This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of UNISCON 2008 held in Klagenfurt, Austria, during April 22-25, 2008.

UNISCON combines the ECOMO workshop series and the ISTA conference series. The 19 papers dealing with conceptual modeling, model-driven software development and information systems applications represent a 30% selection from the original set of submissions.

They are completed by two keynote lectures and 35 papers from internationally renowned researchers, invited in honor of Heinrich C. Mayr, whose 60th birthday is also celebrated at this event, that he originally created.

BIS 2008 was the 11th in a series of international conferences on Business - formation Systems. The conference took place in Innsbruck which means that after Klagenfurt it was the second Austrian BIS edition. The BIS conference series from its veryroots has been recognized by professionalsas a forum for the exchangeand disseminationof topicalresearchin the development,implemen- tion, application and improvement of computer systems for business processes. The theme of this conference was"Business Processes and Social Contexts- Reaching Beyond the Enterprise."The material collected in this volume covers research trends as well as current achievements and cutting-edge developments in the area of modern business information systems. A set of 41 papers were - lectedforthepresentationduringthemaineventandgroupedaroundconference topics: Business Process Management, Service Discovery and Composition, - tologies, Information Retrieval, Interoperability, Mobility and Contexts, Ent- prise Resource Planning, Wikis and Folksonomies, Rules and Semantic Queries. The Program Committee consisted of more than 80 members that carefully evaluated all the submitted papers. This year they were supported by an Easy- Chair review system, and again, we observed an increase in the quality of the reviews. This not only raised the quality of the conference but also positively a?ected the work of the authors. The regular program was complemented by the outstanding keynote spe- ers. We are proud that BIS 2008 hosted Alistair Barros (SAP, Australia), Hans Ulrich Buhl (University of Augsburg, Germany), Fabio Ciravegna (University of She?eld, UK), John Davies (BT, UK), and Frank Leymann (University of Stuttgart, Germany).

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Business Information Systems, BIS 2007, held in Poznan, Poland in April 2007. Among the issues addressed in the 49 revised full papers presented together with one keynote lecture are business process management, Web services, ontologies, information retrieval, system design, agents and mobile applications, decision support, social issues, specific MIS issues.

This volume is a sequel to Information Management: The Strategic Dimension (OUP, 1988), a book which was well received by managers and academics alike. The purpose of this book is to take an informed, dispassionate and constructive look, based on research, at the challenges of IT and to offer insight, analysis and guidance on the ever changing IT environment, focusing in particular on managerial and organizational issues. These include centralization versus decentralization, relations between users and specialists, managing the IS function, outsourcing versus internal capabilities, project management and systems implementation, and an assessment of Business Process Re-engineering at both the conceptual and empirical level. The book provides an authoritative overview and helpful diagnosis of current information management challenges by some of the leading information systems researchers in Europe and the USA. The volume will be essential reading for IT researchers, management consultants and senior IT professionals.

Increasingly India, with its expertise in communication technology, is becoming the "global back office" to international supply chains. Many international companies (and examples are legion, but a few examples are IBM, Sony, Exxon/Mobil, etc.) have employed Indian resources to help them with their data, their computerized decision support and their knowledge management. With large corporations opening the path to India, it has allowed a substantial communications and decision-support infrastructure to develop in a number of Indian cities. Therefore, opportunities have emerged for both large and small enterprises in the global market place to utilize these developing Indian resources.

DECISION SUPPORT FOR GLOBAL ENTERPRISES is a volume of a mixture of peer-reviewed and invited papers. The volume will have two primary goals: (1) Stimulate creative and thoughtful discussion between academic research leaders and the practitioner information systems community that will improve both the research and practice in the area. (2) Increase the awareness of the problems and challenges faced by global enterprises that can be met with innovative computerized decision support systems. In addition to the positive aspects, the limitations of these systems and technologies are also explored. Emphasized in the book will be research on the following topics: (1) the emerging enterprise decision making processes and technologies; (2) decision making in uncertain, rapidly changing conditions; (3) the changing infrastructure in organizations and society; (4) the expanding role of web technologies; and (5) emerging theories and practices for managing knowledge and in making decisions.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Practical Aspects of Knowledge Management, PAKM 2006, held in Vienna, Austria in November/December 2006.

