For many years companies have been investing in enterprise systems and IT initiatives but they are now struggling to achieve the desired results. It takes a long time to make the best of your enterprise systems so businesses must stop looking for the next technology 'silver bullet' and instead maximize the value of existing IT investments

Social media has received considerable attention, and many potential benefits, as well as concerns, are now being discussed. This book explores how social media can successfully support business processes in marketing, sales and service in the context of customer relationship management (CRM). It presents the fundamentals of Social CRM and shows how small and large companies alike have implemented it. In turn, the book presents analytic and operational software tools that offer features for enhancing and streamlining interactions with customers. The book concludes with an overview of essential design areas that businesses need to bear in mind when introducing social media into their CRM strategies. In this regard, it also points out key success factors, limitations, and data protection aspects.

An ontology is a formal description of concepts and relationships that can exist for a community of human and/or machine agents. The notion of ontologies is crucial for the purpose of enabling knowledge sharing and reuse. The Handbook on Ontologies provides a comprehensive overview of the current status and future prospectives of the field of ontologies considering ontology languages, ontology engineering methods, example ontologies, infrastructures and technologies for ontologies, and how to bring this all into ontology-based infrastructures and applications that are among the best of their kind. The field of ontologies has tremendously developed and grown in the five years since the first edition of the "Handbook on Ontologies." Therefore, its revision includes 21 completely new chapters as well as a major re-working of 15 chapters transferred to this second edition.

As digitization continues to bring rapid changes to businesses, companies must remain agile in order to comply with changing regulations and maintain governance and compliance while achieving its business objectives. To achieve this agility, IT staff within these companies must be able to respond quickly to changing business needs while maintaining existing and efficient infrastructure. Strategic IT Governance and Performance Frameworks in Large Organizations is an essential reference source that provides emerging frameworks and models that implement an efficient strategic IT governance in organizations and discusses the effects these policies have on the business as a whole. Featuring six international case studies from large organizations, this title covers topics such as IT management, security policy, and organizational governance, and is ideally designed for IT specialists, academicians, researchers, policymakers, and managers.

This book deals with the issues of modelling management processes of information technology and IT projects while its core is the model of information technology management and its component models (contextual, local) describing initial processing and the maturity capsule as well as a decision-making system represented by a multi-level sequential model of IT technology selection, which acquires a fuzzy rule-based implementation in this work.

In terms of applicability, this work may also be useful for diagnosing applicability of IT standards in evaluation of IT organizations. The results of this diagnosis might prove valid for those preparing new standards so that apart from their own visions they could, to an even greater extent, take into account the capabilities and needs of the leaders of project and manufacturing teams.

The book is intended for IT professionals using the ITIL, COBIT and TOGAF standards in their work. Students of computer science and management who are interested in the issue of IT project and technology management are also likely to benefit from this study. For young students of IT, it can serve as a source of knowledge in the field of information technology evaluation. This book is also designed for specialists in modelling socio-technical systems.

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This book contains the refereed proceedings of the 2nd Advances in Business Research International Conference (ABRIC2016). Chapters in the book address the theme of Advancing Knowledge, Connecting the World, reflecting on the emerging issues in various business management fields and the interconnections of multiple disciplines for creating knowledge advancement. Papers were carefully reviewed and selected and grouped into four main themes: economic and finance, marketing and communications, management, and information technology in business. The book serves as a helpful resource for students and researchers of business management, especially in understanding issues and cases of business in emerging economies and markets.

