This book develops, evaluates and refines a cloud service relationship theory that explains how cloud users' uncertainties arise in these relationships and how they can be mitigated. To that end, the book employs principal-agent theory and the concepts of bounded rationality and social embeddedness. Beyond advancing IS research, the findings presented can greatly benefit governments, IT departments and IT providers, helping them to better understand cloud service relationships and to adjust their cloud service strategies accordingly.

Today s global business environments drive companies to be more technology dependent, and to remain competitive, firms need to introduce or adopt a new technology to business. In order to achieve a successful integration with maximum return on investment, companies need a systematic approach that accommodates a comprehensive course of action of technology integration.

"Technology Integration to Business Practical Methods and Case Studies" suggests a business-driven holistic approach of technology integration that consists of several steps. First, companies should examine the current state, issues, benefits, and obstacles of technology integration in conjunction with their competitive business strategy and operational capability. Second, firms should investigate new, emerging business technologies as to how those technologies can contribute to improve the business. Third, with the technology integration needs identified, companies should complete preparatory tasks before actual implementation, such as, business process analysis, technology assessment, technology provider investigation, business case development, and cost-benefit analysis. Fourth, because the nature of technology integration project involves many stakeholders in global locations, firms should use effective project management knowledge from project initiation, through planning, execution, control, to close.

Students will learn real-world technology integration processes in industry settings and become more prepared for industrial careers. Practitioners will find thorough procedures and methods that are useful in practice to improve business performance. Realistic examples for manufacturing, logistics, and supply chain management application domains give the reader practical implications for the methods presented. "

While implementing IS and IT in support of their business strategies, companies are looking for ways to bridge the gap between their competitive position and technological investment, including ways to use this investment to the advantage of the organization. Critical Reflections on Information Systems: A Systemic Approach faces this challenge by offering ways to incorporate IT into such organizations while also successfully giving the company an edge over its competitors.

In the mid 1990s, Tim Berners-Lee had the idea of developing the World Wide Web into a "Semantic Web", a web of information that could be interpreted by machines in order to allow the automatic exploitation of data, which until then had to be done by humans manually. One of the first people to research topics related to the Semantic Web was Professor Rudi Studer. From the beginning, Rudi drove projects like ONTOBROKER and On-to-Knowledge, which later resulted in W3C standards such as RDF and OWL. By the late 1990s, Rudi had established a research group at the University of Karlsruhe, which later became the nucleus and breeding ground for Semantic Web research, and many of today's well-known research groups were either founded by his disciples or benefited from close cooperation with this think tank. In this book, published in celebration of Rudi's 60th birthday, many of his colleagues look back on the main research results achieved during the last 20 years. Under the editorship of Dieter Fensel, once one of Rudi's early PhD students, an impressive list of contributors and contributions has been collected, covering areas like Knowledge Management, Ontology Engineering, Service Management, and Semantic Search. Overall, this book provides an excellent overview of the state of the art in Semantic Web research, by combining historical roots with the latest results, which may finally make the dream of a "Web of knowledge, software and services" come true.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 8.1 Working Conference on Method Engineering, ME 2011, held in Paris, France, in April 2011. The 13 revised full papers and 6 short papers presented together with the abstracts of two keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 30 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on situated method engineering, method engineering foundations, customized methods, tools for method engineering, new trends to build methods, and method engineering services.

The essence of decision-aiding software is that it consists of various forms of microcomputer programming designed to enable users to process a set of (1) goals to be achieved, (2) alternatives available for achieving them, and (3) relations between goals and alternatives in order to choose the best alternative, combination, allocation, or predictive decision-rule. Benefits from using decision-aiding software include (1) being more explicit about goals to be achieved, alternatives available for achieving them, and relations between goals and alternatives; (2) being stimulated to think of more goals, alternatives, and relations than one would otherwise be likely to do; (3) being prepared to handle multiple goals, alternatives, and relations without getting confused and without feeling the need to resort to a single composite goal or a single go/no-go alternative; (4) being encouraged to experiment with changes in the inputs into one's thinking to see how one's conclusions are affected; and (5) being better able to achieve or exceed one's goals when choosing among alternatives or allocating scarce resources.

There are five parts to the book covering: (1) a broad overview of decision-aiding packages, including criteria for evaluating them; (2) approaches that are based on management science and operations research, including linear programming and decision trees; (3) spreadsheet-based software, generally with goals on the columns, alternatives on the rows, relations in the cells, overall totals for each alternative at the far right, and a capability for indicating how the totals would be altered as a result of changes in the inputs; (4) expert systems software including rule-based and knowledge-based expert systems; and (5) general applications of decision-aiding software and a discussion of the increasing utilization of such software.

