Designed for use by professionals and graduate-level students in public administration and not-for-profit management, this is a comprehensive, clearly written guide to the use of statistical analysis in the management of nonprofit organizations. The volume emphasizes statistical models that use more than one variable and is unique in presenting multivariate statistics specifically with the public and nonprofit manager in mind. Examples throughout have been chosen to be relevant to the not-for-profit organization and each chapter contains several real-life illustrations of how statistical techniques can be used in actual practice. In addition to explaining statistical methods and techniques in detail, the author focuses on why statistics should be used and helps the reader obtain an intuitive grasp of the rationale behind the statistics. Because she stresses the logic of proofs and the limitations of results rather than the pure mathematics of statistical derivation, the volume is accessible to students and managers with only a little statistical background.

Following a chapter that introduces the concept of multivariate analysis, Stiefel explains simple and multiple regression models in detail. Later chapters discuss other techniques that are becoming widely used in not-for-profit organizations: logit and probit analysis, time-series models, and simultaneous equation models. Two types of examples are used to make the material immediately relevant to the not-for-profit manager: real-world examples culled from professional journals and reports in a variety of fields including health care, education, finance, budgeting, and administrative science; and examples of results obtained using statistical programs run on a personal computer. Thus the book enables the reader to understand and interpret both the statistics used in professional articles and statistical results as they appear on computer printouts. Four appendixes review basic statistical methods such as simple summation operators, the Pearson Correlation Coefficient, and hypothesis testing for the sample mean.

This book is the Proceedings of the International Workshop on Finance 2011, held in Kyoto in the summer of 2011 with the aim of exchanging new ideas in financial engineering among researchers from various countries from both academia and industry. The workshop was held as a successor to the Daiwa International Workshop (2004-2008), and the KIER-TMU International Workshop (2009-2010). This workshop was organized by the Center for Advanced Research in Finance (CARF), Graduate School of Economics, the University of Tokyo, and Graduate School of Social Sciences, Tokyo Metropolitan University - and co-organized by Life Risk Research Center, Doshisha University.The workshop serves as a bridge between academic researchers and practitioners. This book contains about fifteen papers, all refereed, representing the presentations at the workshop. The papers address state-of-the-art techniques in financial engineering.

Twenty years after the first publications and books on enterprise architecture, the domain is evolving from a technology-driven towards a more business-driven approach, thus empowering decision makers to adapt and transform an enterprise in order to keep up with changing business needs. At the same time the discipline of enterprise architecting has matured, leading to a better understanding of the profession of an enterprise architect.

With this book, the authors aim to provide an overview of enterprise architecture including the process of creating, applying and maintaining it, thus taking into account the perspectives of CxOs, business managers, enterprise architects, solution architects, designers and engineers. They explore the results that are produced as part of an enterprise architecture, the process by which these are produced, and the role the architect plays in this process. As such, they do not describe a specific method for developing an enterprise (IT) architecture, nor do they define a specific modeling language for enterprise architecture, rather they offer the reader a fundamental way of thinking about enterprise architecture, which will enable him to select and apply the right approach, architecture framework and tools that meet the objective and context of the architecture work at hand. This approach is emphasized by discussion statements at the end of each chapter, sparking thoughts about benefits, shortcomings, and future research directions.

Covering both theoretical foundations and practical use, and written in close collaboration between industry professionals and academic lecturers, Enterprise Architecture thus offers an ideal introduction for students in areas like business information systems or management science, as well as guidance and background for professionals seeking a more thorough understanding of their field of work.

This book collects high-quality papers on the latest fundamental advances in the state of Econophysics and Management Science, providing insights that address problems concerning the international economy, social development and economic security. This book applies the multi-fractal detrended class method, and improves the method with different filters. The authors apply those methods to a variety of areas: financial markets, energy markets, gold market and so on. This book is arguably a systematic research and summary of various kinds of multi-fractal detrended methods. Furthermore, it puts forward some investment suggestions on a healthy development of financial markets.