Healthcare Informatics: Improving Efficiency and Productivity examines the complexities involved in managing resources in our healthcare system and explains how management theory and informatics applications can increase efficiencies in various functional areas of healthcare services. Delving into data and project management and advanced analytics, this book details and provides supporting evidence for the strategic concepts that are critical to achieving successful healthcare information technology (HIT), information management, and electronic health record (EHR) applications. This includes the vital importance of involving nursing staff in rollouts, engaging physicians early in any process, and developing a more receptive organizational culture to digital information and systems adoption. We owe it to ourselves and future generations to do all we can to make our healthcare systems work smarter, be more effective, and reach more people. The power to know is at our fingertips; we need only embrace it. -From the foreword by James H. Goodnight, PhD, CEO, SAS Bridging the gap from theory to practice, it discusses actual informatics applications that have been incorporated by various healthcare organizations and the corresponding management strategies that led to their successful employment. Offering a wealth of detail, it details several working projects, including: A computer physician order entry (CPOE) system project at a North Carolina hospital E-commerce self-service patient check-in at a New Jersey hospital The informatics project that turned a healthcare system's paper-based resources into digital assets Projects at one hospital that helped reduce excesses in length of stay, improved patient safety; and improved efficiency with an ADE alert system A healthcare system's use of algorithms to identify patients at risk for hepatitis Offering the guidance that healthcare specialists need to make use of various informatics platforms, this book provides the motivation and the proven methods that can be adapted and applied to any number of staff, patient, or regulatory concerns.

IT education, particularly at business colleges, is undergoing a transformation because of the emerging federated systems or enterprise-wide systems (ES). This follows a trend in industry, which uses complex software applications like SAP and others. This movement toward ES in industry has created major challenges for integrating ES into the classroom. ""Enterprise Systems Education in the 21st Century"" presents methods of reengineering business curricula in order to use ES solutions. It also helps ES vendors understand the higher education environment so they can support college and university programs. ""Enterprise Systems Education in the 21st Century"" acts as a platform for both educators and vendors to present solutions and experiences gained from the challenges of integrating ES into the business classroom.

This book presents and discusses the main strategic and organizational challenges posed by Big Data and analytics in a manner relevant to both practitioners and scholars. The first part of the book analyzes strategic issues relating to the growing relevance of Big Data and analytics for competitive advantage, which is also attributable to empowerment of activities such as consumer profiling, market segmentation, and development of new products or services. Detailed consideration is also given to the strategic impact of Big Data and analytics on innovation in domains such as government and education and to Big Data-driven business models. The second part of the book addresses the impact of Big Data and analytics on management and organizations, focusing on challenges for governance, evaluation, and change management, while the concluding part reviews real examples of Big Data and analytics innovation at the global level. The text is supported by informative illustrations and case studies, so that practitioners can use the book as a toolbox to improve understanding and exploit business opportunities related to Big Data and analytics.

Readings in Virtual Research Ethics: Issues and Controversies provides an in-depth look at the emerging field of online research and the corresponding ethical dilemmas associated with it. Issues related to traditional research ethics such as autonomy or respect for persons, justice, and beneficence are extended into the virtual realm and such areas as subject selection and recruitment, informed consent, privacy, ownership of data, and research with minors, among many others are explored in the media and contexts of email surveys and interviews, synchronous chat, virtual ethnography, asynchronous discussion lists, and newsgroups.

This book addresses the issue of smart and sustainable development in the Mediterranean (MED) region, a distinct part of the world, full of challenges and risks but also opportunities. Above all, the book focuses on smartening up small and medium-sized cities and insular communities, taking into account their geographical peculiarities, the pattern of MED urban settlements and the abundance of island complexes in the MED Basin. Taking for granted that sustainability in the MED is the overarching policy goal that needs to be served, the book explores different aspects of smartness in support of this goal's achievement. In this respect, evidence from concrete smart developments adopted by forerunners in the MED region is collected and analyzed; coupled with experiences gathered from successful, non-MED, examples of smart efforts in European countries. More specifically, current research and empirical results from MED urban environments are discussed, as well as findings from or concerning other parts of the world, which are of relevance to the MED region. The book's primary goal is to enable policymakers, planners and decision-making bodies to recognize the challenges and options available; and make to more informed policy decisions towards smart, sustainable, inclusive and resilient urban and regional futures in the MED.

