This textbook first introduces the reader to return measurement and then goes on to compare the time-weighted rate of return (TWR) with the money-weighted rate of return (MWR). To emphasize the importance of risk in conjunction with return, different tracking errors are analyzed and ex-post versus ex-ante risk figures are compared. The author then proceeds to modern portfolio theory (MPT) and illustrates how the constraints interfere substantially in the construction of optimized portfolios. As a conclusion, the book provides the reader with all the essential aspects of investment controlling.

This authoritative text/reference describes the state of the art in requirements engineering for software systems for distributed computing. A particular focus is placed on integrated solutions, which take into account the requirements of scalability, flexibility, sustainability and operability for distributed environments. Topics and features: discusses the latest developments, tools, technologies and trends in software requirements engineering; reviews the relevant theoretical frameworks, practical approaches and methodologies for service requirements; examines the three key components of the requirements engineering process, namely requirements elicitation, requirements specification, and requirements validation and evaluation; presents detailed contributions from an international selection of highly reputed experts in the field; offers guidance on best practices, and suggests directions for further research in the area.

This book examines issues related to the alignment of business strategies and analytics. Vast amounts of data are being generated, collected, stored, processed, analyzed, distributed and used at an ever-increasing rate by organizations. Simultaneously, managers must rapidly and thoroughly understand the factors driving their business. Business Analytics is an interactive process of analyzing and exploring enterprise data to find valuable insights that can be exploited for competitive advantage. However, to gain this advantage, organizations need to create a sophisticated analytical climate within which strategic decisions are made. As a result, there is a growing awareness that alignment among business strategies, business structures, and analytics are critical to effectively develop and deploy techniques to enhance an organization's decision-making capability. In the past, the relevance and usefulness of academic research in the area of alignment is often questioned by practitioners, but this book seeks to bridge this gap. Aligning Business Strategies and Analytics: Bridging Between Theory and Practice is comprised of twelve chapters, divided into three sections. The book begins by introducing business analytics and the current gap between academic training and the needs within the business community. Chapters 2 - 5 examines how the use of cognitive computing improves financial advice, how technology is accelerating the growth of the financial advising industry, explores the application of advanced analytics to various facets of the industry and provides the context for analytics in practice. Chapters 6 - 9 offers real-world examples of how project management professionals tackle big-data challenges, explores the application of agile methodologies, discusses the operational benefits that can be gained by implementing real-time, and a case study on human capital analytics. Chapters 10 - 11 reviews the opportunities and potential shortfall and highlights how new media marketing and analytics fostered new insights. Finally the book concludes with a look at how data and analytics are playing a revolutionary role in strategy development in the chemical industry.

This important text/reference presents a comprehensive review of techniques for taxonomy matching, discussing matching algorithms, analyzing matching systems, and comparing matching evaluation approaches. Different methods are investigated in accordance with the criteria of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). The text also highlights promising developments and innovative guidelines, to further motivate researchers and practitioners in the field. Topics and features: discusses the fundamentals and the latest developments in taxonomy matching, including the related fields of ontology matching and schema matching; reviews next-generation matching strategies, matching algorithms, matching systems, and OAEI campaigns, as well as alternative evaluations; examines how the latest techniques make use of different sources of background knowledge to enable precise matching between repositories; describes the theoretical background, state-of-the-art research, and practical real-world applications; covers the fields of dynamic taxonomies, personalized directories, catalog segmentation, and recommender systems. This stimulating book is an essential reference for practitioners engaged in data science and business intelligence, and for researchers specializing in taxonomy matching and semantic similarity assessment. The work is also suitable as a supplementary text for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate courses on information and metadata management.

