In the statistical domain, certain topics have received considerable attention during the last decade or so, necessitated by the growth and evolution of data and theoretical challenges. This growth has invariably been accompanied by computational advancement, which has presented end users as well as researchers with the necessary opportunities to handle data and implement modelling solutions for statistical purposes. Showcasing the interplay among a variety of disciplines, this book offers pioneering theoretical and applied solutions to practice-oriented problems. As a carefully curated collection of prominent international thought leaders, it fosters collaboration between statisticians and biostatisticians and provides an array of thought processes and tools to its readers. The book thereby creates an understanding and appreciation of recent developments as well as an implementation of these contributions within the broader framework of both academia and industry. Computational and Methodological Statistics and Biostatistics is composed of three main themes: * Recent developments in theory and applications of statistical distributions;* Recent developments in supervised and unsupervised modelling;* Recent developments in biostatistics; and also features programming code and accompanying algorithms to enable readers to replicate and implement methodologies. Therefore, this monograph provides a concise point of reference for a variety of current trends and topics within the statistical domain. With interdisciplinary appeal, it will be useful to researchers, graduate students, and practitioners in statistics, biostatistics, clinical methodology, geology, data science, and actuarial science, amongst others.

Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems II, Volume 2 presents work from the IFIP TC 8 WG 8.9 International Conference on the Research and Practical Issues of Enterprise Information Systems (CONFENIS 2007).

Enterprise information systems (EIS) have become increasingly popular over the last 15 years. EIS integrate and support business processes across functional boundaries in a supply chain environment. In recent years, more and more enterprises world-wide have adopted EIS such as Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) for running their businesses. Previously, information systems such as CAD, CAM, MRPII and CRM were widely used for partial functional integration within a business organization. With global operation, global supply chain, and fierce competition in place, there is a need for suitable EIS such as ERP, E-Business or E-Commerce systems to integrate extended enterprises in a supply chain environment with the objective of achieving efficiency, competency, and competitiveness. As an example, the global economy has forced business enterprises such as Dell and Microsoft to adopt ERP in order to take the advantage of strategic alliances within a global supply chain environment. Today, not only the large companies, but also the medium companies are quickly learning that a highly integrated EIS is more and more a required element of doing business. Businesses all over the world are investing billions of dollars in acquiring and implementing EIS in particular ERP systems by SAP and Oracle. As a result, there is a growing demand for researching EIS to provide insights into challenges, issues, and solutions related to the design, implementation and management ofEIS.

Information systems are the backbone of many of today's computerized applications. Distributed databases and the infrastructure needed to support them have been well studied. However, this book is the first to address distributed database interoperability by examining the successes and failures, various approaches, infrastructures, and trends of the field. A gap exists in the way that these systems have been investigated by real practitioners. This gap is more pronounced than usual, partly because of the way businesses operate, the systems they have, and the difficulties created by systems' autonomy and heterogeneity. Telecommunications firms, for example, must deal with an increased demand for automation while at the same time continuing to function at their current level. While academics are focusing on investigating differences between distributed databases, federated databases, heterogeneous databases, and, more generally, among loosely connected and tightly coupled systems, those who have to deal with real problems right away know that the only relevant research is the one that will ensure that their system works to produce reasonably correct results. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems covers the underlying principles and infrastructures needed to realize truly global information systems. The book discusses technologies related to middleware, the Web, workflows, transactions, and data warehousing. It also overviews architectures with a discussion of critical issues. The book gives an overview of systems that can be viewed as learning platforms. While these systems do not translate to successful commercial realities, they push the envelope in terms of research. Successful commercial systems have benefited from the experiments conducted in these prototypes. The book includes two case studies based on the authors' own work. Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems is suitable as a textbook for a graduate-level course on Interconnecting Heterogeneous Information Systems, as well as a secondary text for a graduate-level course on database or information systems, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry.

This open access book presents an overview and step-by-step explanation of process management. It starts with the individual participants' perspectives on their work in a process and its structuring and harmonization, and then moves on to its specification in a model and how it is embedded in the organizational and IT environment of the company. Lastly, the book examines the joint processing of instances in the resulting socio-technical systems. A corresponding illustration, which expands with the overview, enables readers to gain a comprehensive understanding of business process management. The book presents various facets of business process management from the perspective of the participants, and introduces a selection of models that have proved useful in practice. The design of such models supports the transition from a more-or-less unstructured or unsatisfactory way of working to a structured process that corresponds to the ideas of the company and its customers. The book is intended for professionals in industry as well as students in the field of business information systems who are looking for guidelines on how to discover, create and implement real-world processes.

