Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) play a critical role in rejuvenating and sustaining the modern economy, generating substantial employment and serving as important innovation engines for the global economy. Global Perspectives on Small and Medium Enterprises and Strategic Information Systems: International Approaches aims to spread research conducted on SMEs internationally and place it at the disposal of academics, practitioners, consultants, the vendor community, and policymakers. The goal of this book is to highlight the challenges faced by SMEs and how they are coping with the adverse environment through skillful use of IT and technologies such as Web 2.0, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), e-commerce, open source software, Business Process Digitization (BPD), and other emerging technologies.

Concurrent Enterprising: Toward the Concurrent Enterprise in the Era of the Internet and Electronic Commerce presents the concurrent enterprise business model and concurrent enterprising approach, which is emerging as a crucial challenge for organizations in all geographical locations and economic sectors. To achieve this goal, this book deals with the main aspects of the merging context in which enterprises are doing business. This context is characterized by the fastest-spread information and communication technologies (ICT) that constitute the new infrastructure of the global marketplace. This book discusses a set of the most advanced enterprise paradigms created during the 1980s and 1990s, most of them supported by advanced research programs, especially in the worldwide manufacturing industry. The book discusses differences between these enterprise paradigms and presents Internet-related technologies as a main driver toward a new business model. It then examines less theoretical questions - among them, how to implement this new business model and how companies can move to the concurrent enterprise paradigm in creating a concurrent business environment. And it introduces a methodology for enterprises willing to maintain or even improve their competitiveness in the global marketplace. The book has eight chapters. The first two concentrate on the advanced enterprise paradigms, and their advantages and limits for maintaining or improving competitiveness in the global marketplace. Chapter 3 studies, separately, the virtual enterprise and related approaches. Chapter 4 studies another fundamental ingredient of the new business model - concurrent engineering (CE). Chapter 5 summarizes these preceding approaches and establishes a foundation for building a concurrent enterprise. Chapter 6 presents specific business cases illustrating the advantages and limits of virtual enterprise applications and introduces electronic commerce and electronic documents. Chapter 7 presents concurrent enterprise as a new business model, and Chapter 8 synthesizes the concurrent enterprising process. Concurrent Enterprising: Toward the Concurrent Enterprise in the Era of the Internet and Electronic Commerce is a reference and a user's guide designed for business managers, IT managers, engineers, researchers, scientists, and other individuals interested in learning how to use a sustainable business model driven by the Internet and electronic commerce.

Virtual teams constitute a relatively new knowledge area that has risen from two recent changes: the globalization of industry and markets, and advances in information communication technology tools. Continual technological advancement is set against a backdrop of international mergers, take-overs, and alliances, which invariably leads to more distributed collaboration, both formal and informal. The concept of creativity is often at the core of such proactive decisions.Virtual Teams and Creativity: Managing Virtual Teams Effectively for Higher Creativity presents advanced research on the concept of creativity using virtual teams, demonstrating a specific focus and application for virtual teams. Virtual Teams and Creativity: Managing Virtual Teams Effectively for Higher Creativity presents tools, processes, and frameworks to advance the overall concept that leveraging ideas from different locations in an organization and within extended networks is based on creativity, which can deliver innovation.

In many countries, small businesses comprise over 95% of the proportion of private businesses and approximately half of the private workforce, with information technology being used in more than 90% of these businesses. As a result, governments worldwide are placing increasing importance upon the success of small business entrepreneurs and are providing increased resources to support this emphasis. Managing Information Technology in Small Business: Challenges and Solutions presents research in areas such as IT performance, electronic commerce, internet adoption, and IT planning methodologies and focuses on how these areas impact small businesses.

"Decision Systems and Non-stochastic Randomness" is the first systematic presentation and mathematical formalization (including existence theorems) of the statistical regularities of non-stochastic randomness. The results presented in this book extend the capabilities of probability theory by providing mathematical techniques that allow for the description of uncertain events that do not fit standard stochastic models. The book demonstrates how non-stochastic regularities can be incorporated into decision theory and information theory, offering an alternative to the subjective probability approach to uncertainty and the unified approach to the measurement of information. This book is intended for statisticians, mathematicians, engineers, economists or other researchers interested in non-stochastic modeling and decision theory.