Information technology has come to play an important role in organizations over the last few decades. Though it began as an entity dealt with by specialists, IT has evolved to become an everyday tool with both operational and strategic impacts. Most modern organizations have adopted different forms of IT, and become dependent on their computer-based information systems and their peripherals for everyday operations. Information technology offers opportunities to increase efficiency, customer value, and competitiveness.

Given the financial investment in IT required by organizations to remain competitive, IT has become a resource that needs to be managed. Management and Information Technology evaluates organizations? utilization of IT including knowledge management and e-learning, accounting, and business relationships. Presenting theories to help the reader understand the varying roles IT can occupy in different organizations, this volume illustrates the ways in which IT has become a key strategic tool.

A classic text for accuracy and statistical precision. Statistics for Business and Economics enables readers to conduct serious analysis of applied problems rather than running simple "canned" applications. This text is also at a mathematically higher level than most business statistics texts and provides readers with the knowledge they need to become stronger analysts for future managerial positions. The eighth edition of this book has been revised and updated to provide readers with improved problem contexts for learning how statistical methods can improve their analysis and understanding of business and economics.

Over the past decade, innovative technologies have resulted in an extensive growth of new services. Each new service requires a number of management and marketing decisions to be made well in advance of its launch and throughout its entire life cycle. This book develops mathematical models to facilitate decision-making dealing with technologically innovative services. Specifically, it develops (i) models for optimal pricing strategies of subscription services on monopolistic and duopolistic markets; (ii) an analytical model for optimal investment and optimal pricing strategies for innovative maintenance service contracts; and (iii) a model for targeting customers in marketing campaigns. In addition, the models (i)-(iii) can also be used to forecast an aggregate demand for a new service as well as the service demand for each individual customer.

This companion provides broad and in-depth insights into family business in Asia and how Asian family firms navigate in the digital economy. The first part of the book looks at key concepts of family business while the second part presents Asian family firms' cases from Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand, Malaysia and other Asian economies. This comprehensive reference will help readers understand how family firms in Asia compete and survive in the world market especially in the digital age and why and how Asian economies can emerge as one of the most dynamic regions in the world.

The book is distinct as it critically revisits what is 'social' in an enterprise without being limited by theoretical definitions Each chapter includes several case examples from international and well-renowned organizations to depict the dimensions and dilemmas a social enterprise can assume in practice It adopts a pragmatic hands-on community-based approach to drive in the message of social entrepreneurship Online resources include chapter by chapter PowerPoints slides, a video overview and additional case studies.

Multicriteria analysis is a rapidly growing aspect of operations research and management science, with numerous practical applications in a wide range of fields. This book presents all the recent advances in multicriteria analysis, including multicriteria optimization, goal programming, outranking methods, and disaggregation techniques. The latest developments on robustness analysis, preference elicitation, and decision making when faced with incomplete information, are also discussed, together with applications in business performance evaluation, finance, and marketing. Finally, the interactions of multicriteria analysis with other disciplines are also explored, including among others data mining, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary methods.

China has grown to become the world's second largest economy in merely three decades and entrepreneurship has been identified as a key driver of China's fast growth. Since the mid-2000s, the country has transitioned from a predominance of necessity-based entrepreneurship to that of an opportunity-based entrepreneurship. The China Surveys of Global Entrepreneurship Monitor in the last fifteen years consistently indicate the country's high rate of entrepreneurship. Furthermore, more Chinese entrepreneurs have started setting their sights on business internationalisation. Against this backdrop of a thriving entrepreneurial economy, institutions and business environment are, however, not often viewed as "friendly" to private entrepreneurs and businesses. The "re-emergence" of entrepreneurship suggests a history of struggle to overcome opposition and obstruction, to survive and grow, including "rule ambiguities", rent-seeking, subsidies, and institutional constraints, such as industrial barriers, difficulties in getting access to critical resources, and weak property rights. China has also been experiencing economic slowdown, increase in inequality and worsening environmental problems since the turn of the century, clearly indicating that the rapid development of entrepreneurship in China presents a lot of puzzling questions. Entrepreneurship in China attempts to deal with these unanswered queries as well as provide an insightful and updated understanding of entrepreneurship development in China. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal, Entrepreneurship & Regional Development.