This book helps marketing decision makers in allocating their budget to diverse communication channels and different business units in an ROI-optimal way, and to adapt it in an agile manner. The optimal allocation of resources in marketing is not very complex in theory, but in practice a variety of questions arise, for example: How do you find the optimal mix, even across brands and product lines, and how do you adjust it dynamically? What is the right balance between image and performance marketing? How do you tackle strategic data management and other organizational challenges? The authors guide the reader through the entire process from data collection to marketing mix modeling and campaign tracking to tool selection. The book strikes the right balance between theoretical sophistication and necessary pragmatism, with numerous concrete recommendations for decision makers.

This book provides relevant theoretical frameworks and the latest empirical research findings of Operations Research/Management Science applied to Internet of Things. This book identifies and describes ways in which OR and MS have been applied and influenced the development of IoT. Examples are from smart industry; city; transportation; home and smart devices. It discusses future applications, trends, and potential benefits of this new discipline. It is written for professionals who want to improve their understanding of the strategic role of IoT at various levels of the organization, that is, IoT at the global economy level, at networks and organizations level, at teams and work groups, at information systems and, finally, IoT at the level of individuals, as players in the networked environments.

This book highlights research and survey articles dedicated to big data techniques for cyber-physical system (CPS), which addresses the close interactions and feedback controls between cyber components and physical components. The book first discusses some fundamental big data problems and solutions in large scale distributed CPSs. The book then addresses the design and control challenges in multiple CPS domains such as vehicular system, smart city, smart building, and digital microfluidic biochips. This book also presents the recent advances and trends in the maritime simulation system and the flood defence system.

This book presents contemporary empirical methods in software engineering related to the plurality of research methodologies, human factors, data collection and processing, aggregation and synthesis of evidence, and impact of software engineering research. The individual chapters discuss methods that impact the current evolution of empirical software engineering and form the backbone of future research. Following an introductory chapter that outlines the background of and developments in empirical software engineering over the last 50 years and provides an overview of the subsequent contributions, the remainder of the book is divided into four parts: Study Strategies (including e.g. guidelines for surveys or design science); Data Collection, Production, and Analysis (highlighting approaches from e.g. data science, biometric measurement, and simulation-based studies); Knowledge Acquisition and Aggregation (highlighting literature research, threats to validity, and evidence aggregation); and Knowledge Transfer (discussing open science and knowledge transfer with industry). Empirical methods like experimentation have become a powerful means of advancing the field of software engineering by providing scientific evidence on software development, operation, and maintenance, but also by supporting practitioners in their decision-making and learning processes. Thus the book is equally suitable for academics aiming to expand the field and for industrial researchers and practitioners looking for novel ways to check the validity of their assumptions and experiences. Chapter 17 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Triple Bottom Line (TBL or 3BL) was coined as a wide and inspiring approach for businesses aimed at understanding how to create, track and manage economic, social, and environmental value added. The sustainability sector is strongly increasing its relevance among academics and practitioners, and the market opportunities associated with the Sustainable Development Goals are estimated in over $ 12 trillion per year by 2030. Although this is a promising context, a recent article suggested a rethinking of the TBL, arguing that sustainability goals' value should not be assessed in terms of profit and loss, but of people wellbeing and planet health, looking for a societal profit. Technology plays a crucial role in our society. Respectively, the Agenda 21 and the Paris Agreement consider technology to be essential in the pursue of the sustainable development and the achievement of the SDGs. Adding to this, the Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital solution in several field, from the way of working to the way of buying and consuming. Companies are becoming more aware of the responsibility they have with the environmental and human context, and people are looking for a work reflecting their values and purposes to motive them. This book aims to contribute to the understanding on the role of technology and its emerging and innovative solutions in the achievement of a sustainable development while making profit. It will be of value to researchers, academics, practitioners, and students in the fields of strategic management, entrepreneurship, management of technology and innovation, and sustainable development.

This book readdresses fundamental issues in knowledge management, leading to a new area of study: knowledge processes. McInerney 's and Day 's superb authors from various disciplines offer new and exciting views on knowledge acquisition, generation, sharing and management in a post-industrial environment. Their contributions discuss problems of knowledge acquisition, handling, and learning from a variety of perspectives.