In Sustaining Cultural Development, Biljana Mickov and James Doyle argue that effective programmes to promote greater participation in cultural life require substantial investment in research and strategic planning. Using studies from contributors throughout Europe, they look at ways to promote cultural life as the centre of the broader sustainable development of society. These studies illustrate how combining cultural identity, cultural diversity and creativity with increased participation of citizens in cultural life improves harmonized cultural development and promotes democracy. They indicate a shift from traditional governance of the cultural sector to a new, more horizontal, approach that links cultural workers at different levels in different sectors and different locations. This book will stimulate debate amongst cultural leaders, city managers and other policy makers, as well as serving as a resource for researchers and those teaching and learning on a range of post-graduate courses and programmes.

The purpose of the 3rd International Conference on Enterprise Information Systems (ICEIS) was to bring together researchers, engineers, and practitioners interested in the advances and business applications of information systems. The research papers published here have been carefully selected from those presented at the conference, and focus on real world applications covering four main themes: database and information systems integration; artificial intelligence and decision support systems; information systems analysis and specification; and internet computing and electronic commerce.

Audience: This book will be of interest to information technology professionals, especially those working on systems integration, databases, decision support systems, or electronic commerce. It will also be of use to middle managers who need to work with information systems and require knowledge of current trends in development methods and applications.

Integrity and Internal Control in Information Systems is a state-of-the-art book that establishes the basis for an ongoing dialogue between the IT security specialists and the internal control specialists so that both may work more effectively together to assist in creating effective business systems in the future. Building on the issues presented in the preceding volume of this series, this book seeks further answers to the following questions: What precisely do business managers need in order to have confidence in the integrity of their information systems and their data? What is the status quo of research and development in this area? Where are the gaps between business needs on the one hand and research/development on the other; what needs to be done to bridge these gaps? Integrity and Internal Control in Information Systems contains the selected proceedings of the Second Working Conference on Integrity and Internal Control in Information Systems, sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and held in Warrenton, Virginia, USA, in November 1998. It will be essential reading for academics and practitioners in computer science, information technology, business informatics, accountancy and edp-auditing.

Information Technology for Small Business: Managing the Digital Enterprise provides an overview of how small and medium business enterprises (SMEs) can use flexibility, agility, and anticipation strategies to better utilize information technology and knowledge management. Because small and medium businesses tend to be late technology adopters, they could miss versatile and strategic workforce advantages that enable them to achieve higher efficiency and effectiveness through technology.

This book shows these SMEs new technology trends that can transform the nature of their operations both in an evolutionary business path and through revolutionary opportunities. Information Technology for Small Business: Managing the Digital Enterprise applied correctly to small and medium business can be used as a strategic tool to reach growth and profit goals for the SMEs competing in a very dynamic and global marketplace. Examples include: identifying ways that IT can be used to develop strong relationships with customers and suppliers, and how to select the best technologies for business needs.

Information Technology for Small Business: Managing the Digital Enterprise targets SME owners, educators, and practitioners working in the related fields of management, IT, IS, and CS-related disciplines. Advanced-level students and policy makers focusing on SMEs will also find this book valuable in terms of main concepts for discussion.

The book "Soft Computing for Business Intelligence "is the remarkable output of a program based on the idea of joint trans-disciplinary research as supported by the Eureka Iberoamerica Network and the University of Oldenburg.

It contains twenty-seven papers allocated to three sections" Soft Computing," "Business Intelligence and Knowledge Discovery," and "Knowledge Management and Decision Making." Although the contents touch different domains they are similar in so far as they follow the BI principle Observation and Analysis while keeping a practical oriented theoretical eye on sound methodologies, like Fuzzy Logic, Compensatory Fuzzy Logic (CFL), Rough Sets and other soft computing elements.

