This series is dedicated to developments in accounting information systems. Each volume is structured into three sections: information systems practice and theory; information systems and the accounting/auditing environment; and perspectives on information systems research. This volume includes evidence from three experiments relating to the effect of socioeconomic background on computer anxiety and performance. Other areas covered include audit expert system development, users affective responses to information systems through an empirical comparison of four operationalizations, articulating accounting database queries, audit decision aids and integrating group support systems into the accounting environment.

This book is about using information in small businesses to compete; it is about strategy and information systems. It examines problems that these businesses face and suggests some solutions. It looks at how strategie planning takes place and how information systems should be designed and developed in line with strategy, from a business rather than a purely technical point ofview. The main contribution made is proposing an approach to crafting strategy, designing new business processes and information systems planning that could realistically be used by the average small business, that is one without great knowledge of strategy or information systems, and one that cannot afford to buy in this knowledge. The approach differs from others suggested in the literature in that it emphasises the important role of creativity in the process of creating strategy and in information system design and illustrates where this creativity may come from, it emphasises the importance of getting staff involved and it attempts to lessen the communication problems that exists between business people and information system developers, something that historically has caused problems.

Globalization of business, internationalization of trade, and increasing prevalence of multi-cultural interdisciplinary teams are beginning to redefine the nature of office work. Different-time/different-place/different-culture teams will become the norm. Same-time/same-place/same-culture teams will become the exception. The International Office of the Future (IOF) will be a dramatically different environment than that which exists in the majority of today's organizations. Prospects for the IOF give rise to numerous questions, which are addressed in this book. What are the salient issues? What design options or solution strategies exist to address these issues? How might these design options be best implemented? What are their implications? In addition, a number of specific topics will be discussed including: multi-cultural team productivity, IT platform requirements, and global telecommunications.

th This volume gathers together the technical papers presented at the 8 European Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (ECSCW), held in Helsinki Finland. ECSCW is an international forum for multidisciplinary research covering the technical, empirical, and theoretical aspects of collaboration and computer systems. The 20 papers presented here have been selected via a rigorous reviewing process from 110 submissions. Both the number of submissions and the quality of the selected papers are testimony to the diversity and energy of the CSCW community. We trust that you will find the papers interesting and that they will serve to stimulate further quality work within the community. The technical papers are complemented by a wider set of activities at ECSCW 2003, including tutorials, workshops, demonstrations, videos, posters and a doctoral colloquium. Together these provide rich opportunities for discussion, learning and exploration of the more recent and novel issues in the field. This conference could not have taken place without considerable enthusiasm, support and participation, not to mention the hard work of a number of people. In particular, we would like to thank the following: * The authors, representing over 17 countries and 97 institutions, who submitted a paper. So many submissions of such high quality are the basis of a good conference. * The members of the program committee who so diligently reviewed and discussed papers. Their collective decisions result in a good scientific program and their feedback to authors strengthens the work of the community.

This reference examines a wide range of environmental factors, both internal and external, that contribute to complexity.

The ultimate guide to how to redesign and rethink - reframe - your projects, initiatives and even your very business model, Cyber Commerce Reframing (CCR) shows you how to turn your company around in the Cyber Economy towards maximum use of information technology by additionally saving investments already made. In his vivid and hands-on book, the author provides you the insights of what went wrong with web-based business by examining failed companies all over the world. CCR constitutes an alternative to business process reengineering and optimization, which were partly not as successful as during the 80s and 90s in delivering expected results as they precondition too much additional investments, neglect organizations' uniqueness and often miss the starting point. Having designed, planned, supported and implemented CCR solutions at various companies of different size, the description of the work with corporate clients facilitates the task of incorporating CCR's novel ideas in your company.