The 29 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 123 submissions. All aspects of knowledge management and their role in next-generation business solutions are addressed in perspective to business and organisation sciences, cognitive science, and computer science.

Despite many years of development, risk management remains problematic for the majority of organizations. One common challenge is the human dimension, in other words, the way people perceive risk and risk management. Risk management processes and techniques are operated by people, each of whom is a complex individual, influenced by many different factors. And the problem is compounded by the fact that most risk management involves people working in groups. This introduces further layers of complexity through relationships and group dynamics. David Hillson's and Ruth Murray-Webster's Understanding and Managing Risk Attitude will help you understand the human aspects of risk management and to manage proactively the influence of human behaviour on the risk process. The authors introduce a range of models, perspectives and examples to define and detail the range of possible risk attitudes; looking both at individuals and groups. Using leading-edge thinking on self-awareness and emotional literacy, they develop a powerful approach to address the most common shortfall in current risk management: the failure to manage the human aspects of the process. All this is presented in a practical and applied framework, rather than as a theoretical or academic treatise, based on the authors' shared experiences and expertise, rather than empirical research. Anyone involved in implementing risk management will benefit from this book, including risk practitioners, senior managers and directors responsible for corporate governance, project managers and their teams. It is also essential reading for HR professionals and others interested in organizational or behavioural psychology. This second edition is updated to strengthen the understanding of individual risk attitudes and reinforce what individuals can do to manage those risk attitudes that are leading them away from their objectives. For people who want to embrace this subject, the book highlights ways forward that are proven and practical.

The book answers a simple question: when managers and companies face a decision with two outcomes that are safe and risky, what leads them to choose the risky alternative? The answer starts with a detailed review of the theory behind risk and decision making by managers. The book then gathers real-world evidence using two surveys of senior managers and directors to analyze why they take risks, and how companies control risks.

This is a book about traders in financial markets: what they do, the kind of people they are, how they perceive the world they inhabit, how they make decisions and take risks. This is also a book about how traders are managed-the best and the worst examples-and about the institutions they inhabit: firms, markets, cultures and theories of how the world works. How these institutions function, how traders are managed, and how traders view the world, all have profound effects on the wider financial environment. This book explores these relationships and their implications theoretically and empirically. The data discussed in this book on a three-year project researching the psychological and social influences on the behavior and performance of traders in investment banks. One hundred and eighteen traders and managers in four leading organizations participated. Data was collected through semi-structured interviews supplemented by questionnaries, measures of personality, risk propensity and a novel computer based measure designed to assess illusion of control and other cognitive biases. The authors' approach to writing this book is explicitly interdisciplinary. hey draw on sociology, psychology and econics in order to illuminate the work of traders and the world they inhabit. The book is a significant contribution to the growing body of research and literature suggesting that if we are to effectively understand financial markets and the actors who inhabit them, the insights of neo-classical financial economics need supplementing with a broader range of social science approaches. The book will be of value to researchers interested in the functioning of financial institutions and markets, to those with an interest in market regulation and to practitioners wishing to benefit from an analytical perspective on the challenges facing traders and their managers.

Many complex systems in civil and military operations are highly automated with the intention of supporting human performance in difficult cognitive tasks. The complex systems can involve teams or individuals working on real-time supervisory control, command or information management tasks where a number of constraints must be satisfied. Decision Making in Complex Environments addresses the role of the human, the technology and the processes in complex socio-technical and technological systems. The aim of the book is to apply a multi-disciplinary perspective to the examination of the human factors in complex decision making. It contains more than 30 contributions on key subjects such as military human factors, team decision making issues, situation awareness, and technology support. In addition to the major application area of military human factors there are chapters on business, medical, governmental and aeronautical decision making. The book provides a unique blend of expertise from psychology, human factors, industry, commercial environments, the military, computer science, organizational psychology and training that should be valuable to academics and practitioners alike.

