The information systems (IS) field represents a multidisciplinary area that links the rapidly changing technology of information (or communications and information technology, ICT) to the business and social environment. Despite the potential that the IS field has to develop its own native theories to address current issues involving ICT it has consistently borrowed theories from its "reference disciplines," often uncritically, to legitimize its research. This volume is the first of a series intended to advance IS research beyond this form of borrowed legitimization and derivative research towards fresh and original research that naturally comes from its own theories. It is inconceivable for a field so relevant to the era of the hyper-connected society, disruptive technologies, big data, social media, "fake news" and the weaponization of information to not be brimming with its own theories. The first step in reaching the goal of developing native IS theories is to reach an agreement on the need for theory (its rationale) and its role as the most distinctive product of human intellectual activity. This volume addresses what theories are, why bother with theories and the process of theorizing itself because the process of developing theories cannot be divorced from the product of that process. It will lay out a research agenda for decades to come and will be invaluable reading for any academic in the IS field and related disciplines concerned with information, systems, technology and their management.

This edited book provides a platform to bring together researchers, academia and industry collaborators to exchange their knowledge and work to develop better understanding about the scope of blockchain technology in business management applications of different sectors such as retail sector, supply chain and logistics, healthcare sector, manufacturing sector, judiciary, finance and government sector in terms of data quality and timeliness. The book presents original unpublished research papers on blockchain technology and business management on novel architectures, prototypes and case studies.

We are living in the middle of a Fourth Industrial Revolution, with new technology leading to dramatic shifts in everything from manufacturing to supply chain logistics. In a lively, developing field of academic, procurement is often neglected. Despite this, procurement plays a vital role, connecting the organization with its ecosystem. At a time of change and economic crisis, a new business model is called for, which this book aims to define. Based on the applications of Industry 4.0 concepts to procurement, this book describes Procurement 4.0 as a method and a set of tools, helping businesses to improve the value of their products, reduce waste, become more flexible, and address the business needs of the future. It will appeal to academics in the area, as well as practitioners.

The need for every professional to have a solid presence on the Internet is more important than ever before. Having a presence beyond an email account, such as a custom web page or web application, usually requires a clumsy assortment of outside services or hiring a dedicated administrator. Thus it is more sensible for the average professional to become adept at managing their own private server. In Set Up and Manage Your Virtual Private Server, author Jon Westfall expertly designs interesting, understandable lessons for professionals such as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and more to deploy their own virtual private server. He walks you through choosing the right service and customizing it for your specific business or personal needs, and does this with great ease while instilling invaluable knowledge. Basics such as setting up users, managing security and firewalls, installing and updating software, and troubleshooting by reviewing log files, backing up data, and so much more. Set Up and Manage Your Virtual Private Server equips you with the power of knowledge to set your web presence apart from the rest. You now have complete control over your virtual brand that is your own-separate from any employer or affiliate. Your career mobility is in your hands with the ability to run your own private server at your fingertips. The digital era centers this technical literacy and independence as a critical skillset. What You Will Learn Understand basic server terminology and the way servers operate and are networked together See how software is used on a server and its role (for example, Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, and so on) Get comfortable with the basic command-line operation of a virtual private server to set up users, manage security and firewalls, install software, update software, and troubleshoot by reviewing log files Store and back up important information Identify, analyze, and deploy open-source software products that can enhance productivity Who This Book Is For Non-tech professionals, individuals who have an established professional career, looking to understand more about how to set up and manage a private server.

This book presents the proceedings of the virtual conference NeuroIS Retreat 2020, June 2-4, hosted in Austria, reporting on topics at the intersection of information systems (IS) research, neurophysiology and the brain sciences. Readers will discover the latest findings from top scholars in the field of NeuroIS, which offer detailed insights on the neurobiology underlying IS behavior, essential methods and tools and their applications for IS, as well as the application of neuroscience and neurophysiological theories to advance IS theory.

There has been growing interest on business models among academics and practitioners in recent years, as business model describes how an organization creates, distributes and captures value and, therefore, can be considered the DNA of the organization. Recently, factors related to digital transformation, the vital role of sustainability and social aspects, along with an increasing globalization, have pushed towards radical transformations in business models. This book aims to further our knowledge on business model innovation in new contexts of analysis and with new perspectives of investigation. Insights from business model innovation are presented from studies focusing on start-ups, small businesses and large businesses to provide a bigger picture on new dynamics connected to digital transformation, sustainability, new global relationships. As such, the scope is on new ways to create value, new components and dynamics (such as digitalization and sustainability) concerning the key elements of the business model (value creation, value configuration and value capture), and new relationships between actors that may foster business model innovation. It represents a valuable resource for practitioners willing to innovate business models, academics aiming at finding new research lines, and students keen to learn more about business models.