Advanced Topics in Information Resources Management features the most current research findings in all aspects of information resources management. From successfully implementing technology change to understanding the human factors in IT utilization, this important volume addresses many of the managerial and organizational applications to and implications of information technology in organizations. Volume three will prove to be instrumental in the improvement and development of the theory and practice of information resources management while educating organizations on how they can benefit from and improve their information resources and all the tools utilized to gather, process, disseminate, and manage this valuable resource. *Note: This book is part of a new series entitled "Advanced Topics in "Information Resources Management." This book is Volume Three within this series (Vol. III, 2004).

Recent achievements in hardware and software development, such as multi-core CPUs and DRAM capacities of multiple terabytes per server, enabled the introduction of a revolutionary technology: in-memory data management. This technology supports the flexible and extremely fast analysis of massive amounts of enterprise data. Professor Hasso Plattner and his research group at the Hasso Plattner Institute in Potsdam, Germany, have been investigating and teaching the corresponding concepts and their adoption in the software industry for years. This book is based on an online course that was first launched in autumn 2012 with more than 13,000 enrolled students and marked the successful starting point of the openHPI e-learning platform. The course is mainly designed for students of computer science, software engineering, and IT related subjects, but addresses business experts, software developers, technology experts, and IT analysts alike. Plattner and his group focus on exploring the inner mechanics of a column-oriented dictionary-encoded in-memory database. Covered topics include - amongst others - physical data storage and access, basic database operators, compression mechanisms, and parallel join algorithms. Beyond that, implications for future enterprise applications and their development are discussed. Step by step, readers will understand the radical differences and advantages of the new technology over traditional row-oriented, disk-based databases. In this completely revised 2nd edition, we incorporate the feedback of thousands of course participants on openHPI and take into account latest advancements in hard- and software. Improved figures, explanations, and examples further ease the understanding of the concepts presented. We introduce advanced data management techniques such as transparent aggregate caches and provide new showcases that demonstrate the potential of in-memory databases for two diverse industries: retail and life sciences.

Reinhard Brandl proposes a method to derive estimates for the expected resource consumption of customer-oriented services during standard load tests. This facilitates the determination of usage-based cost allocation keys significantly. He implements the concept in a software tool kit, evaluates it in a set of experiments with multi-tier database applications, and analyzes how the method can be integrated into existing IT processes at the BMW Group.

This book examines agile approaches from a management perspective by focusing on matters of strategy, implementation, organization and people. It examines the turbulence of the marketplace and business environment in order to identify what role agile management has to play in coping with such change and uncertainty. Based on observations, personal experience and extensive research, it clearly identifies the fabric of the agile organization, helping managers to become agile leaders in an uncertain world. The book opens with a broad survey of agile strategies, comparing and contrasting some of the major methodologies selected on the basis of where they lie on a continuum of ceremony and formality, ranging from the minimalist technique-driven and software engineering focused XP, to the pragmatic product-project paradigm that is Scrum and its scaled counterpart SAFe (R), to the comparatively project-centric DSDM. Subsequently, the core of the book focuses on DSDM, owing to the method's comprehensive elaboration of program and project management practices. This work will chiefly be of interest to all those with decision-making authority within their organizations (e.g., senior managers, line managers, program, project and risk managers) and for whom topics such as strategy, finance, quality, governance and risk management constitute a daily aspect of their work. It will, however, also be of interest to those readers in advanced management or business administration courses (e.g., MBA, MSc), who wish to engage in the management of agile organizations and thus need to adapt their skills and knowledge accordingly.