This book explores all relevant aspects of net scoring, also known as uplift modeling: a data mining approach used to analyze and predict the effects of a given treatment on a desired target variable for an individual observation. After discussing modern net score modeling methods, data preparation, and the assessment of uplift models, the book investigates software implementations and real-world scenarios. Focusing on the application of theoretical results and on practical issues of uplift modeling, it also includes a dedicated chapter on software solutions in SAS, R, Spectrum Miner, and KNIME, which compares the respective tools. This book also presents the applications of net scoring in various contexts, e.g. medical treatment, with a special emphasis on direct marketing and corresponding business cases. The target audience primarily includes data scientists, especially researchers and practitioners in predictive modeling and scoring, mainly, but not exclusively, in the marketing context.

What will business software look like in the future? And how will it be developed?

This book covers the proceedings of the first international conference on Future Business Software - a new think tank discussing the trends in enterprise software with speakers from Europe's most successful software companies and the leading research institutions. The articles focus on two of the most prominent trends in the field: emergent software and agile development processes.

"Emergent Software" is a new paradigm of software development that addresses the highly complex requirements of tomorrow's business software and aims at dynamically and flexibly combining a business software solution's different components in order to fulfill customers' needs with a minimum of effort. Agile development processes are the response of software technology to the implementation of diverse and rapidly changing software requirements. A major focus is on the minimization of project risks, e.g. through short, iterative development cycles, test-driven development and an intensive culture of communication."

This is the sixth volume in a series dealing with such topics as information systems practice and theory, information systems and the accounting/auditing environment, and differing perspectives on information systems research.

This book comprises the refereed papers together with the invited keynote papers, presented at the Second International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems. The conference was organised by the School of Computing at Staffordshire University, UK, and the Escola Superior de Tecnologia of Setubal, Portugal, in cooperation with the British Computer Society and the International Federation for Information Processing, Working Group 8.1. The purpose of this 2nd International Conference was to bring together researchers, engineers and practitioners interested in the advances in and business applications of information systems. The papers demonstrate the vitality and vibrancy of the field of Enterprise Information Systems. The research papers included here were selected from among 143 submissions from 32 countries in the following four areas: Enterprise Database Applications, Artificial Intelligence Applications and Decision Support Systems, Systems Analysis and Specification, and Internet and Electronic Commerce. Every paper had at least two reVIewers drawn from 10 countries. The papers included in this book were recommended by the reviewers. On behalf of the conference organising committee we would like to thank all the members of the Programme Committee for their work in reviewing and selecting the papers that appear in this volume. We would also like to thank all the authors who have submitted their papers to this conference, and would like to apologise to the authors that we were unable to include and wish them success next year.

The advent of the digital economy has the potential to dramatically change the conventional interrelationships among individuals, enterprises and society. There can be little doubt that to achieve vigorous socioeconomic developments in the 21st century, people will have to aggressively use information technology to boost innovation and to organically link the results of that innovation to solutions to global environmental issues and social challenges such as the opportunity divide. We are responsible for taking advantage of the opportunities opened up by the digital economy and for turning those opportunities into things that reflect our values and goals. The book examines the overall impact of the digital economy and the development of a practical institutional design.

This book offers guidance for US-based IT businesses on both sides of the Atlantic when dealing with big data and government data, since transatlantic data flows are key to the success of these enterprises. It offers practical insights into many of the data-protection challenges US companies in various industries face when seeking to comply with US and EU data-protection laws, and analyses the potential conflicts in the light of their risks and the way in which US-based cloud providers react to the uncertainties of the applicable data-protection rules. The book particularly focuses on the insights derived from a qualitative study conducted in 2016 with various cloud-based IT businesses in the Silicon Valley area, which shows the diversity of views on data protection and the many approaches companies take to this topic. Further, it discusses key data-protection issues in the field of big data and government data.