Concerns about environmental, social, economic, health, and other impacts in the building industry have led to the development of a number of environmental and sustainability assessment approaches, strategies, models, appraisals, and methodologies. Green technology and practices have been implemented to improve sustainable development performance and yield economic, social, and environmental benefits and a series of environmental and sustainability rating systems (ESRSs) have been developed around the world and used extensively with unquestionable benefits to stakeholders in the building industry. Such systems beg to be adapted and implemented in other industry contexts still seeking suitable tools with which to effectively communicate their commitment to a sustainable future and gain the "social license" to operate. Sustainability Assessment: A Rating System Framework for Best Practices shows how this can be done. It makes the case for the development and implementation of ESRSs in new industry contexts ranging from , manufacturing and transportation to mining and energy putting forward a new project sustainability rating system framework to assess the sustainability of a wide variety of organizations and projects. This assessment framework includes but is not limited to regulatory requirements, and includes approaches for measuring sustainability on social, economic, environmental, and health grounds. This book will be of interest to researchers and practitioners across a wide range of disciplines and industries. Scientists will find technical insights here that can further research while practitioners will find that they can implement the framework in any type of organization or project in order to address stakeholders' needs and expectations while achieving their short, mid, and long term sustainability vision and goals.

This book explores recent advances in the Internet of things (IoT) via advanced technologies and provides an overview of most aspects which are relevant for advance secure, distributed, decentralized blockchain technology in the Internet of things, their applications, and industry IoT. The book provides an in-depth analysis of the step-by-step evolution of IoT to create a change by enhancing the productivity of industries. It introduces how connected things, data, and their communication (data sharing) environment build a transparent, reliable, secure environment for people, processes, systems, and services with the help of blockchain technology.

This book covers a very broad range of topics in marketing, communication, and tourism, focusing especially on new perspectives and technologies that promise to influence the future direction of marketing research and practice in a digital and innovational era. Among the areas covered are product and brand management, strategic marketing, B2B marketing and sales management, international marketing, business communication and advertising, digital and social marketing, tourism and hospitality marketing and management, destination branding and cultural management, and event marketing. The book comprises the proceedings of the International Conference on Strategic Innovative Marketing and Tourism (ICSIMAT) 2019, where researchers, academics, and government and industry practitioners from around the world came together to discuss best practices, the latest research, new paradigms, and advances in theory. It will be of interest to a wide audience, including members of the academic community, MSc and PhD students, and marketing and tourism professionals.

This book examines the managerial dimensions of business intelligence (BI) systems. It develops a set of guidelines for value creation by implementing business intelligence systems and technologies. In particular the book looks at BI as a process - driven by a mix of human and technological capabilities - to serve complex information needs in building insights and providing aid in decision making. After an introduction to the key concepts of BI and neighboring areas of information processing, the book looks at the complexity and multidimensionality of BI. It tackles both data integration and information integration issues. Bodies of knowledge and other widely accepted collections of experience are presented and turned into lessons learned. Following a straightforward introduction to the processes and technologies of BI the book embarks on BI maturity and agility, the components, drivers and inhibitors of BI culture and soft BI factors like attention, sense and trust. Eventually the book attempts to provide a holistic view on business intelligence, possible structures and tradeoffs and embarks to provide an outlook on possible developments in BI and analytics.