We make decisions, and these decisions make us and our organisations. And in theory, decision-making should be easy: a problem is identified, the decision-makers generate solutions, and choose the optimal one - and powerful mathematical tools are available to facilitate the task. Yet if it is all so simple why do organisations, both private and public sector, keep making mistakes - the results of which are borne by shareholders, employees, taxpayers and ultimately society at large? This guide to decision making. by leading decision science academic Helga Drummond, aims to improve decision-making in organisations. It explores how and why decisions go awry in the first place - and offers practical advice on what decision-makers can do to counter the psychological, social and other forces that can undermine individual judgment and pull organisations off course. Full of examples of good and bad decision-making from around the world, it will make readers think more clearly about decisions big and small.

Volume 14, Advances in Business and Management Forecasting is a blind refereed serial publication. It presents state-of-the-art studies in the application of forecasting methodologies in such areas as financial forecasting, market demand analysis, executive compensation forecasting, data analysis, forecasting improvement with interpolation and cluster analysis. This is a key text for academics and researchers of financial forecasting, market demand forecasting and executive compensation forecasting.

Data management systems play the most crucial role in building large application s- tems. Since modern applications are no longer single monolithic software blocks but highly flexible and configurable collections of cooperative services, the data mana- ment layer also has to adapt to these new requirements. Therefore, within recent years, data management systems have faced a tremendous shift from the central management of individual records in a transactional way to a platform for data integration, fede- tion, search services, and data analysis. This book addresses these new issues in the area of data management from multiple perspectives, in the form of individual contributions, and it outlines future challenges in the context of data management. These contributions are dedicated to Prof. em. Dr. Dr. -Ing. E. h. Hartmut Wedekind on the occasion of his 70th birthday, and were (co-)authored by some of his academic descendants. Prof. Wedekind is one of the most prominent figures of the database management community in Germany, and he enjoys an excellent international reputation as well. Over the last 35 years he greatly contributed to making relational database technology a success. As far back as the early 1970s, he covered-as the first author in Germany- the state of the art concerning the relational model and related issues in two widely used textbooks "Datenbanksysteme I" and "Datenbanksysteme II". Without him, the idea of modeling complex-structured real-world scenarios in a relational way would be far less developed by now. Among Prof.

Budding entrepreneurs face a challenging road. The path is not made any easier by all the cliches they hear about how to make a startup succeed-from platitudes and conventional wisdom to downright contradictions. This witty and wise guide to the dilemmas of entrepreneurship debunks widespread misconceptions about how the world of startups works and offers hard-earned advice for every step of the journey. Instead of startup myths-legends spun from a fantasy version of Silicon Valley-Rizwan Virk provides startup models-frameworks that help make thoughtful decisions about starting, growing, managing, and selling a business. Rather than dispensing simplistic rules, he mentors readers in the development of a mental toolkit for approaching challenges based on how startup markets evolve in real life. In snappy prose with savvy pop-culture and real-world examples, Virk recasts entrepreneurship as a grand adventure. He points out the pitfalls that appear along the way and offers insights into how to avoid them, sharing the secrets of founding a startup, raising money, hiring and firing, when to enter a market and when to exit, and how to value a company. Virk combines lessons learned the hard way during his twenty-five years of founding, investing in, and advising startups with reflections from well-known venture capitalists and experts. His candid advice makes Startup Myths and Models an ideal guide for those readers just embarking on the startup life and those looking for their next adventure.