This book closes the gap between information technologies and management decision making. It treats currently relevant topics in information technology--knowledge-based expert systems, graphic-user interface, fuzzy logic, neural networks, data storage, client server, and integration of heterogeneous databases--by using examples and, more importantly, by relating these methods to the needs of the decision maker by taking into account the individual's decision style. The authors provide a solid basis for determining how decision makers use and access information that becomes part of the design of information systems. Integrating the decision maker into the design results in a more intelligent information system because the focus is on the outcome rather than on the methodology or computer power used.

This book sets the stage of the evolution of corporate governance, laws and regulations, other forms of governance, and the interaction between data governance and other corporate governance sub-disciplines. Given the continuously evolving and complex regulatory landscape and the growing number of laws and regulations, compliance is a widely discussed issue in the field of data. This book considers the cost of non-compliance bringing in examples from different industries of instances in which companies failed to comply with rules, regulations, and other legal obligations, and goes on to explain how data governance helps in avoiding such pitfalls. The first in a three-volume series on data governance, this book does not assume any prior or specialist knowledge in data governance and will be highly beneficial for IT, management and law students, academics, information management and business professionals, and researchers to enhance their knowledge and get guidance in managing their own data governance projects from a governance and compliance perspective.

"The worked examples and guided questions are invaluable, and are a particular strength of this text, as they help to prepare the students to tackle the practice questions. Having exam-style questions (at the end) is another very good feature of this book. All of the examples and questions use appropriate and relevant business-related scenarios... I am confident that this book will achieve the aim of helping A/AS Business students develop their maths skills and enhance their understanding of the subject." Michaela Cottee, Principal Lecturer in Statistics, Hertfordshire Business School. If you struggle with calculating profit or working out unit costs, this is the book for you. This textbook companion will help improve your essential maths skills for business, whichever awarding body specification you're following. You can use it throughout your course, whenever you feel you need some extra help. - Develop your understanding of both maths and business with all worked examples and questions within a business context - Improve your confidence with a step-by-step approach to every maths skill - Measure your progress with guided and non-guided questions to see how you're improving - Understand where you're going wrong with full worked solutions to every question - Feel confident in expert guidance from experienced teacher Charlotte Wright and Principal Examiner Mike Pickerden; reviewed by Dr Michaela Cottee, Principal Lecturer in Statistics at Hertfordshire Business School

Within the digital era, agile working is imperative for organisations and workers to meet the needs of customers, service-users and ever-changing markets. This needs to be achieved whilst meeting goals of effectiveness and well-being. In this book, state-of-the-art theory is used to understand how to optimise agile working by addressing key issues around personality, team-working and management. The authors define the concept of agile working and unpack often-misunderstood terms associated with this, such as remote working and telework. The book explores the well-being consequences of agile work including sedentary behaviours, digital distraction, and digital resistance before offering insights for the future. Examining current practice in the context of established and emerging theory, the book paves the way towards further advances in the field and supports organisations seeking to make agile working work for them. Agile Working and Well-being in the Digital Age provides a valuable new resource for practitioners and scholars in the fields of occupational and organizational psychology, human resource management, organisational development, mental health and well-being.

This book examines the changing business and economic environment for postal services in Lithuania and the upcoming challenges for this industry. Postal services continue to play a central part in the development of national economies. However, the economic and social role of postal services has changed rapidly and fundamentally over the last two decades. In most industrialized countries, paper-based communications are in serious decline, while the demand for parcel delivery services is rising steadily with the continuing development of e-commerce, just-in-time production techniques, and global supply chains. For the postal sector as a whole, the centre of gravity has shifted dramatically from letters and documents to parcels. The authors explain how the organizational paradigm has inexorably shifted from that of a national, government-owned postal administration providing the basic delivery services required by society, to a system of interdependent local and regional undertakings that both compete and cooperate with one another. The book argues that there are no indications that the postal sector has stopped changing, and that it seems most probable that the European Union's postal sector will look quite different in 2035 than it does today. In closing, the book explains how the shareholders of postal services companies have recently confirmed that the time has come to rethink the strategy of creating and maintaining competitiveness in the postal services industry.

This book investigates the adoption of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) in Caribbean travel firms, particularly for sales and marketing purposes. By examining the decision-making process in tourism companies deciding whether to become more dependent on digital capabilities and artificial intelligence, this text seeks to understand the role of strategy and resources in technology adoption. Further, the author assesses the role of factors both external (such as culture) and internal (such as leadership) in this strategic process. Economies in the Caribbean are reliant on tourism to bring prosperity to the region, and with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the industry is being forced to transform the way it operates. With implications for those studying organizational behavior as well as strategic and tourism management, this study analyzes rapid change in this pivotal industry.