This book focuses on data and how modern business firms use social data, specifically Online Social Networks (OSNs) incorporated as part of the infrastructure for a number of emerging applications such as personalized recommendation systems, opinion analysis, expertise retrieval, and computational advertising. This book identifies how in such applications, social data offers a plethora of benefits to enhance the decision making process. This book highlights that business intelligence applications are more focused on structured data; however, in order to understand and analyse the social big data, there is a need to aggregate data from various sources and to present it in a plausible format. Big Social Data (BSD) exhibit all the typical properties of big data: wide physical distribution, diversity of formats, non-standard data models, independently-managed and heterogeneous semantics but even further valuable with marketing opportunities. The book provides a review of the current state-of-the-art approaches for big social data analytics as well as to present dissimilar methods to infer value from social data. The book further examines several areas of research that benefits from the propagation of the social data. In particular, the book presents various technical approaches that produce data analytics capable of handling big data features and effective in filtering out unsolicited data and inferring a value. These approaches comprise advanced technical solutions able to capture huge amounts of generated data, scrutinise the collected data to eliminate unwanted data, measure the quality of the inferred data, and transform the amended data for further data analysis. Furthermore, the book presents solutions to derive knowledge and sentiments from BSD and to provide social data classification and prediction. The approaches in this book also incorporate several technologies such as semantic discovery, sentiment analysis, affective computing and machine learning. This book has additional special feature enriched with numerous illustrations such as tables, graphs and charts incorporating advanced visualisation tools in accessible an attractive display.

This book explores the undeveloped potential of video-ethnography to study the material, embodied and sensory dimensions of workplace practices. With the growing interest in sociomateriality and the development of research on the embodied and sensory dimensions of organizational practices, some methodological challenges of this type of research need to be addressed. The main purpose of this book is to present various forms of video-ethnography that make organizational phenomena visible and help better appreciate the organizing properties of bodies, affects, senses and spaces in workplace practices. To do so, illustrative cases based on video-ethnography was discussed to understand how experiential and unspoken ways of knowing produced through a video-based approach can be made meaningful and relevant to study the material, embodied and sensory dimension of work practices. This book is addressed to researchers and students in social sciences and organizational studies and offers a methodological reflection on how to study the material, embodied, and sensory dimensions of organizational life.

Many people are confused by mixed messages from their managers. About 85% of the pool of managers are malevolent, who do not care about the organisation and use the structure for their own needs of power and control. We know what a good manager looks like, but in complex social interactions within organisations this can be confused with the manipulations of the malevolent managers, from CEO to the lowest grade supervisor. The Respectful Manager: The Guide to Successful Management is about the application of the Executive Impression Management type of the Respectful Manager, derived from new ground-breaking research regarding fraudster managers. It explains clearly and precisely what a good manager looks like and behaves like with their co-workers. In this book, the foundations are laid to understand and recognise a Respectful Manager. This is critical for management training purposes and for managerial recruitment and promotion procedures. For those looking at increasing profitability, increasing competitive edge, and engaging their workforce in fulfilling work, the Respectful Manager is the key. This book is a must read for those who aspire to management roles, including senior management, as a guide to the very best practice in the field.

Managing People in Small and Medium Enterprises in Turbulent Contexts explores a range of human resource management (HRM) issues specific to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Based on a series of research studies and secondary sources of data, the book's primary aim is to contextualise HRM issues in SMEs operating in a variety of national economic contexts that are (or have recently experienced) a turbulent situation. SMEs are the backbone of these economies. It is therefore critical that we study HR practices and concepts within such enterprises. The book covers HR practices in SMEs, such as recruitment and selection, training and development, performance evaluation and employee relations, by focusing on three types of turbulent economies: emerging market economies in Asia, the Pacific, Africa and Latin America; transition economies of Central and Eastern Europe; and crisis contexts in Southern Europe. Managing People in Small and Medium Enterprises in Turbulent Contexts is a useful resource for organisations, practitioners, academics and scholars in the fields of HRM, employee engagement, small and medium business management and other related disciplines.

This book presents the theory and practice of product lifecycle management, chiefly focusing on modern approaches suitable for digitalized enterprises. In addition to describing adaptive methods for advanced product creation using big data analytics, it presents economic and mathematical models for managing product lifecycles based on the application of recent methods (e.g. digital design and automated intelligent systems) to control pre-production and production processes. Given its scope, the book appeals to researchers, economic analysts and entrepreneurs alike.

This book projects a futuristic scenario that is more existent than they have been at any time earlier. To be conscious of the bursting prospective of IoT, it has to be amalgamated with AI technologies. Predictive and advanced analysis can be made based on the data collected, discovered and analyzed. To achieve all these compatibility, complexity, legal and ethical issues arise due to automation of connected components and gadgets of widespread companies across the globe. While these are a few examples of issues, the authors' intention in editing this book is to offer concepts of integrating AI with IoT in a precise and clear manner to the research community. In editing this book, the authors' attempt is to provide novel advances and applications to address the challenge of continually discovering patterns for IoT by covering various aspects of implementing AI techniques to make IoT solutions smarter. The only way to remain pace with this data generated by the IoT and acquire the concealed acquaintance it encloses is to employ AI as the eventual catalyst for IoT. IoT together with AI is more than an inclination or existence; it will develop into a paradigm. It helps those researchers who have an interest in this field to keep insight into different concepts and their importance for applications in real life. This has been done to make the edited book more flexible and to stimulate further interest in topics. All these motivated the authors toward integrating AI in achieving smarter IoT. The authors believe that their effort can make this collection interesting and highly attract the student pursuing pre-research, research and even master in multidisciplinary domain.