This book trailblazes co-evolution approaches which have been prototyped and tried out by the authors, with global academic and practitioner backgrounds. It was devised to help humanity, people, perceived as complex adaptive systems, to self-organize, co-create, and manage complexity, by showcasing with own example, as individuals and open networks. The book bundles main components needed for facilitation in complexity, while each chapter covers conceptual solutions for specific complexity strategies, tactics, operations - projects. These solutions serve as blueprints and roadmaps, providing approaches for practitioners and researchers alike. The main features incorporated in all the approaches are transcending silos and organizational hierarchies toward a borderless collaboration between diverse stakeholders with dynamic roles and accountabilities regarding purposes, missions and solutions. The book includes suggestions for strategic, tactical and operational managerial and governance approaches for disruptive, short-term, innovative, open, large-scale engagements where rapid onboarding, situational awareness, innovation and innovation in context, and action are expected while fast facilitation, dynamic reconfiguration, and self-organization are required. It also describes how long-term sustained co-creative action needs to be facilitated, to adapt to external and internal complexity dynamics while initiating positive change. This book showcases how co-creation and co-dreaming emerge with co-evolution. Chapters 1, 2, and 11 are available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

The requirements for production systems are constantly changing as a result of changing competitive conditions. This poses a challenge for manufacturers in the various branches of industry and creates an ever-increasing need for flexibility.

With this as a background, this book explores the current developments and trends as well as their impact on today's production systems. It also compares known strategies, concepts and methods used to achieve production flexibility. Similarly, the practical knowledge and current research will be drawn upon and subjected to a sound scientific analysis, through which the technical and organizational flexibility ranges can be measured in their application in a production system. The convenience and usefulness of this concept for manufacturers is substantiated by its implementation in a software tool called ecoFLEX and its practical application, based on extensive examples. This illustrates how flexibility flaws can be quickly identified, classified and properly disposed of using ecoFLEX. This tool helps to close the gap between ERP / PPS systems and digital factory planning tools.

Business process management is usually treated from two different perspectives: business administration and computer science. While business administration professionals tend to consider information technology as a subordinate aspect in business process management for experts to handle, by contrast computer science professionals often consider business goals and organizational regulations as terms that do not deserve much thought but require the appropriate level of abstraction.

Matthias Weske argues that all communities involved need to have a common understanding of the different aspects of business process management. To this end, he details the complete business process lifecycle from the modeling phase to process enactment and improvement, taking into account all different stakeholders involved. After starting with a presentation of general foundations and abstraction models, he explains concepts like process orchestrations and choreographies, as well as process properties and data dependencies. Finally, he presents both traditional and advanced business process management architectures, covering, for example, workflow management systems, service-oriented architectures, and data-driven approaches. In addition, he shows how standards like WfMC, SOAP, WSDL, and BPEL fit into the picture.

This textbook is ideally suited for classes on business process management, information systems architecture, and workflow management. This 2nd edition contains major updates on BPMN Version 2 process orchestration and process choreographies, and the chapter on BPM methodologies has been completely rewritten. The accompanying website www.bpm-book.com contains further information and additional teaching material.

This open access book presents how cutting-edge digital technologies like Big Data, Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Blockchain are set to disrupt the financial sector. The book illustrates how recent advances in these technologies facilitate banks, FinTech, and financial institutions to collect, process, analyze, and fully leverage the very large amounts of data that are nowadays produced and exchanged in the sector. To this end, the book also describes some more the most popular Big Data, AI and Blockchain applications in the sector, including novel applications in the areas of Know Your Customer (KYC), Personalized Wealth Management and Asset Management, Portfolio Risk Assessment, as well as variety of novel Usage-based Insurance applications based on Internet-of-Things data. Most of the presented applications have been developed, deployed and validated in real-life digital finance settings in the context of the European Commission funded INFINITECH project, which is a flagship innovation initiative for Big Data and AI in digital finance. This book is ideal for researchers and practitioners in Big Data, AI, banking and digital finance.

