A much-needed addition to literature, this timely edited collection aims to provide clarity and understanding on how modern organizations work. The authors explore the characteristics of hybrid organizations in contemporary society, taking into account the complex societal challenges that face businesses today. Arguing that hybrid organizations are in fact not a new phenomenon, this thought-provoking collection goes beyond existing research and re-evaluates our traditional understanding of this concept. Scholars of organization, management and innovation will find this book an insightful read, as it sheds light on the fundamental aspects that shape today's hybrid organizations.

Provides answers to key questions affecting the future of electronic data interchange (EDI) and its impact on the business community as a whole. This evolving technology is cheaper than fax, easier to use than electronic bulletin boards and faster than the postal services. It contains practical information and alerts the reader to the level and types of controls necessary to protect data handled through the EDI system interface.

This book covers several new areas in the growing field of analytics with some innovative applications in different business contexts, and consists of selected presentations at the 6th IIMA International Conference on Advanced Data Analysis, Business Analytics and Intelligence. The book is conceptually divided in seven parts. The first part gives expository briefs on some topics of current academic and practitioner interests, such as data streams, binary prediction and reliability shock models. In the second part, the contributions look at artificial intelligence applications with chapters related to explainable AI, personalized search and recommendation, and customer retention management. The third part deals with credit risk analytics, with chapters on optimization of credit limits and mitigation of agricultural lending risks. In its fourth part, the book explores analytics and data mining in the retail context. In the fifth part, the book presents some applications of analytics to operations management. This part has chapters related to improvement of furnace operations, forecasting food indices and analytics for improving student learning outcomes. The sixth part has contributions related to adaptive designs in clinical trials, stochastic comparisons of systems with heterogeneous components and stacking of models. The seventh and final part contains chapters related to finance and economics topics, such as role of infrastructure and taxation on economic growth of countries and connectedness of markets with heterogenous agents, The different themes ensure that the book would be of great value to practitioners, post-graduate students, research scholars and faculty teaching advanced business analytics courses.

The fundamental reason for the existence of any manufacturing organization is to generate wealth by adding value to the products and services it offers. In this new global industrial environment, value is generated from many sources, such as rapid and flexible fulfillment of orders, developing new innovative products and services, providing rapid and responsive product and service support, delivering innovative turn-key solutions to customers, and so on. In the 21st century most manufacturing organizations will have to respond to these challenges through innovative partnerships, by creating virtual enterprises, by operating in agile networks to generate value by exploiting their existing competencies in design, manufacturing, distribution and customer service, whilst building new competencies in information systems, communications and knowledge management. Just as no man is an island, so no business can operate without being part of a network of businesses, which we call the manufacturing value chain. This book brings together the works of leading researchers to present state-of-the-art research and development on the strategic management of the manufacturing value chain' in the broadest sense. The objectives of Strategic Management of the Manufacturing Value Chain are: To provide insights into potential strategies, methods, tools and techniques which could facilitate competitiveness through innovation agility and partnership. To explore the use of enabling technologies, such as IT, in meeting the challenges of the 21st century. To provide practical case studies which demonstrate the use of new approaches to the generation and management of value in manufacturing. Strategic Managementof the Manufacturing Value Chain is suitable as a secondary text for graduate-level courses of management and manufacturing, and as a reference for researchers and practitioners in industry, commerce and government.