The book tears down the traditional focus on business, and extends Business Intelligence techniques in an impressive way to a broad range of fields like medicine, environment, wind farming, social collaboration and interaction, car sharing and sustainability. "

This guide is for practicing statisticians and data scientists who use IBM SPSS for statistical analysis of big data in business and finance. This is the first of a two-part guide to SPSS for Windows, introducing data entry into SPSS, along with elementary statistical and graphical methods for summarizing and presenting data. Part I also covers the rudiments of hypothesis testing and business forecasting while Part II will present multivariate statistical methods, more advanced forecasting methods, and multivariate methods. IBM SPSS Statistics offers a powerful set of statistical and information analysis systems that run on a wide variety of personal computers. The software is built around routines that have been developed, tested, and widely used for more than 20 years. As such, IBM SPSS Statistics is extensively used in industry, commerce, banking, local and national governments, and education. Just a small subset of users of the package include the major clearing banks, the BBC, British Gas, British Airways, British Telecom, the Consumer Association, Eurotunnel, GSK, TfL, the NHS, Shell, Unilever, and W.H.S. Although the emphasis in this guide is on applications of IBM SPSS Statistics, there is a need for users to be aware of the statistical assumptions and rationales underpinning correct and meaningful application of the techniques available in the package; therefore, such assumptions are discussed, and methods of assessing their validity are described. Also presented is the logic underlying the computation of the more commonly used test statistics in the area of hypothesis testing. Mathematical background is kept to a minimum.

In Decision Modelling And Information Systems: The Information Value Chain the authors explain the interrelationships between the decision support, decision modelling, and information systems. The authors borrow from Porter's value chain concept originally set out in the organizational context and apply it to a corporate IS context. Thus data, information and knowledge is seen to be the progressive value added process leading to business intelligence. The book captures key issues that are of central interest to decision support researchers, professionals, and students. The book sets out an interdisciplinary and contemporary view of Decision Support System (DSS).

The first two parts of the book focus on the interdisciplinary decision support framework, in which mathematical programming (optimization) is taken as the inference engine. The role of business analytics and its relationship with recent developments in organisational theory, decision modelling, information systems and information technology are considered in depth. Part three of the book includes a carefully chosen selection of invited contributions from internationally-known researchers. These contributions are thought-provoking and cover key decision modelling and information systems issues.

These chapters include: Arthur Geoffrion on restoring transparency to computational solutions, Bill Inmon on the concept of the corporate information factory, Louis Ma and Efraim Turban on strategic information systems, and Erik Thomsen on information impact and its relationship to the value of information technology.

The final part of the book covers contemporary developments in the related area of business intelligence considered within an organizational context. The topics cover computing delivered across the web, management decision-making, and socio-economic challenges that lie ahead. It is now well accepted that globalisation and the impact of digital economy are profound; and the role of e-business and the delivery of decision models (business analytics) across the net lead to a challenging business environment. In this dynamic setting, decision support is one of the few interdisciplinary frameworks that can be rapidly adopted and deployed to so that businesses can survive and prosper by meeting these new challenges.

Putting capability management into practice requires both a solid theoretical foundation and realistic approaches. This book introduces a development methodology that integrates business and information system development and run-time adjustment based on the concept of capability by presenting the main findings of the CaaS project - the Capability-Driven Development (CDD) methodology, the architecture and components of the CDD environment, examples of real-world applications of CDD, and aspects of CDD usage for creating business value and new opportunities. Capability thinking characterizes an organizational mindset, putting capabilities at the center of the business model and information systems development. It is expected to help organizations and in particular digital enterprises to increase flexibility and agility in adapting to changes in their economic and regulatory environments. Capability management denotes the principles of how capability thinking should be implemented in an organization and the organizational means. This book is intended for anyone who wants to explore the opportunities for developing and managing context-dependent business capabilities and the supporting business services. It does not require a detailed understanding of specific development methods and tools, although some background knowledge and experience in information system development is advisable. The individual chapters have been written by leading researchers in the field of information systems development, enterprise modeling and capability management, as well as practitioners and industrial experts from these fields.