Plenty of software testing books tell you how to test well; this one tells you how to do it while decreasing your testing budget. A series of essays written by some of the leading minds in software testing, How to Reduce the Cost of Software Testing provides tips, tactics, and techniques to help readers accelerate the testing process, improve the performance of the test teams, and lower costs. The distinguished team of contributors-that includes corporate test leaders, best paper authors, and keynote speakers from leading software testing conferences-supply concrete suggestions on how to find cost savings without sacrificing outcome. Detailing strategies that testers can immediately put to use to reduce costs, the book explains how to make testing nimble, how to remove bottlenecks in the testing process, and how to locate and track defects efficiently and effectively. Written in language accessible to non-technical executives, as well as those doing the testing, the book considers the latest advances in test automation, ideology, and technology. Rather than present the perspective of one or two experts in software testing, it supplies the wide-ranging perspectives of a team of experts to help ensure your team can deliver a completed test cycle in less time, with more confidence, and reduced costs.

Cybercrime and Espionage provides a comprehensive analysis of the sophisticated patterns and subversive multi-vector threats (SMTs) associated with modern cybercrime, cyber terrorism, cyber warfare and cyber espionage. Whether the goal is to acquire and subsequently sell intellectual property from one organization to a competitor or the international black markets, to compromise financial data and systems, or undermine the security posture of a nation state by another nation state or sub-national entity, SMTs are real and growing at an alarming pace. This book contains a wealth of knowledge related to the realities seen in the execution of advanced attacks, their success from the perspective of exploitation and their presence within all industry. It will educate readers on the realities of advanced, next generation threats, which take form in a variety ways. This book consists of 12 chapters covering a variety of topics such as the maturity of communications systems and the emergence of advanced web technology; how regulatory compliance has worsened the state of information security; the convergence of physical and logical security; asymmetric forms of gathering information; seven commonalities of SMTs; examples of compromise and presence of SMTs; next generation techniques and tools for avoidance and obfuscation; and next generation techniques and tools for detection, identification and analysis. This book will appeal to information and physical security professionals as well as those in the intelligence community and federal and municipal law enforcement, auditors, forensic analysts, and CIO/CSO/CISO.

Whether it's because of a lack of understanding, poor planning, or a myriad of other things, 50 to 60 percent of the IT effort in most companies can be considered waste. Explaining how to introduce Lean principles to your IT functions to reduce and even eliminate this waste, Lean Management Principles for Information Technology provides the tools and understanding to make better decisions, increase efficiencies, and make IT a major force in delivering sustainable improvements to your supply chain.

The proven Toyota Production System principles described in this book have already helped many IT organizations double and triple their output. It introduces some of the most powerful Lean tools and techniques-including Six Sigma, value stream mapping, and spaghetti charting-and provides a methodology for implementing them to reduce waste in your IT environment. Discussing information production processes, IT systems, and change management through the lens of Lean principles, the book:

• Provides step-by-step guidance through the processes of implementing Lean principles in your IT supply chain management system
• Illustrates successful implementation across a range of industries and countries
• Examines how to use Lean methods to achieve ongoing improvement in IT personnel
• Explains how to implement Lean in the supply chain, while reducing IT cycle time and costs

The text reviews the major management challenges facing IT and illustrates solutions with stories, examples, and case studies of how Lean IT has led to unprecedented improvements in the private and government sectors. Demonstrating how to structure the components of your IT system in accordance with Lean, the book details the measures required to achieve and sustain a world-class Lean IT supply chain management system.

