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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'CRM Systems in Industrial Companies' contributes new knowledge on customer relationship management (CRM) in the field of industrial marketing. Based on an in-depth case study, this book highlights the complexity and challenges in the development, implementation and use of CRM. The volume proposes an alternative conceptualization of CRM: relying on the industrial marketing and purchasing (IMP) perspective, CRM becomes a socio-technical 'resource' which needs to be connected to the other resources before it can create effects on customer relationships.

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.

This book describes analytical techniques for optimizing knowledge acquisition, processing, and propagation, especially in the contexts of cyber-infrastructure and big data. Further, it presents easy-to-use analytical models of knowledge-related processes and their applications. The need for such methods stems from the fact that, when we have to decide where to place sensors, or which algorithm to use for processing the data-we mostly rely on experts' opinions. As a result, the selected knowledge-related methods are often far from ideal. To make better selections, it is necessary to first create easy-to-use models of knowledge-related processes. This is especially important for big data, where traditional numerical methods are unsuitable. The book offers a valuable guide for everyone interested in big data applications: students looking for an overview of related analytical techniques, practitioners interested in applying optimization techniques, and researchers seeking to improve and expand on these techniques.

This book brings together recent qualitative research studies in enterprise-wide implementations. This collection is useful as a teaching case for academia, a student reference and also for academics, researchers and IT practitioners who wish to gain a broad view of ERP implementation success and failure, This book provides relevant methodologies and recent empirical research findings in the area and includes sufficient background information for an understanding of each case but focuses on providing a rich description of more than a dozen real life cases.

Probabilistic Methods for Financial and Marketing Informatics aims to provide students with insights and a guide explaining how to apply probabilistic reasoning to business problems. Rather than dwelling on rigor, algorithms, and proofs of theorems, the authors concentrate on showing examples and using the software package Netica to represent and solve problems. The book contains unique coverage of probabilistic reasoning topics applied to business problems, including marketing, banking, operations management, and finance. It shares insights about when and why probabilistic methods can and cannot be used effectively. This book is recommended for all R&D professionals and students who are involved with industrial informatics, that is, applying the methodologies of computer science and engineering to business or industry information. This includes computer science and other professionals in the data management and data mining field whose interests are business and marketing information in general, and who want to apply AI and probabilistic methods to their problems in order to better predict how well a product or service will do in a particular market, for instance. Typical fields where this technology is used are in advertising, venture capital decision making, operational risk measurement in any industry, credit scoring, and investment science.

This volume collects a selection of refereed papers of the more than one hundred presented at the InternationalConference MAF 2008 - Mathematicaland Statistical Methods for Actuarial Sciences and Finance. The conference was organised by the Department of Applied Mathematics and theDepartment ofStatisticsoftheUniversityCa'Foscari Venice(Italy), withthec- laborationofthe Department ofEconomics and StatisticalSciences ofthe University ofSalerno(Italy).Itwas heldinVenice, fromMarch 26to28,2008, attheprestigious CavalliFranchettipalace, alongGrand Canal, oftheIstitutoVenetodiScienze, Lettere ed Arti. This conference was the ?rst international edition of a biennial national series begunin2004, whichwas bornof thebrilliantbeliefofthe colleagues -and friends- oftheDepartmentofEconomicsandStatisticalSciences oftheUniversityofSalerno: the idea following which the cooperation between mathematicians and statisticians in working in actuarial sciences, in insurance and in ?nance can improve research on these topics. The proof of this consists in the wide participation in these events. In particular, with reference to the 2008 internationaledition: - More than 150 attendants, both academicians and practitioners; - More than 100 accepted communications, organised in 26 parallel sessions, from authors coming from about twenty countries (namely: Canada, Colombia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Great Britain, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, USA); - two plenary guest-organised sessions; and - aprestigiouskeynotelecturedeliveredbyProfessorWolfgangHa ]rdleoftheH- boldt Universityof Berlin (Germany)

This book explores how agile development practices, in particular pair programming, code review and automated testing, help software development teams to perform better. Agile software engineering has become the standard software development paradigm over the last decade, and the insights provided here are taken from a large-scale survey of 80 professional software development teams working at SAP SE in Germany. In addition, the book introduces a novel measurement tool for assessing the performance of software development teams. No previous study has researched this topic with a similar data set comprising insights from more than 450 professional software engineers.

The resource transfer problem (RTP) is a modeling and solution framework for integrated complex scheduling and rich vehicle routing problems. It allows the modeling of a wide variety of scheduling problems, vehicle routing problems, their combination with integrated problems, as well as various specific requirements and restrictions arising in practical scheduling and vehicle routing. Based on the unifying resource transfer problem framework, this book proposes a generic constraint propagation approach that exploits the specific structure of scheduling and routing problems.

Environments needing information technology and management skills combined often find that strategic information and intelligence is not always readily available. How to scan management environments for relevant information and then make sense of the information remains a challenge.Managing Strategic Intelligence: Techniques and Technologies builds a network of excellence in effectively managing strategic information for senior management. It focuses on environment information scanning and organization-wide support for strategic intelligence. Managing Strategic Intelligence: Techniques and Technologies prompts further development for theories and best practices in strategic intelligence, and provides future direction for innovative systems by using intelligent agents. This book also provides practical guidance to organizations on developing effective approaches, mechanisms, and systems to scan, refine, and support strategic information provision.