This book presents a collection of the latest research in the area of immersive technologies, presented at the International Augmented and Virtual Reality Conference 2018 in Manchester, UK, and showcases how augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) are transforming the business landscape. Innovations in this field are seen as providing opportunities for businesses to offer their customers unique services and experiences. The papers gathered here advance the state of the art in AR/VR technologies and their applications in various industries such as healthcare, tourism, hospitality, events, fashion, entertainment, retail, education and gaming. The volume collects contributions by prominent computer and social sciences experts from around the globe. Addressing the most significant topics in the field of augmented and virtual reality and sharing the latest findings, it will be of interest to academics and practitioners alike.

Economies around the globe have evolved into being largely service-oriented economies. Consumers no longer just want a printer or a car, they rather ask for a printing service or a mobility service. In addition, service-oriented organizations increasingly exploit new devices, technologies and infrastructures. Agility is the ability to deal with such changing requirements and environments. Agile ways of working embrace change as a positive force and harness it to the organization's competitive advantage. The approach described in this book focuses on the notion of a service as a piece of functionality that offers value to its customers. Instead of solely looking at agility in the context of system or software development, agility is approached in a broader context. The authors illustrate three kinds of agility that can be found in an agile enterprise: business, process and system agility. These three types of agility reinforce each other and establish the foundation for the agile enterprise. Architecture, patterns, models, and all of the best practices in system development contribute to agile service development and building agile applications. This book addresses two audiences. On the one hand, it aims at agile and architecture practitioners who are looking for more agile ways of working in designing and building business services or who are interested in extending and improving their agile methods by using models and model-based architectures. On the other hand, it addresses students of (enterprise) architecture and software development or service science courses, both in computer science and in business administration.

This book offers hands-on statistical tools for business professionals by focusing on the practical application of a single-equation regression. The authors discuss commonly applied econometric procedures, which are useful in building regression models for economic forecasting and supporting business decisions. A significant part of the book is devoted to traps and pitfalls in implementing regression analysis in real-world scenarios. The book consists of nine chapters, the final two of which are fully devoted to case studies. Today's business environment is characterised by a huge amount of economic data. Making successful business decisions under such data-abundant conditions requires objective analytical tools, which can help to identify and quantify multiple relationships between dozens of economic variables. Single-equation regression analysis, which is discussed in this book, is one such tool. The book offers a valuable guide and is relevant in various areas of economic and business analysis, including marketing, financial and operational management.

This book sheds new light on the current and future challenges faced by cities, and presents approaches, options and solutions enabled by Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) in the smart city context. By focusing on sustainability objectives within a rapidly changing social, economic, environmental and technological setting, it explores a variety of planning challenges faced by contemporary cities and the power of smart city developments in terms of providing innovative tools, approaches, methodologies and technologies to help cities cope with these challenges. Key issues addressed include smart city (e-) planning and (e-)participation; smart data management to facilitate decision-making processes in cities and insular communities on a variety of topics; smart and sustainable management aspects of climate change, water scarcity, mobility, energy, infrastructure, tourism, blue growth, risk assessment; etc. The book presents current and potential pathways and applications for the evolution of smart cities and communities, taking into consideration the unique problems and opportunities emanating from their specific geographical location. The case study examples mainly concern small and medium-sized cities and communities as well as insular areas in the Mediterranean region, while also incorporating lessons learned from other parts of the world. Their focus is on the specific opportunities and threats emerging in these urban and insular environments, which are characterized by their role as globally known tourist destinations, their coastal or port character, and unique cultural resources, as well as the high rated vulnerability in very many sustainability respects (social, economic, biodiversity, urbanization, migration, poverty, etc.) to be found in the Mediterranean region at large

This book presents intellectual, innovative, information technologies (I3-technologies) based on logical and probabilistic (LP) risk models. The technologies presented here consider such models for structurally complex systems and processes with logical links and with random events in economics and technology.
The volumedescribes the following components of risk management technologies: LP-calculus; classes of LP-models of risk and efficiency; procedures for different classes; special software for different classes; examples of applications; methods for the estimation of probabilities of events based on expert information.Also described area variety of training courses in these topics.
The classes of risk models treated here are: LP-modeling, LP-classification, LP-efficiency, and LP-forecasting. Particular attention is paid to LP-models of risk of failure to resolve difficult economic and technical problems. Amongst the discussed procedures of I3-technologies are the construction of LP-models, LP-identification of risk models; LP-risk analysis, LP-management and LP-forecasting of risk.
The book furtherconsiders LP-models of risk of invalidity of systems and processes in accordance with the requirements of ISO 9001-2008, LP-models of bank operational risks in accordance with the requirements of Basel-2, complex risk LP-models for preventing ammunition depot explosions, enterprise electric power supply systems, debugging tests of technical systems, etc. The book also considers LP-models of credit risks, securities portfolios, operational risks in banking, conteraction of bribes and corruption, etc.