Artificial intelligence - and social responsibility. Two topics that are at the top of the business agenda. This book discusses in theory and practice how both topics influence each other. In addition to impulses from the current often controversial scientific discussion, it presents case studies from companies dealing with the specific challenges of artificial intelligence. Particular emphasis is placed on the opportunities that artificial intelligence (AI) offers for companies from different industries. The book shows how dealing with the tension between AI and challenges caused by new corporate social responsibility creates strategic opportunities and also innovation opportunities. It highlights the active involvement of stakeholders in the design process, which is meant to build trust among customers and the public and thus contributes to the innovation and acceptance of artificial intelligence. The book is aimed at researchers and practitioners in the fields of corporate social responsibility as well as artificial intelligence and digitalization. The chapter "Exploring AI with purpose" is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book shows how digital transformation has the power to revolutionize the way procurement operates, and discusses how especially buyer decisions are empowered through artificial intelligence. Depending on a company's strategy all desired outcomes are possible, including doubling savings, innovation, sustainability, quality, speed, and halve the risk. Jumpstart to Digital Procurement is a hands-on guide on how companies can grasp the opportunities offered by digital transformation.

This book describes how manufacturing enterprises, by reinforcing their existing monitoring and control of manufacturing processes, can successfully face the ever-increasing pressure from internal and external environments to maintain their competitive advantage. Numerous performance measurement systems have been elaborated to satisfy these requirements, stressing the importance of financial and operational metrics. It also highlights the fact that research on generating and linking financial and operational metrics, especially in real-time, has not garnered sufficient attention to date. The book follows an approach that integrates enterprises across different levels and departments. By computing and linking the financial and operational metrics in real-time, the book demonstrates how to provide a comprehensive view of an entire enterprise.

Program debugging has always been a difficult and time-consuming task in the context of software development, where spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) is one of the most widely studied families of techniques. While it's not particularly difficult to learn about the process and empirical performance of a particular SBFL technique from the available literature, researchers and practitioners aren't always familiar with the underlying theories. This book provides the first comprehensive guide to fundamental theories in SBFL, while also addressing some emerging challenges in this area. The theoretical framework introduced here reveals the intrinsic relations between various risk evaluation formulas, making it possible to construct a formula performance hierarchy. Further extensions of the framework provide a sufficient and necessary condition for a general maximal formula, as well as performance comparisons for hybrid SBFL methods. With regard to emerging challenges in SBFL, the book mainly covers the frequently encountered oracle problem in SBFL and introduces a metamorphic slice-based solution. In addition, it discusses the challenge of multiple-fault localization and presents cutting-edge approaches to overcoming it. SBFL is a widely studied research area with a massive amount of publications. Thus, it is essential that the software engineering community, especially those involved in program debugging, software maintenance and software quality assurance (including both newcomers and researchers who want to gain deeper insights) understand the most fundamental theories - which could also be very helpful to ensuring the healthy development of the field.

This book contains selected papers presented at the seventh Conference on Working Group 3.7 of the Internation Federation for Information Processing. The focus of Working Froup 3.7 is on ITEM: Information Technology in Educational Management. The event toook place in Hamamatsu, Japan, and enabled the exchange of findings and ideas between researchers in educational management and information technology, policy-makers in the field of education, developers of ITEM systems, and vendors. The overall goal of the conference was to demonstrate and explore directions for developing and improving all types of educational institutions through ITEM.

Contributions to this conference hailed from all over the world. The papers in this volume investigate how ITEM can support and improve educational practice at the level of instruction as well as at the institutional level, an analysis of the history of ITEM as a field of study and practice, results of researcdh on how training can promote the implementation of ITEM systems, and theoretical analyses of the conditions under which ITEM will have the strongest impact. Moreover, all sectors of educational systems (from schools to universities) are represented by the various chapters of this book.