This book provides conceptual understanding of machine learning algorithms though supervised, unsupervised, and advanced learning techniques. The book consists of four parts: foundation, supervised learning, unsupervised learning, and advanced learning. The first part provides the fundamental materials, background, and simple machine learning algorithms, as the preparation for studying machine learning algorithms. The second and the third parts provide understanding of the supervised learning algorithms and the unsupervised learning algorithms as the core parts. The last part provides advanced machine learning algorithms: ensemble learning, semi-supervised learning, temporal learning, and reinforced learning. Provides comprehensive coverage of both learning algorithms: supervised and unsupervised learning; Outlines the computation paradigm for solving classification, regression, and clustering; Features essential techniques for building the a new generation of machine learning.

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

While the west has experienced multiple post-war economic, social and political revolutions, India by contrast has had two distinct moments of transformation in the past century: Independence in 1947 and the economic liberalisation that began in 1991. Midnight's Grandchildren are the offspring of India's second social and economic revolution. India's millennial generation, coming of age post-1991, have grown up in a world of opportunity and relative abundance. Many institutions - family, marriage, workplace, and brands - are being disrupted. Great tension exists as a new generation breaks barriers and seeks to find its place. This book captures an important, transformative moment in India's development. It includes interviews with young Indians who articulate both their optimism and the struggle to find relevant new identities. Managers and recruiters speak about the changes in the workplace and the challenges and opportunities of harnessing India's so-called demographic dividend. Entrepreneurs, brand owners and marketers discuss the role of brands in cementing identities in a world changing rapidly where loyalty has little meaning. Midnight's Grandchildren explains for a business audience the significance of the arrival in the workforce of a generation of millennials as both disruptors of the old order and engine of India's future economic potential. It is of use for professionals and educators wanting to engage this vitally important group of young people.

This book presents the characteristics and benefits industrial organizations can reap from the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). These characteristics and benefits include enhanced competitiveness, increased proactive decision-making, improved creativity and innovation, augmented job creation, heightened agility to respond to continuously changing challenges, and intensified data-driven decision making. In a straightforward fashion, the book also helps readers understand complex concepts that are core to IIoT enterprises, such as Big Data, analytic architecture platforms, machine learning (ML) and data science algorithms, and the power of visualization to enrich the domains experts' decision making. The book also guides the reader on how to think about ways to define new business paradigms that the IIoT facilitates, as well how to increase the probability of success in managing analytic projects that are the core engine of decision-making in the IIoT enterprise. The book starts by defining an IIoT enterprise and the framework used to efficiently operate. A description of the concepts of industrial analytics, which is a major engine for decision making in the IIoT enterprise, is provided. It then discusses how data and machine learning (ML) play an important role in increasing the competitiveness of industrial enterprises that operate using the IIoT technology and business concepts. Real world examples of data driven IIoT enterprises and various business models are presented and a discussion on how the use of ML and data science help address complex decision-making problems and generate new job opportunities. The book presents in an easy-to-understand manner how ML algorithms work and operate on data generated in the IIoT enterprise. Useful for any industry professional interested in advanced industrial software applications, including business managers and professionals interested in how data analytics can help industries and to develop innovative business solutions, as well as data and computer scientists who wish to bridge the analytics and computer science fields with the industrial world, and project managers interested in managing advanced analytic projects.