This book starts with an introduction to process modeling and process paradigms, then explains how to query and analyze process models, and how to analyze the process execution data. In this way, readers receive a comprehensive overview of what is needed to identify, understand and improve business processes. The book chiefly focuses on concepts, techniques and methods. It covers a large body of knowledge on process analytics - including process data querying, analysis, matching and correlating process data and models - to help practitioners and researchers understand the underlying concepts, problems, methods, tools and techniques involved in modern process analytics. Following an introduction to basic business process and process analytics concepts, it describes the state of the art in this area before examining different analytics techniques in detail. In this regard, the book covers analytics over different levels of process abstractions, from process execution data and methods for linking and correlating process execution data, to inferring process models, querying process execution data and process models, and scalable process data analytics methods. In addition, it provides a review of commercial process analytics tools and their practical applications. The book is intended for a broad readership interested in business process management and process analytics. It provides researchers with an introduction to these fields by comprehensively classifying the current state of research, by describing in-depth techniques and methods, and by highlighting future research directions. Lecturers will find a wealth of material to choose from for a variety of courses, ranging from undergraduate courses in business process management to graduate courses in business process analytics. Lastly, it offers professionals a reference guide to the state of the art in commercial tools and techniques, complemented by many real-world use case scenarios.

The promotion of an enterprise culture and entrepreneurship in India in recent decades has had far-reaching implications beyond the economy, and transformed social and cultural attitudes and conduct. This book brings together pioneering research on the nature of India's enterprise culture, covering a range of different themes: workplace, education, religion, trade, films, media, youth identity, gender relations, class formation and urban politics. Based on extensive empirical and ethnographic research by the contributors, the book shows the myriad manifestations of enterprise culture and the making of the aspiring, enterprising-self in public culture, social practice, and personal lives, ranging from attempts to construct hegemonic ideas in public discourse, to appropriation by individuals and groups with unintended consequences, to forms of contested and contradictory expression. It discusses what is 'new' about enterprise culture and how it relates to pre-existing ideas, and goes on to look at the processes and mechanisms through which enterprise culture is becoming entrenched, as well as how it affects different classes and communities. The book highlights the social and political implications of enterprise culture and how it recasts family and interpersonal relationships as well as personal and collective identity. Illuminating one of the most important aspects of India's current economic and social transformation, this book is of interest to students and scholars of Asian Business, Sociology, Anthropology, Development Studies and Media and Cultural Studies.

Through case studies this volume provides evidence that a link between sourcing capabilities and organizational structure contributes to a positive sourcing performance. Reveals that providers who are able to adapt to changing client circumstances, whilst establishing a fit, succeed in achieving a sustainable performance.

The serious difficulties facing the developer of international information systems (i.e. supporting business functions in different countries) are widely known and their propensity to catastrophic failure has been acknowledged among practitioners for quite some time. Despite the often pivotal importance that such systems generally have scholarly research in this field has been surprisingly sparse. Information technology applications with a global range and reach are still largely unstudied and under-explored. Subsequently there is a distinct dearth of theoretical frameworks for dealing with them. After a career in information technology line management I have been involved with multinational enterprises and their information systems for over a decade as a consultant, working in Africa, the UK, continental Europe, North America and Australasia. It was on joining a university in the early nineties that I discovered the near-vacuum in this field of research. When I decided to make international information systems my field of research it became clear that fairly fundamental work needed to be done. I started the project described further on more than 10 years ago. It turned out a fairly difficult, necessarily broad based and, eventually, longitudinal research.

This volume offers the state-of-the-art research and developments in service science and related research, education and practice areas. It showcases emerging technology and applications in fields including healthcare, information technology, transportation, sports, logistics, and public services. Regardless of size and service, a service organization is a service system. Because of the socio-technical nature of a service system, a systems approach must be adopted to design, develop, and deliver services, aimed at meeting end users' both utilitarian and socio-psychological needs. Effective understanding of service and service systems often requires combining multiple methods to consider how interactions of people, technology, organizations, and information create value under various conditions. The papers in this volume highlight ways to approach such technical challenges in service science and are based on submissions from the 2018 INFORMS International Conference on Service Science.