This monograph discusses software reuse and how it can be applied at different stages of the software development process, on different types of data and at different levels of granularity. Several challenging hypotheses are analyzed and confronted using novel data-driven methodologies, in order to solve problems in requirements elicitation and specification extraction, software design and implementation, as well as software quality assurance. The book is accompanied by a number of tools, libraries and working prototypes in order to practically illustrate how the phases of the software engineering life cycle can benefit from unlocking the potential of data. Software engineering researchers, experts, and practitioners can benefit from the various methodologies presented and can better understand how knowledge extracted from software data residing in various repositories can be combined and used to enable effective decision making and save considerable time and effort through software reuse. Mining Software Engineering Data for Software Reuse can also prove handy for graduate-level students in software engineering.

Models derived from the Real Business Cycle perspective have recently taken a major place in business cycle research. The papers in this present volume bring three contributions to this research programme: A critical evaluation of the canonical RBC models, new elements of empirical relevance, based on comparative calibration and testing, and new specifications, at the frontier of business cycle research, coping with non walrasian features, contracts and nominal rigidities, unemployment and growth.

This book describes a conceptual management system derived from the Business and Technology Relationship Model (BTRM). The BTRM describes the relationship between business and technology and provides simple definitions for service quality, alignment, agility, and governance. It explains our problems with traditional methods, democratizes the management and governance of enterprise technologies, and is suitable for introducing process automation. This book describes in detail how the BTRM, combined with a focus on value creation and value delivery, will enable continuous change, in the context of current, emerging and future technologies. It illustrates the potential for real-time insight and control not previously considered and provides a wide range of information to plan an implementation, understand where AI can be applied, and its importance in the world of self-managing systems. The topic of this book is particularly relevant for business managers, business technology managers and technology service providers.

O'Brien's Introduction to Information Systems 16e reflects the contemporary use of enterprise-wide business systems. New real-world case studies continue to correspond with this industry reality. The text's focus is on teaching the future manager the potential effect on business of the most current IT technologies such as the Internet, Intranets, and Extranets for enterprise collaboration, and how IT contributes to competitive advantage, reengineering business processes, problem solving, and decision-making. The benchmark text for the syllabus organized by technology (a week on databases, a week on networks, a week on systems development, etc.) taught from a managerial perspective. O'Brien defines technology and then explains how companies use the technology to improve performance. Real world cases finalize the explanation.

The three volumes of Interest Rate Modeling present a comprehensive and up-to-date treatment of techniques and models used in the pricing and risk management of fixed income securities. Written by two leading practitioners and seasoned industry veterans, this unique series combines finance theory, numerical methods, and approximation techniques to provide the reader with an integrated approach to the process of designing and implementing industrial-strength models for fixed income security valuation and hedging. Aiming to bridge the gap between advanced theoretical models and real-life trading applications, the pragmatic, yet rigorous, approach taken in this book will appeal to students, academics, and professionals working in quantitative finance. The first half of Volume III contains a detailed study of several classes of fixed income securities, ranging from simple vanilla options to highly exotic cancelable and path-dependent derivatives. The analysis is done in product-specific fashion covering, among other subjects, risk characterization, calibration strategies, and valuation methods. In its second half, Volume III studies the general topic of derivative portfolio risk management, with a particular emphasis on the challenging problem of computing smooth price sensitivities to market input perturbations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) and platforms are closely related. Most investments in AI, especially in critical technologies, are provided by large platforms. This book describes how platforms invest in AI and how AI will impact the next generation of competences, following a twofold approach to do so: on the one hand, the book seeks to understand how platforms for investment in intangibles and AI are organized, but on the other hand, it provides a framework to describe how AI will change jobs and competences in the future. Moreover, the book addresses five main themes: 1. platforms, platformization, and the foundations of their business models; 2. artificial intelligence, technological tendencies, and the policy agenda; 3. artificial intelligence, productivity, and the next generation of competences; 4. artificial intelligence, productivity, and the digital divide; 5. artificial intelligence, ethics, and the post-truth society. The book's content is mostly based on papers presented at the last two installments of the World Conference on Intellectual Capital for Communities. It brings together the views of leading scholars and experts on how artificial intelligence and platformization will impact competences in the near future.