Written for first-time buyers who have never owned a property or had a mortgage, rather than buy-to-let investors. Provides a holistic view of the property purchase process, and examines several key aspects: property, mortgages, and legal considerations. Written by academics who have extensive practical experience in property and mortgages.

This book introduces readers to the field of conformance checking as a whole and outlines the fundamental relation between modelled and recorded behaviour. Conformance checking interrelates the modelled and recorded behaviour of a given process and provides techniques and methods for comparing and analysing observed instances of a process in the presence of a model, independent of the model's origin. Its goal is to provide an overview of the essential techniques and methods in this field at an intuitive level, together with precise formalisations of its underlying principles. The book is divided into three parts, that are meant to cover different perspectives of the field of conformance checking. Part I presents a comprehensive yet accessible overview of the essential concepts used to interrelate modelled and recorded behaviour. It also serves as a reference for assessing how conformance checking efforts could be applied in specific domains. Next, Part II provides readers with detailed insights into algorithms for conformance checking, including the most commonly used formal notions and their instantiation for specific analysis questions. Lastly, Part III highlights applications that help to make sense of conformance checking results, thereby providing a necessary next step to increase the value of a given process model. They help to interpret the outcomes of conformance checking and incorporate them by means of enhancement and repair techniques. Providing the core building blocks of conformance checking and describing its main applications, this book mainly addresses students specializing in business process management, researchers entering process mining and conformance checking for the first time, and advanced professionals whose work involves process evaluation, modelling and optimization.

This book explores the premise that organizations are significantly influenced by their inter-organizational relationships; moreover, these relationships may generate important externalities, both positive and negative, impacting the environment at several levels. The advent of the Internet era, on the other hand, has resulted in disruptive changes in traditional inter-organizational networks, and some completely new inter-organizational settings are now arising. In its first part the book reviews the most commonly cited theories explaining inter-organizational phenomena: transaction costs economics, agency theory, resource dependence theory, game theories, collaborative networks theory, institutional theories, organizational ecology, resource-based / relational-based view of the firm, and knowledge network / social network theories. In Part II it thoroughly reviews the literature on a number of key IT-enabled inter-organizational systems currently on the rise, such as virtual organizations, e-intermediators and e-marketplaces. Lastly, Part III presents the case of the Yoox Group, a leading firm offering e-commerce services for fashion and design products. A framework is proposed for systematically linking the different possible types of inter-organizational relationships to specific, suitable sets of theories. The range of possible inter-organizational relationships is described on the basis of three pairs of opposites: conformism-breach, exploitation-exploration, and cooperation-competition. This results in a model that makes it possible to combine different theories in order to study the effects of inter-organizational ambidexterity and dynamism on performance.

Enterprise architecture requires an understanding of all technologies, strategies, and data consumption throughout the enterprise. To this end, one must strive to always broaden knowledge of existing, as well as emerging trends and solutions. As a trade, this role demands an understanding beyond the specificities of technologies and vendor products. An enterprise architect must be versatile with the design and arrangement of elements in an extended network enterprise. Intended for anyone charged with coordinating enterprise architectural design in a small, medium, or large organization, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture helps you explore the various elements of your own particular network environment to develop strategies for mid- to long-term management and sustainable growth. Organized much like a book on structural architecture, this one starts with a solid foundation of frameworks and general guidelines for enterprise governance and design. The book covers common considerations for all enterprises, and then drills down to specific types of technology that may be found in your enterprise. It explores strategies for protecting enterprise resources and examines technologies and strategies that are only just beginning to take place in the modern enterprise network. Each chapter builds on the knowledge and understanding of topics presented earlier in the book to give you a thorough understanding of the challenges and opportunities in managing enterprise resources within a well-designed architectural strategy. Emphasizing only those strategies that weather change, Sustainable Enterprise Architecture shows you how to evaluate your own unique environment and find alignment with the concepts of sustainability and architecture. It gives you the tools to build solutions and policies to protect your enterprise and allow it to provide the greatest organizational value into the future.