A number of applications is given to show the effectiveness of risk management technologies. In addition, topics of lectures and practical computer exercises intended for a two-semester course Risk management technologies are suggested."

The book describes the emergence of big data technologies and the role of Spark in the entire big data stack. It compares Spark and Hadoop and identifies the shortcomings of Hadoop that have been overcome by Spark. The book mainly focuses on the in-depth architecture of Spark and our understanding of Spark RDDs and how RDD complements big data's immutable nature, and solves it with lazy evaluation, cacheable and type inference. It also addresses advanced topics in Spark, starting with the basics of Scala and the core Spark framework, and exploring Spark data frames, machine learning using Mllib, graph analytics using Graph X and real-time processing with Apache Kafka, AWS Kenisis, and Azure Event Hub. It then goes on to investigate Spark using PySpark and R. Focusing on the current big data stack, the book examines the interaction with current big data tools, with Spark being the core processing layer for all types of data. The book is intended for data engineers and scientists working on massive datasets and big data technologies in the cloud. In addition to industry professionals, it is helpful for aspiring data processing professionals and students working in big data processing and cloud computing environments.

With the quantity and quality of available works in Information Systems (IS) research, it would seem advantageous to possess a concise list of exemplary works on IS research, in order to enable instructors of IS research courses to better prepare students to publish in IS venues. To that end, The Handbook of Information Systems Research provides a collection of works on a variety of topics related to IS research. This book provides a fresh perspective on issues related to IS research by providing chapters from world-renowned leaders in IS research along with chapters from relative newcomers who bring some interesting and often new perspectives to IS research. This book should serve as an excellent text for a graduate course on IS research methods.

The main focus of the book is institutional change in the Scandinavian model, with special emphasis on Norway. There are many reasons to pay closer attention to the Norwegian case when it comes to analyses of changes in the public sphere. In the country's political history, the arts and the media played a particular role in the processes towards sovereignty at the beginning of the 20th century. On a par with the other Scandinavian countries, Norway is in the forefront in the world in the distribution and uses of Internet technology. As an extreme case, the most corporatist society within the family of the "Nordic Model", it offers an opportunity both for intriguing case studies and for challenging and refining existing theory on processes of institutional change in media policy and cultural policy. It supplements two recent, important books on political economy in Scandinavia: Varieties of Liberalization and the New Politics of Social Solidarity (Kathleen Thelen, 2014), and The Political Construction of Business Interests (Cathie Jo Martin and Duane Swank, 2013). There are further reasons to pay particular attention to the Scandinavian, and more specifically the Norwegian cases: (i) They are to varying degrees neo-corporatist societies, characterized by ongoing bargaining over social and political reform processes. From a theoretical perspective this invites reflections which, to some extent, are at odds with the dominant conceptions of institutional change. Neither models of path dependency nor models of aggregate, incremental change focus on the continuous social bargaining over institutional change. (ii) Despite recent processes of liberalization, common to the Western world as a whole, corporatism implies a close connection between state, public sphere, cultural life, and religion. This also means that institutions are closely bundled, in an even stronger way than assumed for example in the Varieties of Capitalism literature. Furthermore, we only have scarce insight in the way the different spheres of corporatism are connected and interact. In the proposed edited volume we have collected historical-institutional case studies from a broad set of social fields (a detailed outline of contents and contributors is attached): * Critical assessments of Jurgen Habermas' theory of the public sphere * Can the public sphere be considered an institution? * The central position of the public sphere in social and political change in Norway * Digital transformations and effects of the growing PR industry on the public sphere * Institutionalization of social media in local politics and voluntary organizations * Legitimation work in the public sphere * freedom of expression and warning in the workplace * "Return of religion" to the public sphere, and its effects

This book provides extensive insight into the possibilities and challenges of XML in building new information management solutions in networked organizations. After a brief introduction to Web communication features and XML fundamentals, the book examines the benefits of adopting XML and illustrates various types of XML use: XML in document management; XML for data-centric and multimedia components; XML as a format for metadata, including metadata for the Semantic Web; and XML in support of data interchange between software applications and among organizations. The challenges of adopting XML in large-scale information management are also discussed. In addition, applications across a broad spectrum are examined and numerous case studies pertaining to the adoption of XML are presented. The book is particularly suitable for courses offered in Information Studies, Information Systems, or Information Technology. It also serves as an excellent practical guide for professionals in information management and provides important support material for courses in Computer Science and in Business.