In today's competitive environments enterprises face diminishing market life spans, increasing pressure on profit margins and increasingly complex c- tomer requirements. Thus in their operations, modern organizations have to find a high-level balance between dynamics, complexity and precision in order to best utilize their markets. Organization Theory and Industrial En- neering, the disciplines on hand helping industry to cope with this challenge, soon identified process optimizations as the key to possible solutions. Many efforts have been undertaken to provide sound theoretical models to deal with complexity and dynamics and streamline business processes. These efforts on the one hand helped companies to be more precise in carrying out their actions and even provided solutions to produce customized products at near-mass production prices (Mass-Customization). On the other hand it t- ned out to be one of the most difficult tasks to generalize and transfer ex- riences gained in one process-reengineering project to another and put the theoretical models into practice. Not without reason is it the extremely high failure rate of business-process-reengineering projects that today deters most enterprises from entering such adventures. Right at the same time there emerged a new and highly promising scientific branch, Knowledge Management, that attracted many disciplines - among others again Organization Theory and Industrial Engineering. Knowledge was identified as a major production factor. In industrialized countries, value added is mainly raised by the intellectual abilities of a company's workforce.

The future of work is already here. Customers are adopting disruptive technologies faster than your company can adapt. When your customers are delighted, they can amplify your message in ways that were never before possible. But when your company's performance runs short of what you've promised, customers can seize control of your brand message, spreading their disappointment and frustration faster than you can keep up. To keep pace with today's connected customers, your company must become a connected company. That means deeply engaging with workers, partners, and customers, changing how work is done, how you measure success, and how performance is rewarded. It requires a new way of thinking about your company: less like a machine to be controlled, and more like a complex, dynamic system that can learn and adapt over time. Connected companies have the advantage, because they learn and move faster than their competitors. While others work in isolation, they link into rich networks of possibility and expand their influence. Connected companies around the world are aggressively acquiring customers and disrupting the competition. In The Connected Company, we examine what they're doing, how they're doing it, and why it works. And we show you how your company can use the same principles to adapt - and thrive - in today's ever-changing global marketplace.

A pilot ?ying to a distant city needs to check his position, ?ight path and weather conditions, and must constantly keep his plane under control to land safely.TheIfosurveydataprovideadvanceinformationonchangingeconomic weather conditions and help keep the economy under control. To be sure, by their very nature they only provide short-term information. But like a plane, the economy will not be able to reach its long-term goals if it strays o? course in the short term. The Ifo survey data provide the most comprehensive and accurate, - to-date database in Europe on the state of the business cycle, and the Ifo climate indicator, sometimes simply called "The Ifo," is the most frequently cited indicator of its kind in Europe. Both the European stock market and theeuroreacttoourindicator.Ifo'smethodologyfordeterminingthebusiness climateindicatorhasbeenexportedtomorethan?ftycountries, mostrecently toTurkeyandChina.TheIfopeoplewereproudtohavebeenaskedtohelpset up polling systems in these countries. It is said that the Chinese government relies more on their "Ifo indicator" than on their o?cial accounting statistics.

Regulating risks in modern societies increasingly involves governments guiding and co-opting corporate risk management systems. This book examines the feasibility of this with reference to occupational health and safety on Britain's railways. It raises important questions about how workplace risks are managed and what influence the law can have in this. These issues are especially significant in the wake of major rail disasters and in the face of the increasing popularity of risk-based approaches to corporate governance.

Survive and thrive in a world being taken over by robots and other advanced technology. Artificial intelligence, machine learning, algorithms, blockchains, the Internet of Things, big data analytics, 5G networks, self-driving cars, robotics, 3D printing. In the coming years, these technologies, and others to follow, will have a profound and dramatically disruptive impact on how we work and live. Whether we like it or not, we need to develop a good working relationship with these technologies. We need to know how to "dance" with robots. In Dancing with Robots, futurist, entrepreneur, and innovation coach Bill Bishop describes 29 strategies for success in the New Economy. These new strategies represent a bold, exciting, unexpected, and radically different road map for future success. Bishop also explains how our Five Human Superpowers -- embodied pattern recognition, unbridled curiosity, purpose-driven ideation, ethical framing, and metaphoric communication -- give us a competitive edge over robots and other advanced technology in a world being taken over by automation and AI.