This book provides an overview of data mining methods demonstrated by software. Knowledge management involves application of human knowledge (epistemology) with the technological advances of our current society (computer systems) and big data, both in terms of collecting data and in analyzing it. We see three types of analytic tools. Descriptive analytics focus on reports of what has happened. Predictive analytics extend statistical and/or artificial intelligence to provide forecasting capability. It also includes classification modeling. Diagnostic analytics can apply analysis to sensor input to direct control systems automatically. Prescriptive analytics applies quantitative models to optimize systems, or at least to identify improved systems. Data mining includes descriptive and predictive modeling. Operations research includes all three. This book focuses on descriptive analytics. The book seeks to provide simple explanations and demonstration of some descriptive tools. This second edition provides more examples of big data impact, updates the content on visualization, clarifies some points, and expands coverage of association rules and cluster analysis. Chapter 1 gives an overview in the context of knowledge management. Chapter 2 discusses some basic software support to data visualization. Chapter 3 covers fundamentals of market basket analysis, and Chapter 4 provides demonstration of RFM modeling, a basic marketing data mining tool. Chapter 5 demonstrates association rule mining. Chapter 6 is a more in-depth coverage of cluster analysis. Chapter 7 discusses link analysis. Models are demonstrated using business related data. The style of the book is intended to be descriptive, seeking to explain how methods work, with some citations, but without deep scholarly reference. The data sets and software are all selected for widespread availability and access by any reader with computer links.

In this groundbreaking book, two acknowledged experts explore the underlying principles of systems integration, and, with the help of numerous case studies show IT managers, systems analysts, and project managers how to apply those principles to solving complex business problems. The authors reveal the linkages between business processes and how they can be supported in enterprise-wide integrated systems. Rather than review specific products and tools, the authors use real-life examples to provides readers with a practical understanding of integrated system architectures and how they function within the framework of an Enterprise Planning System.

The Internet is already more widely deployed than any other computing system in history and continues to grow rapidly. New technologies, including high speed wide area network and improved software support for distribution, promise to make the Internet much more useful for general purpose distributed computing in the future. Web Information Systems is dedicated to the new era of information systems on web environments, due to not only the growing popularity of the web technology but also the roles that web technology play in modern information systems. The major elements of web information systems include web semantics, XML technologies, web mining and querying, web-based information systems, information extraction, and web semantics.

This open access book explores the digital transformation of small and rural towns, in particular, how to measure the evolution and development of digital towns. In addition to access to resources, competition from urban and global markets, and population trends, rural communities present lesser access and use of digital technologies and have lower digital competencies and skills than their urban counterparts. Consequently, they experience less beneficial outcomes from increased digitalisation than urban areas. This book defines what a digital town is and explores digitalisation from the perspective of the four basic economic sectors in towns - individuals and households, businesses, the public sector, and civil society - and three types of enabling infrastructure - digital connectivity, education, and governance. Particular attention is paid to how digitalisation efforts are measured by intergovernmental and international organisations for each sector and enabling infrastructure. The book concludes with a Digital Town Readiness Framework that offers local communities, policymakers, and scholars an initial set of indicators upon which to develop digital town initiatives, and measure progress. For those ready to embrace the opportunity, this book is a pathfinder on the road to a more equitable and impactful digital society and digital economy.

Three years ago, the first Liquid Legal book compelled the legal profession to reassess its identity and to aspire to become a strategic partner for corporate executives as well as for clients. It also led to the foundation of the Liquid Legal Institute (LLI) - an association that sparks innovation and drives collaboration in the legal industry. This second Liquid Legal book builds on the LLI's progress and on the lessons learned by a legal community that has moved beyond focusing purely on LegalTech. It not only presents an outlook on how legal professionals will operate in the future, but also allows readers to develop a genuine understanding of the value of digitalization, standardization and new methodologies. Further, the book outlines a Common Legal Platform (CLP) and makes it the common point of departure for every author, offering inspiring insights from a wide range of forward-thinking experts who are all invested in driving new thinking within the legal ecosystem. The book also features "Liquid Legal Waves," which provide links between the various articles, connecting concrete ideas, practical solutions and specific topics and putting them into perspective, and so creating a true network of ideas for readers. A must read, this book is vibrant proof of the power of sharing, collaboration and coopetition, helping the legal profession to shape its digital future and revitalize its relevance while retaining a focus on the human lawyer.