This book attempts to create awareness about the UN-MDGs and how various ICT can be harnessed to appeal to different demographics. Current empirical evidence suggests that MDG awareness is relatively low particularly in developed countries, and that the levels of MDG awareness vary considerable across socioeconomic variables or demographics from United Nations perspective. It also examines how ICT can be used to bring about technical and social innovations strengthen livelihoods, support economic development, water and climate resilience and improve the education and health sectors and enhance development opportunities. Several studies are highlighted that reinforce the view that government support and private sector expertise and funding are important factors in ICT-based e-government solutions in developing countries. The book also builds on the thesis that a strong connection between competencies in mathematics, science, and information communication/technology is required to build logical concepts and critical thinking skills. It also examines the opportunities and barriers of promoting students' learning skills, including communication, cooperation, collaboration and connection using the Wiki tool under the blackboard platform. Finally, the book also highlights the challenges involved in application of ICT in education. This is significant for educators in order to surmount these obstacles and consequently successfully incorporate ICT into the educational system. The chapters present the relevant literature on ICTs and the perceived barriers to ICT integration in basic education. They also focus on the implications of incorporating ICT in the basic educational system. The challenges confronting the integration of ICT in education are equally identified with a view to ensuring a more efficient application of ICT in attaining education for all.

Thierauf's work develops a number of interesting and potentially useful approaches to management information systems (MIS) practice. The author presents a number of techniques (some well known, others more recent) that practicing MIS managers may adopt to facilitate effective MIS planning for the 1990's by focusing on problem finding rather than on problem solving. A primary recommendation of Thierauf's is the restructuring of the MIS organization using a functional (end-user) departmental approach. Discussed at length are various issues relevant to this restructuring, such as staffing, motivating MIS personnel and end users, and MIS soft' controls. Recommended for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as practicing managers and MIS specialists. "Choice"

With new developments in hardware and software, MIS managers are increasingly faced with the need to develop more sophisticated managerial--as opposed to purely technical--skills. Here, an acknowledged expert in the field of information systems draws on his own original research and experience to develop a set of workable strategies and techniques that MIS managers can use to function more effectively as we move into the next decade. Thierauf identifies probable trends in the field in coming years and outlines ways in which MIS managers can anticipate predictable problems, apply improved management skills to the end-user interface, and effectively motivate MIS personnel.

Thierauf concentrates particularly on four major areas of managerial responsibility: planning, organizing, motivating, and controlling. In planning, he shows how to use problem-finding techniques to anticipate and solve potential problems between MIS personnel and end-users. To help reduce this conflict, Thierauf argues, there is a need for a new direction in organizing MIS departments. He proposes bringing MIS and end-use departments together by using a functional departmental approach. In motivating MIS personnel, there is need to go beyond self-actualization by emphasizing mutual actualization as well as self donation. Finally, in the area of control, Thierauf advocates the use of soft controls to replace stringent controls that have had a tendency to restrict personal freedom on the job. A common thread througout the discussion is a focus on effective guidelines for the MIS manager to follow in order to come to grips with the changing realities of the 1990s.

Information Systems Action Research is organized into three parts: the first part focuses on the methodological issues that arise when action research methods are conducted; the second part provides examples of action research in practice; and the third part will summarize the philosophical foundations of action research and its application as a methodology in Information Systems research and research programs. The book will include chapters from Europe, Australasia, and the Americas representing different traditions and perspectives in action research. These chapters will come from prominent scholars in the areas, who are widely recognized as authors of seminal ideas in action research.

