres of Academic Excellence in Information Assurance. This meant a meta-analysis methodology could not be used, and either an “Exploratory Factor Analysis” (EFA) or a “Confirmatory Factor Analysis” (CFA) approach would be appropriate.
Based on one of the most relevant papers found, a CFA approach was taken which involved conducting a survey of subject matter experts (in this case the academic staff involved with the Centres of Academic Excellence (CAE) at their academic institution). Due to a lower than expected response rate, this research should be considered as a pilot study. The initial findings show that the survey lacked validity due to not meeting goodness of fit modeling requirements. Exploratory Factor Analysis was then conducted to determine which if any factors could be found. The results show that there were six factors which can be appropriately named as “People and Culture”, “Employee Recognition”, “Program Design”, “Training”, “Management commitment”, and “Career monitoring”.
The future work from this thesis is to conduct further research with those six factors based on a larger sample of respondents. It is intended that the results can then be generalised to countries outside of America.