This concise yet comprehensive one-volume guide, the first to encompass the interrelated functions of information and records management, is designed to meet the needs of office records and information decision-makers, planners, and administrators. Focusing equally on theory and practice, it offers complete instruction on how to assess an organization's systeM's requirements, plan and develop an information and records management system, select vendors and equipment, set the system in motion, and use it effectively. Emphasizing the importance of the systeM's long-term effectiveness, the author provides guidelines on monitoring procedures, keeping abreast on industry and information-processing trends, and avoiding obsolescence. He includes many useful examples, forms, and other illustrative materials reflecting current business practice.

This book combines, for the first time, the operations management and operations research concepts in lean and agile supply chain management (SCM) for achieving decreased uncertainty, increased productivity, and sustainability through the use of quality engineering techniques (QETs). The book serves as a beneficial supplementary read for supply chain management and logistics courses in operations management/operations research for industrial engineering or management departments as the book uses practical examples of QET applications in SCM in a variety of industries, such as manufacturing, international shipping, and services. By reading this book, a wide range of audiences from general readers to students in industrial engineering or management fields will learn practical skills that can be utilized in the application of quality engineering techniques in lean and agile SCM.

In an article for Wired Magazine in 2006, Jeff Howe defined crowdsourcing as an idea for outsourcing a task that is traditionally performed by a single employee to a large group of people in the form of an open call. Since then, by modifying crowdsourcing into different forms, some of the most successful new companies on the market have used this idea to make people's lives easier and better. On the other hand, software testing has long been recognized as a time-consuming and expensive activity. Mobile application testing is especially difficult, largely due to compatibility issues: a mobile application must work on devices with different operating systems (e.g. iOS, Android), manufacturers (e.g. Huawei, Samsung) and keypad types (e.g. virtual keypad, hard keypad). One cannot be 100% sure that, just because a tested application works well on one device, it will run smoothly on all others.Crowdsourced testing is an emerging paradigm that can improve the cost-effectiveness of software testing and accelerate the process, especially for mobile applications. It entrusts testing tasks to online crowdworkers whose diverse testing devices/contexts, experience, and skill sets can significantly contribute to more reliable, cost-effective and efficient testing results. It has already been adopted by many software organizations, including Google, Facebook, Amazon and Microsoft. This book provides an intelligent overview of crowdsourced testing research and practice. It employs machine learning, data mining, and deep learning techniques to process the data generated during the crowdsourced testing process, to facilitate the management of crowdsourced testing, and to improve the quality of crowdsourced testing.

The production and consumption of information and communication technologies (or ICTs) are becoming deeply embedded within our societies. The influence and implications of this have an impact at a macro level, in the way our governments, economies, and businesses operate, andat a micro level in our everyday lives. This handbook is about the many challenges presented by ICTs. It sets out an intellectual agenda that examines the implications of ICTs for individuals, organizations, democracy, and the economy. Explicity interdisciplinary, and combining empirical research with theoretical work, it is organised around four themes covering the knowledge economy; organizational dynamics, strategy, and design; governance and democracy; and culture, community and new media literacies. It provides a comprehensive resource for those working in the social sciences, and in the physical sciences and engineering fields, with leading contemporary research informed principally by the disciplines of anthropology, economics, philosophy, politics, and sociology.

E-government faces huge challenges in achieving interoperability and integration, taking into account differences in laws, regulations, services, administrative processes and languages across regions and countries. On the other hand, issues like service, data and process integration have been researched by the Semantic Web community for several years now, and in the last two to three years we have witnessed the first applications of semantic technologies in real, operational e-government systems in both Europe and the US which address exactly these challenges.

With this book, the editors present the latest research results on how to use semantic technologies in order to improve or even revolutionize the use of ICT in public administration systems. The contributions are organized into three parts: architectures and process integration, ontologies and interoperability, and portals and user interactions. They give a broad overview of how semantic technologies have been applied in different e-government projects funded from the European program for ICT Research and Development, and they cover a wide spectrum of semantic technologies such as development of domain and service ontologies, semantic enhancements of business process models, semantic Service-Oriented Architectures (SOAs) based on Semantic Web Services (SWS) frameworks, and ontology-based knowledge management.