This book is a first. It fills a major gap in the market and provides a wide snapshot of intelligent technologies for inconsistency resolution. The need for this resolution of knowledge inconsistency arises in many practical applications of computer systems. This kind of inconsistency results from the use of various resources of knowledge in realizing practical tasks. These resources are often autonomous and use different mechanisms for processing knowledge about the same real world. This can lead to compatibility problems.

An important aspect of managing human capital in the 21st century workplace is managing the interface between humans and information technology, particularly the World Wide Web. The Web has changed not only how and where business is conducted, but also how and where work is done. Personal web usage has created many desirable organizational outcomes such as, reducing the cost of communication, restructuring how work is performed. However, it has also generated undesirable outcomes, for instance, loss of intellectual property, sexual harassment lawsuits, productivity losses due to surfing usage, security threats, and network bandwidth overload by visiting web sites for travel, leisure, and sports, and news. The mechanisms controlling the interface of individual and institution in this flexible, open, autonomous work environment created by the Web are emergent phenomena, and the lines between legitimate usage and usage are just beginning to be understood. Personal Web Usage in the Workplace: A Guide to Effective Human Resources Management examines topics which embrace a wide array of Personal Web Usage issues such as antecedents of Web usage, frameworks/models of Web usage, Web technologies for monitoring usage, Web usage within other cultures and countries, Measurement issues of Web usage, and the impact of Web usage among others.

Business process reengineering (BPR) focuses on redesigning the strategic and value-added processes which transcend the organizational boundaries. It is a cross-functional approach that requires support from almost all the departments of the organization. Business Process Reengineering: Automation Decision Points in Process Reengineering offers a new framework based process reengineering and links it to organization life cycle, process life cycle, and process management. This volume describes the fundamental concepts behind business process reengineering and examines them through case studies, and should appeal to researchers and academics interested in business process reengineering, operations strategy, and organizational restructuring and design.

In recent years, with rapidly advancing technology and a more globalized culture, the importance of Information Systems has become paramount. The application of Information Systems has made a huge impact on the service sector, both public and private. Information Systems and New Applications in the Service Sector: Models and Methods examines current, state-of-the-art research in the area of service sectors and their interactions, linkages, applications, and support using information systems. This publication encompasses theoretical, analytical, and empirical research, as well as comprehensive reviews of relevant research, technical reports, and case studies of effective applications in this area. The use of new theories, technologies, models, methods, techniques, and principles are emphasized all while explaining the relationship between the advancement of the service sector and the evolution of information systems.

This book presents source code modularization as a key activity in reverse engineering to extract the software architecture from the existing source code. To this end, it provides detailed techniques for source code modularization and discusses their effects on different software quality attributes. Nonetheless, it is not a mere survey of source code modularization algorithms, but rather a consistent and unifying theoretical modularization framework, and as such is the first publication that comprehensively examines the models and techniques for source code modularization. It enables readers to gain a thorough understanding of topics like software artifacts proximity, hierarchical and partitional modularization algorithms, search- and algebraic-based software modularization, software modularization evaluation techniques and software quality attributes and modularization. This book introduces students and software professionals to the fundamental ideas of source code modularization concepts, similarity/dissimilarity metrics, modularization metrics, and quality assurance. Further, it allows undergraduate and graduate students in software engineering, computer science, and computer engineering with no prior experience in the software industry to explore the subject in a step-by-step manner. Practitioners benefit from the structured presentation and comprehensive nature of the materials, while the large number of bibliographic references makes this book a valuable resource for researchers working on source code modularization.

Universities are increasingly being asked to play a greater role in their communities. With the growth of the technology industry and the increasing importance of the Internet in education and everyday life, academic IT departments are beginning to form partnerships with both non-profit and for-profit organizations in the local community. These partnerships can relate to the whole curriculum, to specific classes, to students internships, to theoretical research, and to industrial research, and there are many other possibilities for IT/Community partnerships. Managing IT/Community Partnerships in the 21st Century explores the various possibilities for partnerships between academic IT departments and community-based organizations.

During the 21st century business environments have become more complex and dynamic than ever before. Companies operate in a world of change influenced by globalisation, volatile markets, legal changes and technical progress. As a result, they have to handle growing volumes of data and therefore require fast storage, reliable data access, intelligent retrieval of information and automated decision-making mechanisms, all provided at the highest level of service quality. Successful enterprises are aware of these challenges and efficiently respond to the dynamic environment in which their business operates. Business Intelligence (BI) and Performance Management (PM) offer solutions to these challenges and provide techniques to enable effective business change. The important aspects of both topics are discussed within this state-of-the-art volume. It covers the strategic support, business applications, methodologies and technologies from the field, and explores the benefits, issues and challenges of each. Issues are analysed from many different perspectives, ranging from strategic management to data technologies, and the different subjects are complimented and illustrated by numerous examples of industrial applications. Contributions are authored by leading academics and practitioners representing various universities, research centres and companies worldwide. Their experience covers multiple disciplines and industries, including finance, construction, logistics, and public services, amongst others. Business Intelligence and Performance Management is a valuable source of reference for graduates approaching MSc or PhD programs and for professionals in industry researching in the fields of BI and PM for industrial application.