Improved interoperability between public organizations as well as between public and private organizations is of critical importance to make electronic government more successful. ""E-Government Interoperability and Information Resource Integration: Frameworks for Aligned Development"" focuses on the integration of new technologies into digital government, generating new insights into e-government interoperability. This book will benefit systems designers, developers, and programmers in public and private software organizations who need a larger perspective of interoperability when solving technical problems.

This book addresses the impacts of various types of services such as infrastructure, platforms, software, and business processes that cloud computing and Big Data have introduced into business. Featuring chapters which discuss effective and efficient approaches in dealing with the inherent complexity and increasing demands in data science, a variety of application domains are covered. Various case studies by data management and analysis experts are presented in these chapters. Covered applications include banking, social networks, bioinformatics, healthcare, transportation and criminology. Highlighting the Importance of Big Data Management and Analysis for Various Applications will provide the reader with an understanding of how data management and analysis are adapted to these applications. This book will appeal to researchers and professionals in the field.

This book investigates the impact of production input factors on the market, consumer and producer energy demand characteristics in 30 industrial sectors for South Korea over the period 1980-2009, and for Japan over the period 1973-2006, with special emphasis placed on the effects of ICT investment on the demand for energy. A dynamic factor demand model is developed, accounting for the adjustment costs that are defined in terms of forgone output from current production. It addresses four key aspects of production and energy demand in manufacturing: first, it establishes the various relationships between different factors of production. Second, it investigates whether the energy demand in the industrial sectors in South Korea would be decreased or increased by substituting/complementing with other input factors such as ICT capital and labor. Third, it looks at sources of growth in the industrial sectors through decomposing the Divisia index based total factor productivity (TFP). Finally it provides appropriate policy recommendations based on these findings. The results of this study may provide industrial sectors' stakeholders and environmental and industrial policy makers with a flexible model that has the capacity to assess outcomes of various policies under certain scenarios. The factor demand methodology described in this book is very advanced and up-to-date. It can be used when teaching advanced graduate courses and in empirically advanced research. Therefore, it is highly relevant in both teaching as a main or supplementary text and in particular as a reference handbook in conducting empirical research. The focus on ICT effects on energy use makes this book an important addition to the existing literature on industrial development.

This book presents a collection of studies that have applied analytical methods to improve preparedness, planning, and a faster response to A&E and public health emergencies like epidemic and disease outbreak. It explores the application of quantitative Operational Research techniques such as Mathematical Modelling and Optimization, Maximum Likelihood Estimation, Multiple-Criteria Decision Analysis, Discrete-event Simulation, Data Mining, and Bayesian Decision Models. These techniques have been used for better management of emergency care, including first responders, ambulance services, A&E departments, and mass immunisation centres. This volume focuses on planning at the operational level whereas volume 2 focuses mainly on planning at the strategic level. The OR Essentials series presents a unique cross-section of high quality research work fundamental to understanding contemporary issues and research across a range of Operational Research (OR) topics. It brings together some of the best research papers from the highly respected journals of the Operational Research Society, also published by Palgrave Macmillan.

This book presents cutting edge research on the development of analytics in travel and tourism. It introduces new conceptual frameworks and measurement tools, as well as applications and case studies for destination marketing and management. It is divided into five parts: Part one on travel demand analytics focuses on conceptualizing and implementing travel demand modeling using big data. It illustrates new ways to identify, generate and utilize large quantities of data in tourism demand forecasting and modeling. Part two focuses on analytics in travel and everyday life, presenting recent developments in wearable computers and physiological measurement devices, and the implications for our understanding of on-the-go travelers and tourism design. Part three embraces tourism geoanalytics, correlating social media and geo-based data with tourism statistics. Part four discusses web-based and social media analytics and presents the latest developments in utilizing user-generated content on the Internet to understand a number of managerial problems. The final part is a collection of case studies using web-based and social media analytics, with examples from the Sochi Olympics on Twitter, leveraging online reviews in the hotel industry, and evaluating destination communications and market intelligence with online hotel reviews. The chapters in this section collectively describe a range of different approaches to understanding market dynamics in tourism and hospitality.