While the web itself is about twenty years old, businesses are still impleme- ing the technology into the fabric of the business model. The background section will focus on defining the building blocks for the framework including defining the basic components of Web 1. 0 which focused on the presence and business transaction. The Web 2. 0 section will focus on defining the basic building blocks of customer interactions, while the final section will focus on a review the wine industry. 2. 1 Web 1. 0: Presence and Electronic Commerce The term Web 1. 0 emerged from the research around the development of Web 2. 0. Prior to this, researchers commonly referred to Web 1. 0 as Electronic C- merce or E-Business. Where as, web 1. 0 focused on a read only web interface, Web 2. 0 focuses on a read-write interface where value emerges from the contri- tion of a large volume of users. The Internet initially focused on the command and control of the information itself. Information was controlled by a relative small number of resources but distributed to a large number which spawned the massive growth of the web itself. Like television before it, the web allowed for the broadcasting of information to a large number of users. Initial web sites were built simply to communicate presence or provide information on the business - self. This component includes information like marketing materials, investor re- tions, employment opportunities, and product information.

This book offers readers essential orientation on cybersecurity safeguards, and first and foremost helps them find the right balance between financial expenditures and risk mitigation. This is achieved by pursuing a multi-disciplinary approach that combines well-founded methods from economics and the computer sciences. Established decision making techniques are embedded into a walk-through for the complete lifecycle of cybersecurity investments. Insights into the economic aspect of the costs and benefits of cybersecurity are supplemented by established and innovative economic indicators. Readers will find practical tools and techniques to support reasonable decision making in cybersecurity investments. Further, they will be equipped to encourage a common understanding using economic aspects, and to provide cost transparency for the senior management.

This book presents a systematic literature review of 156 published papers on business model innovation (BMI). The aim is to identify and integrate the different theoretical perspectives, analytical levels, and empirical contexts in order to deepen understanding of this complex phenomenon. The authors conduct an inductive thematic analysis based on an informal ontological classification that identifies 56 key themes. Within each theme, discussion focuses on thematic patterns, potential inconsistencies and debates, and future directions and opportunities for research. The book makes a number of significant contributions to the field. First, it offers a deeper understanding of the evolution of research on BMI through an ontological map that identifies the key thematic areas in the literature. Second, a multilevel model is developed that clarifies the concept of BMI by identifying its drivers, contingencies, and outcomes. Third, the authors identify clear and specific directions for further research and offer suggestions on research design, creating an informative road map for the future. The book will be of value both to scholars and researchers and to practitioners.

Creative problem solving (CPS) is a six-step process designed to help people systematically resolve nonroutine, ambiguous types of problems. Because most organizational problems tend to be nonroutine, skill in using CPS process can confer a significant competitive advantage. "Creative Problem Solving" gives training managers the information they need to develop and teach a course on CPS. VanGundy provides an overview of the process, elements of the creative climate needed to foster CPS and innovative thinking, creative thinking exercises designed to illustrate specific CPS principles, and easy-to-follow descriptions of proven idea-generated methods.

This edited volume is brought out from the contributions of the research papers presented in the International Conference on Data Science and Business Analytics (ICDSBA- 2017), which was held during September 23-25 2017 in ChangSha, China. As we all know, the field of data science and business analytics is emerging at the intersection of the fields of mathematics, statistics, operations research, information systems, computer science and engineering. Data science and business analytics is an interdisciplinary field about processes and systems to extract knowledge or insights from data. Data science and business analytics employ techniques and theories drawn from many fields including signal processing, probability models, machine learning, statistical learning, data mining, database, data engineering, pattern recognition, visualization, descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, prescriptive analytics, uncertainty modeling, big data, data warehousing, data compression, computer programming, business intelligence, computational intelligence, and high performance computing among others. The volume contains 55 contributions from diverse areas of Data Science and Business Analytics, which has been categorized into five sections, namely: i) Marketing and Supply Chain Analytics; ii) Logistics and Operations Analytics; iii) Financial Analytics. iv) Predictive Modeling and Data Analytics; v) Communications and Information Systems Analytics. The readers shall not only receive the theoretical knowledge about this upcoming area but also cutting edge applications of this domains.

Competitive intelligence uses public sources to obtain valuable information on competition and competitors. By using competitive intelligence aggressively and intelligently, corporations can obtain information on potential acquisition targets, markets, key personnel, the probable emergence of new products, or the financial strength or contracts of a competing firm. An absolutely indispensable playbook for anyone who has to compete during the information explosion.