This book explores community dynamics within social media. Using Wikipedia as an example, the volume explores communities that rely upon commons-based peer production. Fundamental theoretical principles spanning such domains as organizational configurations, leadership roles, and social evolutionary theory are developed. In the context of Wikipedia, these theories explain how a functional elite of highly productive editors has emerged and why they are responsible for a majority of the content. It explains how the elite shapes the project and how this group tends to become stable and increasingly influential over time. Wikipedia has developed a new and resilient social hierarchy, an adhocracy, which combines features of traditional and new, online, social organizations. The book presents a set of practical approaches for using these theories in real-world practice. This work fundamentally changes the way we think about social media leadership and evolution, emphasizing the crucial contributions of leadership, of elite social roles, and of group global structure to the overall success and stability of large social media projects. Written in an accessible and direct style, the book will be of interest to academics as well as professionals with an interest in social media and commons-based peer production processes.

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

Emerging business models, value configurations, and information technologies interact over time to create competitive advantage. Modern information technology has to be studied, understood, and applied along the time dimension of months and years, where changes are the rule. Such changes created by interactions between business elements and resources are very well suited for system dynamics modeling. ""Business Dynamics in Information Technology"" presents business-technology alignment processes, interaction processes, and decision processes, helping the reader study information technology from a dynamic, rather than a static, perspective. By introducing two simple tools from system dynamic modeling - causal loops and reference modes - the dynamic perspective will become important to both students and practitioners in the future.

Requirements engineering has since long acknowledged the importance of the notion that system requirements are stakeholder goals-rather than system functions-and ought to be elicited, modeled and analyzed accordingly. In this book, Nurcan and her co-editors collected twenty contributions from leading researchers in requirements engineering with the intention to comprehensively present an overview of the different perspectives that exist today, in 2010, on the concept of intention in the information systems community. These original papers honor Colette Rolland for her contributions to this field, as she was probably the first to emphasize that 'intention' has to be considered as a first-class concept in information systems engineering. Written by long-term collaborators (and most often friends) of Colette Rolland, this volume covers topics like goal-oriented requirements engineering, model-driven development, method engineering, and enterprise modeling. As such, it is a tour d'horizon of Colette Rolland's lifework, and is presented to her on the occasion of her retirement at CaISE 2010 in Hammamet, the conference she once cofounded and which she helped to grow and prosper for more than 20 years.

This book explores coordination within and between teams in the context of large-scale agile software development, providing readers a deeper understanding of how coordinated action between teams is achieved in multiteam systems. An exploratory multiple case study with five multiteam systems and a total of 66 interviewees from development teams at SAP SE is presented and analyzed. In addition, the book explores stereotypes of coordination in large-scale agile settings and shares new perspectives on integrating conditions for coordination. No previous study has researched this topic with a similar data set, consisting of insights from professional software development teams. As such, the book will be of interest to all researchers and practitioners whose work involves software product development across several teams.

Today's MIS manager must understand and apply the latest thinking on the crucial management functions: planning, organizing, directing, and controlling. Moreover, not only must managers understand the research-based foundations underlying this thinking, they must also know how to leverage the new MIS technologies and incorporate them into it. Thierauf's new book guides managers through the technology/managerial function interface, explains latest research and its applications, and then provides MIS managers, their external auditors and consultants, with a unique questionnaire to help them assess the performance of their MIS groups and their own managerial effectiveness. With illustrations, checklists, guidelines, and unusual clarity of presentation, not only will Thierauf's book help MIS managers and those they report to understand better their day-to-day tasks, but it will also shed new light on the technologies themselves and their inevitable work impacts.

The success of an enterprise today is dependent upon its information system, which comprises Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Supply Chain Management (SCM), and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Disruption of Enterprise Information Systems (EIS), even for a short period of time, can cause large problems for business operations. Enterprise Information Systems and Implementing IT Infrastructures: Challenges and Issues aims at identifying potential research problems and issues in EIS, allowing research scholars and practitioners to develop suitable strategies and operational policies for EIS, thus improving communication within organizations. The cutting-edge research discussed in this book intends to spark the discussion of new ideas and developments in the field of EIS amongst researchers and practitioners.