In a world moving towards services, driving service productivity is a central challenge for leaders and members of all types of organisations: for service businesses there is a clear need to be "productive", but it is far less clear what this exactly means. In this book, we invite you on a journey that explores the ways, tools and options for driving service productivity. We take an innovator's perspectives and look at the tricky challenge of service productivity as a landscape of options for designing the future of services. Case examples, from the airport, hotel, healthcare, and professional service industry, offer insights in the methods used and approaches taken in business practice. Research results provide food for thought and valuable advice on the path towards superior service productivity. Throughout the book we also listen to the views and advices of interviewed experts from academia as well as business practice on how to drive service productivity. A forecast on how service productivity and service innovation might evolve in the future provides us - and hopefully you as a reader - with the necessary food for thought to develop our own understanding of driving service productivity in different business settings. Overall, this book is not a traditional "academic product" that summarises the views of a few, but a co-created offering that profited enormously from the contributions of so many.

This book is intended to spark a discourse on, and contribute to finding a clear consensus in, the debate between conceptualizing a knowledge strategy and planning a knowledge strategy. It explores the complex relationship between the notions of knowledge and strategy in the business context, one that is of practical importance to companies. After reviewing the extant literature, the book shows how the concept of knowledge strategies can be seen as a new perspective for exploring business strategies. It proposes a new approach that clarifies how planned and emergent knowledge strategies allow companies to make projections into the uncertain and unpredictable future that dominates today's economy.

This book on Infectious Disease Informatics (IDI) and biosurveillance is intended to provide an integrated view of the current state of the art, identify technical and policy challenges and opportunities, and promote cross-disciplinary research that takes advantage of novel methodology and what we have learned from innovative applications. This book also fills a systemic gap in the literature by emphasizing informatics driven perspectives (e.g., information system design, data standards, computational aspects of biosurveillance algorithms, and system evaluation). Finally, this book attempts to reach policy makers and practitioners through the clear and effective communication of recent research findings in the context of case studies in IDI and biosurveillance, providing "hands-on" in-depth opportunities to practitioners to increase their understanding of value, applicability, and limitations of technical solutions. This book collects the state of the art research and modern perspectives of distinguished individuals and research groups on cutting-edge IDI technical and policy research and its application in biosurveillance. The contributed chapters are grouped into three units. Unit I provides an overview of recent biosurveillance research while highlighting the relevant legal and policy structures in the context of IDI and biosurveillance ongoing activities. It also identifies IDI data sources while addressing information collection, sharing, and dissemination issues as well as ethical considerations. Unit II contains survey chapters on the types of surveillance methods used to analyze IDI data in the context of public health and bioterrorism. Specific computational techniques covered include: text mining, time series analysis, multiple data streams methods, ensembles of surveillance methods, spatial analysis and visualization, social network analysis, and agent-based simulation. Unit III examines IT and decision support for public health event response and bio-defense. Practical lessons learned in developing public health and biosurveillance systems, technology adoption, and syndromic surveillance for large events are discussed. The goal of this book is to provide an understandable interdisciplinary IDI and biosurveillance reference either used as a standalone textbook or reference for students, researchers, and practitioners in public health, veterinary medicine, biostatistics, information systems, computer science, and public administration and policy.

"Socio-Technical Knowledge Management: Studies and Initiatives" connects knowledge management theory to knowledge management practice, allowing the empirical research presented to resolve challenges. It portrays knowledge management issues approached in a holistic and systematic manner which provides a better understanding of the benefits and limitations of various socio-technical knowledge management initiatives.

This book is dedicated to population health management and how it can be used to improve the health care and outcomes for patients with poly chronic conditions. The book uses an integrated approach guided by a transdisciplinary orientation that incorporates both a macro and a micro-theoretical framework for promoting population health management. Thus, policy decision makers can prioritize how limited resources can be used to optimize health service needs of the chronically ill and disabled in the nation as well as in the globe. The book also identifies appropriate applications of health information technology that can facilitate interoperability, data sharing and effective communication to ensure that applicable knowledge is derived from the available information. Multiple implications of population health management for poly chronic conditions suggest that concerted efforts in promoting preventive strategies can yield numerous benefits. Continuous improvement efforts through impact evaluation and a commitment to the adoption of the health information technology resources needed are also critical aspects of this process. Patients with poly chronic conditions have complex needs and are often high-utilizers of health services. Great potential exists to improve the health and health care of these individuals through improved coordination integrating multiple domains of the population health management approach. Population Health Management is needed now more than ever due to the current challenges facing the health care system that were not present in previous decades. This book points out strategic directions suggested by empirical evidence and experts' opinions on innovative care management solutions observed in many advanced countries.