This two-volume handbook presents a collection of novel methodologies with applications and illustrative examples in the areas of data-driven computational social sciences. Throughout this handbook, the focus is kept specifically on business and consumer-oriented applications with interesting sections ranging from clustering and network analysis, meta-analytics, memetic algorithms, machine learning, recommender systems methodologies, parallel pattern mining and data mining to specific applications in market segmentation, travel, fashion or entertainment analytics. A must-read for anyone in data-analytics, marketing, behavior modelling and computational social science, interested in the latest applications of new computer science methodologies. The chapters are contributed by leading experts in the associated fields.The chapters cover technical aspects at different levels, some of which are introductory and could be used for teaching. Some chapters aim at building a common understanding of the methodologies and recent application areas including the introduction of new theoretical results in the complexity of core problems. Business and marketing professionals may use the book to familiarize themselves with some important foundations of data science. The work is a good starting point to establish an open dialogue of communication between professionals and researchers from different fields. Together, the two volumes present a number of different new directions in Business and Customer Analytics with an emphasis in personalization of services, the development of new mathematical models and new algorithms, heuristics and metaheuristics applied to the challenging problems in the field. Sections of the book have introductory material to more specific and advanced themes in some of the chapters, allowing the volumes to be used as an advanced textbook. Clustering, Proximity Graphs, Pattern Mining, Frequent Itemset Mining, Feature Engineering, Network and Community Detection, Network-based Recommending Systems and Visualization, are some of the topics in the first volume. Techniques on Memetic Algorithms and their applications to Business Analytics and Data Science are surveyed in the second volume; applications in Team Orienteering, Competitive Facility-location, and Visualization of Products and Consumers are also discussed. The second volume also includes an introduction to Meta-Analytics, and to the application areas of Fashion and Travel Analytics. Overall, the two-volume set helps to describe some fundamentals, acts as a bridge between different disciplines, and presents important results in a rapidly moving field combining powerful optimization techniques allied to new mathematical models critical for personalization of services. Academics and professionals working in the area of business anyalytics, data science, operations research and marketing will find this handbook valuable as a reference. Students studying these fields will find this handbook useful and helpful as a secondary textbook.

This book presents the application of a comparatively simple nonparametric regression algorithm, known as the multivariate adaptive regression splines (MARS) surrogate model, which can be used to approximate the relationship between the inputs and outputs, and express that relationship mathematically. The book first describes the MARS algorithm, then highlights a number of geotechnical applications with multivariate big data sets to explore the approach's generalization capabilities and accuracy. As such, it offers a valuable resource for all geotechnical researchers, engineers, and general readers interested in big data analysis.

The importance of benchmarking in the service sector is well recognized as it helps in continuous improvement in products and work processes. Through benchmarking, companies have strived to implement best practices in order to remain competitive in the product- market in which they operate. However studies on benchmarking, particularly in the software development sector, have neglected using multiple variables and therefore have not been as comprehensive. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry fills this void by examining benchmarking in the business of software development and studying how it is affected by development process, application type, hardware platforms used, and many other variables. Information Theory and Best Practices in the IT Industry begins by examining practices of benchmarking productivity and critically appraises them. Next the book identifies different variables which affect productivity and variables that affect quality, developing useful equations that explaining their relationships. Finally these equations and findings are applied to case studies. Utilizing this book, practitioners can decide about what emphasis they should attach to different variables in their own companies, while seeking to optimize productivity and defect density.

In the field of genetic and evolutionary algorithms (GEAs), a large amount of theory and empirical study has been focused on operators and test problems, while problem representation has often been taken as given. This book breaks with this tradition and provides a comprehensive overview on the influence of problem representations on GEA performance. The book summarizes existing knowledge regarding problem representations and describes how basic properties of representations, such as redundancy, scaling, or locality, influence the performance of GEAs and other heuristic optimization methods. Using the developed theory, representations can be analyzed and designed in a theory-guided matter. The theoretical concepts are used for solving integer optimization problems and network design problems more efficiently. The book is written in an easy-readable style and is intended for researchers, practitioners, and students who want to learn about representations. This second edition extends the analysis of the basic properties of representations and introduces a new chapter on the analysis of direct representations.

Continuous technological innovation amidst the increasing complexity of organizational structures and operations has created the need to achieve a new level of skillful performance and innovative procedures within the information resources management sector. ""Best Practices and Conceptual Innovations in Information Resources Management: Utilizing Technologies to Enable Global Progressions"" provides authoritative insight into emerging developments in information resources management and how these technologies are shaping the way the world does business, creates policies, and advances organizational practices. With chapters delving into pertinent aspects of such disciplines as knowledge management, open source software, systems engineering, project management, and IT governance, this book offers audiences solutions for improved organizational functioning.