The information systems field has contributed greatly to the rise of the information economy and the information society. Yet, after more than a quarter-century since its formation, it still is plagued by doubts about its identity and legitimacy. "Information Systems: The State of the Field" contains the reflections of leading IS scholars on the nature of the discipline, its core identity and the challenges of creating a strong and legitimate academic enterprise centred on information systems. It includes debates, reflections and commentaries from a group of leading information system scholars, and offers an overview of the state of the field at this time. This book is intended for all who are interested in the nature and direction of the information system field as it enters the 21st century.

"The sociologist Zygmund Bauman has defined a discipline which is constantly debating its credentials as a "flawed" discipline. This critique can certainly be applied to the IS discipline. The editors of this book must be congratulated on collecting together the principal writings reflecting the nature of the debate to provide a learned and fascinating account of where the field now stands and perhaps where it is going. It is essential reading for any student of IS."
--Frank Land, Emeritus Professor, Department of Information Systems, London School of Economics

"The struggle for identity, according to Alford North Whitehead entails a dialectic of "becoming." It evolves from coping with continuous change, a conflict of perspectives and always asking: "Who am I?," "Who are we?," "Who are we not?," "What do we inherit from our past?." In this imaginatively edited volume, King and Lyytinenrecount information systems' restless pursuit for identity. Anyone who is affected by the struggles, but more importantly everyone who wants to join it must read this book."
--Richard O. Mason, Carr P. Collins Distinguished Professor, Management Information Sciences, Edwin L. Cox School of Business, Southern Methodist University

Soft computing techniques are innovative tools that use nature-inspired algorithms to run predictive analysis of industries from business to software measurement. These tools have gained momentum in recent years for their practicality and flexibility. The Handbook of Research on Fuzzy and Rough Set Theory in Organizational Decision Making collects both empirical and applied research in the field of fuzzy set theory, and bridges the gap between the application of soft computational approaches and the organizational decision making process. This publication is a pivotal reference for business professionals, IT specialists, software engineers, and advanced students of business and information technology.

In the context of rapid ICT development, this book focuses on how gamification affects consumer engagement and can be used to create a shared value for customers and companies. Based on the constructs of shared value, consumer engagement and gamification, it creates a conceptual model and a research methodology to enable empirical testing and provide complex empirical research findings. The book demonstrates the use of game elements and the motivation to play games as a means of achieving a psychological effect, i.e., consumer engagement manifested through gamified activities and brand engagement. This joint empirical study, by an expert team, concludes that the analysis of consumer perceived value in the context of engagement in gamified activities should distinguish between not just the theoretically identified company/brand-related economic, emotional, functional and social values, but also between engagement-related social and functional values.

This book celebrates the 10-year anniversary of Software Center (a collaboration between 18 European companies and five Swedish universities) by presenting some of the most impactful and relevant journal or conference papers that researchers in the center have published over the last decade. The book is organized around the five themes around which research in Software Center is organized, i.e. Continuous Delivery, Continuous Architecture, Metrics, Customer Data and Ecosystems Driven Development, and AI Engineering. The focus of the Continuous Delivery theme is to help companies to continuously build high quality products with the right degree of automation. The Continuous Architecture theme addresses challenges that arise when balancing the need for architectural quality and more agile ways of working with shorter development cycles. The Metrics theme studies and provides insight to understand, monitor and improve software processes, products and organizations. The fourth theme, Customer Data and Ecosystem Driven Development, helps companies make sense of the vast amounts of data that are continuously collected from products in the field. Eventually, the theme of AI Engineering addresses the challenge that many companies struggle with in terms of deploying machine- and deep-learning models in industrial contexts with production quality. Each theme has its own part in the book and each part has an introduction chapter and then a carefully selected reprint of the most important papers from that theme. This book mainly aims at researchers and advanced professionals in the areas of software engineering who would like to get an overview about the achievement made in various topics relevant for industrial large-scale software development and management - and to see how research benefits from a close cooperation between industry and academia.