The book focuses on smart computing for crowdfunding usage, looking at the crowdfunding landscape, e.g., reward-, donation-, equity-, P2P-based and the crowdfunding ecosystem, e.g., regulator, asker, backer, investor, and operator. The increased complexity of fund raising scenario, driven by the broad economic environment as well as the need for using alternative funding sources, has sparked research in smart computing techniques. Covering a wide range of detailed topics, the authors of this book offer an outstanding overview of the current state of the art; providing deep insights into smart computing methods, tools, and their applications in crowdfunding; exploring the importance of smart analysis, prediction, and decision-making within the fintech industry. This book is intended to be an authoritative and valuable resource for professional practitioners and researchers alike, as well as finance engineering, and computer science students who are interested in crowdfunding and other emerging fintech topics.

A valuable tool for establishing and maintaining system reliability, overall equipment effectiveness (OEE) has proven to be very effective in reducing unscheduled downtime for companies around the world. So much so that OEE is quickly becoming a requirement for improving quality and substantiating capacity in leading organizations, as well as a required area of study for the ISO/TS 16949.

Breaking down the methodology from a historical perspective, The OEE Primer Understanding Overall Equipment Effectiveness, Reliability, and Maintainability explores the overall effectiveness of machines and unveils novel methods that focus on design improvement including hazard analysis, rate of change of failure (ROCOF) analysis, failure rate finite element analysis (FEA), and theory of inventive problem solving (TRIZ). It covers loss of effectiveness, new machinery, electrical maintenance issues, Weibull distribution, measurement techniques, and mechanical and electrical reliability. The book also:

• Discusses Reliability and Maintainability (R&M), not as tools to be used in specific tasks, rather as a discipline
• Covers the application of OEE as an overall improvement tool
• Assesses existing and new equipment from classical, reliability, and maintainability perspectives
• Includes a bonus CD with more than 100 pages of appendices and additional resources featuring statistical tables, outlines, case studies, guidelines, and standards

Introducing the classical approach to improvement, this book provides an understanding of exactly what OEE is and how it can be best applied to address capacity issues. Highlighting mechanical and electrical opportunities throughout, the text includes many tables, forms, and examples that clearly illustrate and enhance the material presented.

Ontologies tend to be found everywhere. They are viewed as the silver bullet for many applications, such as database integration, peer-to-peer systems, e-commerce, semantic web services, or social networks. However, in open or evolving systems, such as the semantic web, different parties would, in general, adopt different ontologies. Thus, merely using ontologies, like using XML, does not reduce heterogeneity: it just raises heterogeneity problems to a higher level. Euzenat and Shvaiko's book is devoted to ontology matching as a solution to the semantic heterogeneity problem faced by computer systems. Ontology matching aims at finding correspondences between semantically related entities of different ontologies. These correspondences may stand for equivalence as well as other relations, such as consequence, subsumption, or disjointness, between ontology entities. Many different matching solutions have been proposed so far from various viewpoints, e.g., databases, information systems, and artificial intelligence. The second edition of Ontology Matching has been thoroughly revised and updated to reflect the most recent advances in this quickly developing area, which resulted in more than 150 pages of new content. In particular, the book includes a new chapter dedicated to the methodology for performing ontology matching. It also covers emerging topics, such as data interlinking, ontology partitioning and pruning, context-based matching, matcher tuning, alignment debugging, and user involvement in matching, to mention a few. More than 100 state-of-the-art matching systems and frameworks were reviewed. With Ontology Matching, researchers and practitioners will find a reference book that presents currently available work in a uniform framework. In particular, the work and the techniques presented in this book can be equally applied to database schema matching, catalog integration, XML schema matching and other related problems. The objectives of the book include presenting (i) the state of the art and (ii) the latest research results in ontology matching by providing a systematic and detailed account of matching techniques and matching systems from theoretical, practical and application perspectives.