In this volume, researchers of Semantic Web technologies will find a wealth of challenging real-world scenarios to stimulate new fields of research, while developers of e-government systems as well as other stakeholders in public administration will appreciate the detailed presentations and discussions of numerous applications in areas such as e-government portals, personalization of Web-based public services, or integration and orchestration of public administration processes.

Organisational Semiotics occupies an important niche in the research community of human communication and information systems. It opens up new ways of understanding the functioning of information and information resources in organised behavior.

Coordination And Communication Using Signs: Studies in Organisational Semiotics is a cutting-edge volume that bridges the gap between the technical and social aspects of information systems and information technology. The chapters in the book are divided into two major sections. The first section deals with Communication and Pragmatics, and Organisational Systems. In this section the following topics are examined:

• the semiotic framework and natural language;
• coordination and communication using natural language and other artifacts in a real-life setting;
• substantive-level issues of information systems and business processes from several theoretical perspectives;
• language as action;
• communication quality in the context of systems and business processes;
• organisational action and Greimas' semiotics.

Section Two concentrates on organisational systems, which may or may not include a computer system as a component and examines the following topics:

• semiotic strategies and semiotic models of organisational structures;
• the impact of information technology with instructive case studies;
• the impact of information technology with a particular focus on sense-making in the work floor context;
• the design of computer information systems;
• improving the design quality of agent-based information systems;
• the design ofinformation systems, in terms of capacity, and data scheme.

All the chapters in the volume have been submitted to a review process of discussants and peer reviews.

This book features the latest research in the area of immersive technologies, presented at the 5th International Augmented and Virtual Reality Conference, held in Munich, Germany in 2019. Bridging the gap between academia and industry, it presents the state of the art in augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) technologies and their applications in various industries such as marketing, education, healthcare, tourism, events, fashion, entertainment, retail and the gaming industry. The volume is a collection of research papers by prominent AR and VR scholars from around the globe. Covering the most significant topics in the field of augmented and virtual reality and providing the latest findings, it is of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

This book presents the many facets, concepts and theories that have influenced knowledge management and the state of practice concerning strategy, organization, systems and economics. The second edition updates the material to cover the most recent developments in ICT-supported knowledge management. It also provides a more coverage of its theoretical foundation including a new account of knowledge work, discusses the potentials and challenges of process-oriented knowledge management, adds a new chapter on modelling that plays an important role in knowledge management initiatives and contrasts architectures for centralized and distributed or peer-to-peer knowledge management systems.

The Mind under the Axioms reviews two basic ingredients of our understanding of human decisions - conative aspects (preferences) and cognitive aspects (beliefs). These ingredients are axiomatized in modern decision theory in the view to obtain a formally and empirically tractable representation of the decision-maker. The main issue developed in this book is the connection between realistic and testable psychological features and the descriptive component of abstract axioms of rationality. It addresses three main topics for which the interaction between axiomatization and psychology leads to potential new developments in experimental decision-theory and puts strictures on the standard revealed preference methodology prevailing in that field. The possibility of a cardinal representation of preferences is discussed. Different ways of accounting for incomplete preferences, and in which sense, are analysed. Finally, the conditions of separability between preferences and beliefs, such as prescribed by axioms of state-independence, are submitted to actual and potential tests. The book offers a bridge between the disciplines of decision-theory, psychology, and neuroeconomics. It is thus relevant for those, in psychology and cognitive sciences, who are sometimes put off by the high degree of formalism and abstraction in decision-theory, that seems to lie beyond the reach of psychological realism. It also aims to convince those in decision-theory for whom psychological realism and empirical testability should not constrain the modelling enterprise that conceptual clarification can come from attempted experimentation.

The transition to Industry 4.0, and the subsequent ubiquitous digitalization and integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the economic system, has set the stage for a fundamental change - one towards forming a cyber economy: a type of economy in which humans are economic subjects who interact with or are confronted with AI. This book examines these interactions and specifically analyzes the overall effects of digitalization on the workplace, and on the economic system of the future. Scholars from a diverse range of fields address both the challenges and opportunities of using AI in business sectors, as well as the role of people dealing with digital channels. In closing, the book discusses the need to, and options for, training and educating the labor force in the digital age.