Social entrepreneurs are change makers that aim to solve society's unsolved problems. Not surprisingly, social entrepreneurship has thus created high expectations. To better understand the potential as well as the limitations of social entrepreneurship, however, a more nuanced approach is needed in two ways. First, social entrepreneurship is a multi-level phenomenon. It spans macro-level questions as well as meso-level questions and, finally, micro-level questions. If we really want to understand social entrepreneurship, we need to bring together all three levels of analysis and see how they are connected. Second, while social entrepreneurship can certainly produce socially desirable outcomes, we also need a critical perspective to capture potential undesirable effects that social entrepreneurship can cause, often unintendedly, in society, in markets, in organizations, and for individuals. To this end, an ethical perspective can help complement the positive analysis of social entrepreneurship with a discussion of the normative implications of its potential "dark side". Looking at social entrepreneurship from both a multi-level analysis and an ethical perspective, Social Entrepreneurship and Business Ethics takes the reader on a journey through the "bright side" as well as the potential "dark side" of social entrepreneurship for societies, organizations, and individuals. Highlighting both, this book not only seeks to provoke researchers and students to advance their understanding of social entrepreneurship. It also hopes to help practitioners to better realize the positive contributions of social entrepreneurship for society.

Managing for IT skills is never easy at the firm level, due to the fact that technologies change constantly and rapidly. The supply and demand of IT skills fluctuate, and firms do not have commonly recognized frameworks to manage IT skills of their workforce. A consistent taxonomy of IT skills is underdeveloped and used infrequently in industry. This book provides the basic vocabulary and managerial framework for managing strategically the IT workforce at the firm level. It also informs managers what tools and services are available to assess the skill levels of their IT workforce and job candidates. Finally, it gives different perspectives on managing IT skills - how individuals, HR managers, educators, and governments approach IT skills management.

Among the many elementary expositions of psychoanalysis, "The Talking Cure" is unique in focusing on the actual analytic experience. Lichtenberg's approach is humanistic, demonstrating empathic understanding of the fears and hopes of the person seeking help. He provides a "feel" for what happens during the analytic voyage of self-discovery.

This book explores the possibility of integrating design thinking into today's technical contexts. Despite the popularity of design thinking in research and practice, this area is still too often treated in isolation without a clear, consistent connection to the world of software development. The book presents design thinking approaches and experiences that can facilitate the development of software-intensive products and services. It argues that design thinking and related software engineering practices, including requirements engineering and user-centric design (UX) approaches, are not mutually exclusive. Rather, they provide complementary methods and tools for designing software-intensive systems with a human-centric approach. Bringing together prominent experts and practitioners to share their insights, approaches and experiences, the book sheds new light on the specific interpretations and meanings of design thinking in various fields such as engineering, management, and information technology. As such, it provides a framework for professionals to demonstrate the potential of design thinking for software development, while offering academic researchers a roadmap for further research.

This book discusses the effect of global pandemic, Covid-19, on human resource and draws strategies with new job designing tools and techniques. It provides insights on how to develop new strategies for HR professionals in corporates and academicians. This book explores the implication of descriptive, predictive and prescriptive HR analytics practices for different functional domains and in different countries during COVID-19. It brings new dimensions of study in HR analytics which are sure to change after COVID-19 as it has affected the way people are going to work.

In recent years, digital business models have frequently been the subject of academic and practical discourse. The increasing interconnectivity across the entire supply chain, which is subsumed under the term Industry 4.0, can unlock even farther-reaching potentials for digital business models, affecting entire supply chains and ecosystems. This book examines the specific challenges and obstacles that supply chain and ecosystem management poses with regard to the development of digital business models. The top-quality contributions gathered here focus on the successful implementation of Industry 4.0 in digital business models for industrial organizations in a European context, making the book a valuable asset for researchers and practitioners alike.

1) This is a comprehensive book on creative industries in India. 2) The book contains essays with recent data and multiple crucial case studies from across India. 3) This book will be of interest to departments of development studies, South Asian studies and cultural studies across UK.