This book defines and develops the concept of data capital. Using an interdisciplinary perspective, this book focuses on the key features of the data economy, systematically presenting the economic aspects of data science. The book (1) introduces an alternative interpretation on economists' observation of which capital has changed radically since the twentieth century; (2) elaborates on the composition of data capital and it as a factor of production; (3) describes morphological changes in data capital that influence its accumulation and circulation; (4) explains the rise of data capital as an underappreciated cause of phenomena from data sovereign, economic inequality, to stagnating productivity; (5) discusses hopes and challenges for industrial circles, the government and academia when an intangible wealth brought by data (and information or knowledge as well); (6) proposes the development of criteria for measuring regulating data capital in the twenty-first century for regulatory purposes by looking at the prospects for data capital and possible impact on future society. Providing the first a thorough introduction to the theory of data as capital, this book will be useful for those studying economics, data science, and business, as well as those in the financial industry who own, control, or wish to work with data resources.

This book highlights interdisciplinary insights, latest research results, and technological trends in Business Intelligence and Modelling in fields such as: Business Intelligence, Business Transformation, Knowledge Dissemination & Implementation, Modeling for Logistics, Business Informatics, Business Model Innovation, Simulation Modelling, E-Business, Enterprise & Conceptual Modelling, etc. The book is divided into eight sections, grouping emerging marketing technologies together in a close examination of practices, problems and trends. The chapters have been written by researchers and practitioners that demonstrate a special orientation in Strategic Marketing and Business Intelligence. This volume shares their recent contributions to the field and showcases their exchange of insights.

Program debugging has always been a difficult and time-consuming task in the context of software development, where spectrum-based fault localization (SBFL) is one of the most widely studied families of techniques. While it's not particularly difficult to learn about the process and empirical performance of a particular SBFL technique from the available literature, researchers and practitioners aren't always familiar with the underlying theories. This book provides the first comprehensive guide to fundamental theories in SBFL, while also addressing some emerging challenges in this area. The theoretical framework introduced here reveals the intrinsic relations between various risk evaluation formulas, making it possible to construct a formula performance hierarchy. Further extensions of the framework provide a sufficient and necessary condition for a general maximal formula, as well as performance comparisons for hybrid SBFL methods. With regard to emerging challenges in SBFL, the book mainly covers the frequently encountered oracle problem in SBFL and introduces a metamorphic slice-based solution. In addition, it discusses the challenge of multiple-fault localization and presents cutting-edge approaches to overcoming it. SBFL is a widely studied research area with a massive amount of publications. Thus, it is essential that the software engineering community, especially those involved in program debugging, software maintenance and software quality assurance (including both newcomers and researchers who want to gain deeper insights) understand the most fundamental theories - which could also be very helpful to ensuring the healthy development of the field.

This book explores recent advances in blockchain technology and its impact on Industry 4.0 via advanced technologies. It provides an in-depth analysis of the step by step evolution of Industry 4.0 and blockchain technologies for creating the next-generation, secure, decentralized, distributed and trusted industry environment and enhancing the productivity of industries. The book describes how blockchain technology makes the industrial internet (Industry 4.0) a transparent, reliable and secure environment for people, processes, systems, and services, presenting a strong, technological and conceptual framework and roadmap for decision-makers involved in the transformation of any area of industry.

This book presents the main theoretical foundations behind smart services as well as specific guidelines and practically proven methods on how to design them. Furthermore, it gives an overview of the possible implementation architectures and shows how the designed smart services can be realized with specific technologies. Finally, it provides four specific use cases that show how smart services have been realized in practice and what impact they have within the businesses. The first part of the book defines the basic concepts and aims to establish a shared understanding of terms, such as smart services, service systems, smart service systems or cyber-physical systems. On this basis, it provides an analysis of existing work and includes insights on how an organization incorporating smart services could enhance and adjust their management and business processes. The second part on the design of smart services elaborates on what constitutes a successful smart service and describes experiences in the area of interdisciplinary teams, strategic partnerships, the overall service systems and the common data basis. In the third part, technical reference architectures are presented in detail, encompassing topics on the design of digital twins in cyber physical systems, the communication between entities and sensors in the age of Industry 4.0 as well as data management and integration. The fourth part then highlights a number of analytical possibilities that can be realized and that can constitute or be part of smart services, including machine learning and artificial intelligence methods. Finally, the applicability of the introduced design and development method is demonstrated by considering specific real-world use cases. These include services in the industrial and mobility sector, which were developed in direct cooperation with industry partners. The main target audience of this book is industry-focused readers, especially practitioners from industry, who are involved in supporting and managing digital business. These include professionals working in business development, product management, strategy, and development, ranging from middle management to Chief Digital Officers. It conveys all the basics needed for developing smart services and successfully placing them on the market by explaining technical aspects as well as showcasing practical use cases.