"Martin Sikora, Editor, Mergers and AcquisitionS"

Competitive intelligence uses public sources to obtain valuable information on competition and competitors. In an open society such as our own, businesses place a great deal of information in the public domain. By using competitive intelligence aggressively and intelligently, corporations can obtain information on potential acquisition targets, markets, key personnel, the probable emergence of new products, or the financial strength or contracts of a competing firm. In fact, the authors contend that as much as 90 percent of the information required to decide on a course of litigation, acquisitions, expansion, new product introduction, or financing, is available through competitive intelligence.

Information and Communication Technologies - Visions and Realities, based on Britain's Programme on Information and Communication Technologies (PICT), illuminates the social and economic implications of the digital revolution. The thirty contributors include such leading scholars as Walter Baer, Jay Blumler, Peter Cochrane, Rod Coombes, Bill Dutton, Chris Freeman, Nicholas Garnham, John Goddard, Kenneth Kraemer, Donald MacKenzie, Robin Mansell, Bill melody, Roger Silverstone, Robin Williams, and Steve Woolgar.

Three dominant forces worldwide are driving change today in our financial markets: competition, technology and regulation. But their collective impact in reshaping the markets, though they may be viewed individually as desirable or well-intentioned, is producing challenging results that are difficult to predict, hard to control and not easy to understand. Extreme market turbulence has underlined the key issues as much attention turns to the appropriate regulatory response. That is the backdrop for this thought-provoking book, emerging from a Baruch College Conference on equity market structure in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, and featuring contributions from an acclaimed panel of international scholars, policymakers, regulators, and industry leaders. The result presents emerging perspective and ideas that illuminate the dynamics of financial regulation today and into the future. The Zicklin School of Business Financial Markets Series presents the insights emerging from a sequence of conferences hosted by the Zicklin School at Baruch College for industry professionals, regulators, and scholars. Much more than historical documents, the transcripts from the conferences are edited for clarity, perspective and context; material and comments from subsequent interviews with the panelists and speakers are integrated for a complete thematic presentation. Each book is focused on a well delineated topic, but all deliver broader insights into the quality and efficiency of the U.S. equity markets and the dynamic forces changing them.

Forecasting is a crucial function for companies in the fashion industry, but for many real-life forecasting applications in the, the data patterns are notorious for being highly volatile and it is very difficult, if not impossible, to analytically learn about the underlying patterns. As a result, many traditional methods (such as pure statistical models) will fail to make a sound prediction. Over the past decade, advances in artificial intelligence and computing technologies have provided an alternative way of generating precise and accurate forecasting results for fashion businesses. Despite being an important and timely topic, there is currently an absence of a comprehensive reference source that provides up-to-date theoretical and applied research findings on the subject of intelligent fashion forecasting systems. This three-part handbook fulfills this need and covers materials ranging from introductory studies and technical reviews, theoretical modeling research, to intelligent fashion forecasting applications and analysis. This book is suitable for academic researchers, graduate students, senior undergraduate students and practitioners who are interested in the latest research on fashion forecasting.

Systems for Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) and Online Analytical Processing (OLAP) are currently separate. The potential of the latest technologies and changes in operational and analytical applications over the last decade have given rise to the unification of these systems, which can be of benefit for both workloads. Research and industry have reacted and prototypes of hybrid database systems are now appearing.

Benchmarks are the standard method for evaluating, comparing and supporting the development of new database systems. Because of the separation of OLTP and OLAP systems, existing benchmarks are only focused on one or the other. With the rise of hybrid database systems, benchmarks to assess these systems will be needed as well.

Based on the examination of existing benchmarks, a new benchmark for hybrid database systems is introduced in this book. It is furthermore used to determine the effect of adding OLAP to an OLTP workload and is applied to analyze the impact of typically used optimizations in the historically separate OLTP and OLAP domains in mixed-workload scenarios.