The cultural sector plays an important role in sustainable economic development and creates economic activities, opportunities for entrepreneurship and jobs, adding to the attractiveness of cities and contributing to the development of tourism. The Cultural Sector and Sustainable Economic Development: Innovation and the Creative Economy in European Cities offers both a theoretical and practical analysis of the contemporary approach to culture and innovation, with special emphasis on the relationships among culture, innovation and the economy. Sustainable development, itself, balances environmental protection, culture, social progress, the economy and stability today and for the future. The book's key theme is the role and possibility of culture as a laboratory, with a strong supporting subtext on innovative practice. The text provides an eclectic mix of possibilities that reinforce and underscore the full innovative and complex potentials of culture. It is a cross-disciplinary volume presenting case studies that cover the main theme of cultural ecosystem in a very broad sense, highlighting the relationships that could lead to a sustainable system where economy and culture are the main players. It proposes and maps the European perspective of urban cultural development and suggests that the successes and challenges of European cities under consideration may offer guidance on best practices for urban development in other distant cultural contexts. This book is written in such a way that it can be used as a summary for a cultural professional, a reference text for an academic or for actors in local development and cultural policy at European, national and local levels.

This book studies mathematical theories of machine learning. The first part of the book explores the optimality and adaptivity of choosing step sizes of gradient descent for escaping strict saddle points in non-convex optimization problems. In the second part, the authors propose algorithms to find local minima in nonconvex optimization and to obtain global minima in some degree from the Newton Second Law without friction. In the third part, the authors study the problem of subspace clustering with noisy and missing data, which is a problem well-motivated by practical applications data subject to stochastic Gaussian noise and/or incomplete data with uniformly missing entries. In the last part, the authors introduce an novel VAR model with Elastic-Net regularization and its equivalent Bayesian model allowing for both a stable sparsity and a group selection.

Business schools have been criticized for several things, such as lacking relevance, a too weak ethics orientation, dated paradigms, or commercialization. Simultaneously, there has been much positive change and accelerated dynamics toward forming future-ready companies and graduates. This book outlines how to better understand and master the digital transformation challenge. It is essential that business school deans, program directors, and faculty members embrace new opportunities to bring the UN-backed Principles of Responsible Management Education (PRME) to life successfully. Part of the Humanism in Business series, this book constitutes a valuable resource for leaders in universities and business schools, as well as individual faculty members aspiring to optimize how they respond to digital transformation. It can also be of use to those studying responsible management education, leadership and business ethics more generally.

This book takes an in-depth look at the economics of digital transformation. Presenting a variety of perspectives from experts, it deals with the socioeconomic changes associated with the digital transformation of production systems. The chapters also address the impacts of digital transformation on the sustainable functioning of socioeconomic and environmental systems. Select chapters also investigate the consequences of adopting intelligent learning systems, both in terms of replacing the human labor force. and their effects on the smart digital management and security of cities, places, and people. Lastly, chapters discuss important questions regarding innovations leading to sustainable change.

Exploring the Cloud Computing (CC) commercial landscape as it matures; this book asserts that the key ingredient in sustaining the Software as a Service (SaaS) business model is subscription renewal. Chronicling the evolution and future trajectory of the CC concept, the authors examine the new paradigm it is creating for the distribution of computer software applications among business-to-business (B2B) clients. CC enabled SaaS has been fundamentally changing the revenue expectations and business model for the application software industry, and impacting on how SaaS providers pursue, acquire and retain B2B clients. Securing SaaS subscription renewal is critical to the survival and prosperity of this business as attrition can have a significant impact on the financial viability of SaaS businesses based on this model. Focusing on the B2B client and the SaaS industry dependency on renewal subscriptions delivered through the CC channel, the primary research presented in this book seeks to examine the key drivers behind the B2B SaaS subscription renewal decision and, in doing so, to explore the recurring revenue framework for the Cloud SaaS business.