The term "sustainability" has entered the lexicon of many academic disciplines and fields of professional practice, but to date does not appear to have been seriously consid ered within the systems community unless, perhaps, under other guises. Within the wider community there is no consensus around what sustainability means with some authors identifying 70 to 100 definitions of the term. Some see sustainability as the precise and quantifiable outcomes of biological systems whilst others see it in terms of processes rele vant to personal and organizational change with the potential to effect changes in our rela tionships with out environments. Internationally it has been increasingly used in relation to the term "sustainable development"--a term popularised by the Brundland Commis of definitions sion's report in 1987 entitled "Our Common Future. " Despite this diversity and polarised perception on its utility, unlike many other popular terms, it has not had its time and subsided quietly from our language. It is therefore timely for the systems com munity to explore the relationship between systems and sustainability in a range of con texts. Participants in this, the 5th International Conference of the United Kingdom Systems Society (UKSS), have been invited to reflect critically on the contribution of sys tems thinking and action to sustainability-to the sustainability of personal relationships, the organizations in which live and work, and our "natural" environment."

This open access book examines the implications of internal crowdsourcing (IC) in companies. Presenting an employee-oriented, cross-sector reference model for good IC practice, it discusses the core theoretical foundations, and offers guidelines for process-management and blueprints for the implementation of IC. Furthermore, it examines solutions for employee training and competence development based on crowdsourcing. As such, the book will appeal to scholars of management science, work studies, organizational and participation research and to readers interested in inclusive approaches for cooperative change management and the IT implications for IC platforms.

This book investigates the impact of information and communication technologies (ICTs) on development and well-being (beyond economic benefits) and highlights some emerging issues relating to the realities, constraints and digital divides with particular reference to India. It collects a series of novel contributions, studying the Indian experience in an international cross-country perspective. The book also discusses economic, social, and behavioural aspects of well-being as well as access to ICTs across regions, states and individuals to account for the digital divide. The book establishes an aggregate relationship between ICT exposure and well-being at the country level and addresses a number of fundamental issues, such as whether ICT raises the level of transparency and governance. Based on case studies and anecdotal evidence, it then further assesses the effective implementation of service delivery through ICT innovations. The book is divided into four parts: The introductory part surveys the literature and presents background information on the Indian case; introduces the main themes on the relationships between ICT, socio-economic development and digital divides; and provides a summary and roadmap to the chapters of the book. Part II focuses on the impact of ICT on economic performance, including economic growth, productivity and trade. Part III examines the extent of the digital divides in India, including international, regional as well as inter-personal inequality. Finally, Part IV investigates the impact of ICT on governance, users' well-being and social outcomes. Combining insights from analyses of a variety of socio-economic dimensions related to digitalisation, this book is relevant for a wide range of scholars and researchers across disciplines, as well as practitioners and policy-makers. While the book has a main focus on India, various contributions take an international cross-country comparative perspective, and the results have general relevance for digitalisation and development. On the whole, the main message of this book is that the impact of ICTs is contingent upon other assets, capabilities and institutional conditions. National policies should, therefore, not only promote digitalization as such but also ensure its co-evolution and complementarity with a variety of other country-specific factors. Chapter 'Digitalisation and Development: Issues for India and Beyond' of this book is available open access under a CC BY 4.0 license at link.springer.com

This book provides readers the "big picture" and a comprehensive survey of the domain of big data processing systems. For the past decade, the Hadoop framework has dominated the world of big data processing, yet recently academia and industry have started to recognize its limitations in several application domains and thus, it is now gradually being replaced by a collection of engines that are dedicated to specific verticals (e.g. structured data, graph data, and streaming data). The book explores this new wave of systems, which it refers to as Big Data 2.0 processing systems. After Chapter 1 presents the general background of the big data phenomena, Chapter 2 provides an overview of various general-purpose big data processing systems that allow their users to develop various big data processing jobs for different application domains. In turn, Chapter 3 examines various systems that have been introduced to support the SQL flavor on top of the Hadoop infrastructure and provide competing and scalable performance in the processing of large-scale structured data. Chapter 4 discusses several systems that have been designed to tackle the problem of large-scale graph processing, while the main focus of Chapter 5 is on several systems that have been designed to provide scalable solutions for processing big data streams, and on other sets of systems that have been introduced to support the development of data pipelines between various types of big data processing jobs and systems. Next, Chapter 6 focuses on covering the emerging frameworks and systems in the domain of scalable machine learning and deep learning processing. Lastly, Chapter 7 shares conclusions and an outlook on future research challenges. This new and considerably enlarged second edition not only contains the completely new chapter 6, but also offers a refreshed content for the state-of-the-art in all domains of big data processing over the last years. Overall, the book offers a valuable reference guide for professional, students, and researchers in the domain of big data processing systems. Further, its comprehensive content will hopefully encourage readers to pursue further research on the subject.