Despite providing us with a good understanding of how firms use certain mechanisms to benefit from open innovation strategies, current research provides only limited insights into how barriers internal to the firm may hamper knowledge transfer and limit effective utilization of external knowledge sources. The Influence of Internal Barriers on Open Innovation proposes a dynamic perspective that addresses this gap and aims at stimulating this discussion in two ways. First, by looking at how the way firms structure their internal (innovation) activities may (unintentionally) create barriers to the incorporation of external knowledge. Second, by reflecting on how internal barriers might be coupled to firm decisions aimed at the optimization of innovation processes, like the balance between exploration and exploitation strategies. The chapters of this book provide detailed conceptualization and investigation of organizational characteristics and practices that influence internal barriers to open innovation. The diverse set of studies described in the chapters of this book will help open innovation scholars to better understand the challenges that firms face when dealing with internal barriers that affect their external knowledge search and knowledge sourcing. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the journal Industry and Innovation.

Improving Mathematics at Work questions the mathematical knowledge and skills that matter in the twenty-first century world of work, and studies how the use of mathematics in the workplace is evolving in the rapidly-changing context of new technologies and globalisation. Through a series of case studies from the manufacturing and financial service sectors, the authors argue that there has been a radical shift in the type mathematical skills required for work ? a shift not yet fully recognised by the formal education system, or by employers and managers.

Examining how information technology has changed mathematical requirements, the idea of Techno-mathematical Literacies (TmL) is introduced to describe the emerging need to be fluent in the language of mathematical inputs and outputs to technologies and to interpret and communicate with these, rather than merely to be procedurally competent with calculations. The authors argue for careful analyses of workplace activities, looking beyond the conventional thinking about numeracy, which still dominates policy arguments about workplace mathematics. Throughout their study, the authors answer the following fundamental questions:

• What mathematical knowledge and skills matter for the world of work today?
• How does information technology change the necessary knowledge and the ways in which it is encountered?
• How can we develop these essential new skills in the workforce?

With evidence of successful opportunities to learn with TmL that were co-designed and evaluated with employers and employees, this book provides suggestions for the development of TmL through the use of authentic learning activities, and interactive software design. Essential reading for trainers and managers in industry, teachers, researchers and lecturers of mathematics education, and stakeholders implementing evidence-based policy, this book maps the fundamental changes taking place in workplace mathematics.

Firm growth. This concept has interested researchers for generations. Economists have sought to predict and measure firm growth using a host of different variables, while strategic management scholars depict growth as the result of clever analyses and rational resource exploitation. Entrepreneurship scholars - ever engrossed by successful start-ups - have pondered why growth sometimes comes fast and sometimes never at all, while the field of business history has given countless examples of growing firms in a range of different settings. Yet despite research across fields, our knowledge of how growth in a firm actually comes about is limited and we still know little about the process. This book offers a new reading of economist Edith Penrose's The Theory of the Growth of the Firm. The bold statement is that although Penrose's work - across fields and generations - is amongst the most quoted on firm growth, the basic points of her work have yet to be realized and explored empirically. Essentially, growth is created by a dynamic interrelation between the firm's self-conception and its image of context. Based on these two subjective categories, the firm makes decisions and its actions lead it to develop along a particular path. To Penrose this is the basic engine that drives the growth and development of firms. This book discusses how the engine of firm growth can be captured in empirical analysis using interpretative theory and narrative methods inspired by recent streams of research in business history.

Data has become an indispensable success factor for every company. However, the road towards a data-driven organization is paved with numerous challenges. This book presents a process model for the path to a data-driven company and provides recommendations for the design of all relevant fields of action: Which structures need to be created? Which systems and processes have proven beneficial? How can the quality of the data be ensured and what requirements exist for a data-driven organization in the areas of governance and communication? And last but not least: How can employees be brought along on the journey and what implications does the data-driven organization have for our corporate culture? The book presents an orientation and action framework for the strategic and operational design of a data-driven organization and is valuable for managers who are involved in data management in companies and organizations.