Recent achievements in hardware and software developments have enabled the introduction of a revolutionary technology: in-memory data management. This technology supports the flexible and extremely fast analysis of massive amounts of data, such as diagnoses, therapies, and human genome data. This book shares the latest research results of applying in-memory data management to personalized medicine, changing it from computational possibility to clinical reality. The authors provide details on innovative approaches to enabling the processing, combination, and analysis of relevant data in real-time. The book bridges the gap between medical experts, such as physicians, clinicians, and biological researchers, and technology experts, such as software developers, database specialists, and statisticians. Topics covered in this book include - amongst others - modeling of genome data processing and analysis pipelines, high-throughput data processing, exchange of sensitive data and protection of intellectual property. Beyond that, it shares insights on research prototypes for the analysis of patient cohorts, topology analysis of biological pathways, and combined search in structured and unstructured medical data, and outlines completely new processes that have now become possible due to interactive data analyses.

Business rules are everywhere. Every enterprise process, task, activity, or function is governed by rules. However, some of these rules are implicit and thus poorly enforced, others are written but not enforced, and still others are perhaps poorly written and obscurely enforced. The business rule approach looks for ways to elicit, communicate, and manage business rules in a way that all stakeholders can understand, and to enforce them within the IT infrastructure in a way that supports their traceability and facilitates their maintenance.

Boyer and Mili will help you to adopt the business rules approach effectively. While most business rule development methodologies put a heavy emphasis on up-front business modeling and analysis, agile business rule development (ABRD) as introduced in this book is incremental, iterative, and test-driven. Rather than spending weeks discovering and analyzing rules for a complete business function, ABRD puts the emphasis on producing executable, tested rule sets early in the project without jeopardizing the quality, longevity, and maintainability of the end result. The authors presentation covers all four aspects required for a successful application of the business rules approach: (1) foundations, to understand what business rules are (and are not) and what they can do for you; (2) methodology, to understand how to apply the business rules approach; (3) architecture, to understand how rule automation impacts your application; (4) implementation, to actually deliver the technical solution within the context of a particular business rule management system (BRMS). Throughout the book, the authors use an insurance case study that deals with claim processing.

Boyer and Mili cater to different audiences: Project managers will find a pragmatic, proven methodology for delivering and maintaining business rule applications. Business analysts and rule authors will benefit from guidelines and best practices for rule discovery and analysis. Application architects and software developers will appreciate an exploration of the design space for business rule applications, proven architectural and design patterns, and coding guidelines for using JRules.

This proceedings volume presents timely research and insights on the advancement of marketing's basic premise-providing greater levels of customer value. In recent years, both marketing scholars and practitioners have witnessed great advancements in technology and methodologies associated with big data, with location-based marketing centered on mobile apps and the real-time tracking of consumer behavior, and with innovations and enhancements in communications utilizing the continually growing presence of social media. Featuring the full proceedings of the 2017 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS) Annual Conference held in Coronado Island, California, this volume provides ground-breaking research from scholars and practitioners from around the world that will help marketers in providing value for companies, consumers and society. Founded in 1971, the Academy of Marketing Science is an international organization dedicated to promoting timely explorations of phenomena related to the science of marketing in theory, research, and practice. Among its services to members and the community at large, the Academy offers conferences, congresses, and symposia that attract delegates from around the world. Presentations from these events are published in this Proceedings series, which offers a comprehensive archive of volumes reflecting the evolution of the field. Volumes deliver cutting-edge research and insights, complementing the Academy's flagship journals, the Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science (JAMS) and AMS Review. Volumes are edited by leading scholars and practitioners across a wide range of subject areas in marketing science.

This book covers everything from MTS (basic service) to WATS, 800, 900, virtual networks, facsimile networks, travel cards, private lines and intrastate and international services. It examines the impact of changing technology on the corporate network - ISDN, SS7 and intelligent network expansions. The book shows you how to deploy these long distance options for effectively meeting your organization's business objectives.