Business analytics adoption and technological intensity: An efficiency analysis

Despite the overwhelming popularity of business analytics (BA) as an evidence-based decision support mechanism, the impact of its adoption on organizational performance has received scant attention from the research community. This study aims to unfold the adoption efficiencies of BA and its applications by proposing a data envelopment analysis (DEA) methodology to holistically assess the underlying factors with respect to the level of achievement regarding organizational performance, operational performance, and financial performance. Furthermore, the study unveils the firm-level and sectoral-level discrepancies in BA adoption efficiency in different industry settings. Relying on survey data obtained from 204 executives in various industries, this study provides empirical support for the cross-industry differences in BA adoption efficiencies. The results show that the firms in low-tech industries seem to achieve the highest efficiency from adopting BA regarding its influence on firm performance

A review of Communication Tools and Techniques for Successful ICT Projects

Practitioners have repeatedly mentioned that projects that lack effective communication are doomed to fail. Project communications management involves the generation, collection, and storage of information within a project. Project communication therefore provides vital ingredients for the go-no-go decisions in a project through the effective selection of the minimum essential things that can be done to share the collected information among the stakeholders. A fast growing way to manage software development projects is agile project management, whose focus is balancing between continuous releases of quality deliverables and frequently sharing project progress information. In this editorial, we advocate for research on the approaches, tools, and techniques that are used in agile project management in relation to those used in the more traditional approaches to project management to effectively manage communication in software development projects in Africa. The hope is to bring to surface knowledge on how project management communications is currently being effected, as well as the factors about these communications that are distinctive to this region when contrasted with the rest of the world

Assessing the Impact of a Geospatial Information System for Improving Campus Emergency Decision-Making of Novice Crisis Managers

A significant increase in campus-based emergencies warrants the investigation into emergency management information systems that serve a novice crisis decision-maker. Institutions of higher education that are not large enough to have dedicated emergency management offices generally press novice decision-makers into emergency management roles. An investigation was conducted to assess the impact of an emergency management geospatial information system on the decision performance of novice crisis managers through the use of a scenario-based simulation. A mixed method sequential explanatory method was used to collect quasi-experimental data on decision time, decision accuracy and situational awareness. Qualitative analysis was conducted through interviews with participants. Statistical results indicate the decision accuracy is positively affected by the use of an emergency management geospatial information system. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is non-parametric linear programming method used to identify decision-making units in a data set that are optimal in their use of single or a set of resources (inputs) in delivering a set of expected results (outputs). DEA indicated that efficiency ratios from the geospatial information system group outperform the traditional group. Geospatial information systems hold much promise in providing systems that are easy to use, promote heightened levels of situational awareness and decision support

Governance and Water Management: Progress and Tools in Mediterranean Countries

This paper reviews the progress with respect to Integrated Water Resource Management (IWRM) in Mediterranean countries, as addressed within the activities of the Nostrum-Dss project, a Coordination Action funded by the 6th Framework Programme of the EC, with a particular emphasis on the current use of decision support tools (DSS). The IWRM paradigm is a comprehensive management framework, which integrates the different aspects of water resources – from the underlying ecological and physical aspects, to the socio-economic values and needs (horizontal integration); and calls for increasing decentralisation and privatisation of water services (vertical integration), and the devolution of planning authority, without however forgetting the need to ensure equitable access to water resources. Substantial progress has been made in the last decades in Nostrum-Dss Partner countries, although a disparity can still be seen between the Northern and Southern banks. New institutions have been established for implementing IWRM, existing institutions have been reformed, and decision making processes increasingly require public participation. Decentralisation of decision making, implementation and monitoring are also well underway, although improvements are still needed to ensure that the traditional power structures do not prevail. More efficient technologies and infrastructures are in place, especially for the production of high value goods or in agriculture. Finally, several DSS have been developed: yet, while operational/technical DSS instruments have been successfully employed, DSSs tools developed in a participatory way, or tackling more complex, political as well as environmental and economic problems are still de-linked from actual decision making processes. Laws and regulations for water management in most Mediterranean countries embrace and support the paradigms of IWRM – and EU framework directives have played an important role in fostering this shift from more traditional, vertical governance to new, horizontal governance based on soft laws. Yet, the implementation of such laws and regulations is often only partial – often because of the lack of a clear monitoring and enforcement strategy, but also because of governments’ financial and human resources constraints. Strong overlaps of roles and competences among different government institutions remain, hampering effective implementation of water management. The tendency to centralisation of decision making persists, and actors’ involvement is scanty. The shift towards the use of demand side policies as opposed to supply side policies is not yet completed: yet, supply side policies are very costly, as they are based on greater mobilisation of financial resources. Full cost recovery pricing is not practiced widely. This reluctance to introduce full cost recovery pricing in developing countries may be due to ethical and moral considerations, but in developed countries it is often associated with strong lobbying power of interest groups. This study was supported by funding under the Sixth Research Framework of the European Union within the project "Network on Governance, Science and Technology for Sustainable Water Resource Management in the Mediterranean- The role of Dss tools” (NOSTRUM-Dss, contract number INCO-CT-2004-509158).Integrated Water Resources Management, Decision Support Systems, Environmental Governance

Sociotechnical Envelopment of Artificial Intelligence: An Approach to Organizational Deployment of Inscrutable Artificial Intelligence Systems

The paper presents an approach for implementing inscrutable (i.e., nonexplainable) artificial intelligence (AI) such as neural networks in an accountable and safe manner in organizational settings. Drawing on an exploratory case study and the recently proposed concept of envelopment, it describes a case of an organization successfully “enveloping” its AI solutions to balance the performance benefits of flexible AI models with the risks that inscrutable models can entail. The authors present several envelopment methods—establishing clear boundaries within which the AI is to interact with its surroundings, choosing and curating the training data well, and appropriately managing input and output sources—alongside their influence on the choice of AI models within the organization. This work makes two key contributions: It introduces the concept of sociotechnical envelopment by demonstrating the ways in which an organization’s successful AI envelopment depends on the interaction of social and technical factors, thus extending the literature’s focus beyond mere technical issues. Secondly, the empirical examples illustrate how operationalizing a sociotechnical envelopment enables an organization to manage the trade-off between low explainability and high performance presented by inscrutable models. These contributions pave the way for more responsible, accountable AI implementations in organizations, whereby humans can gain better control of even inscrutable machine-learning models

Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action

China’s road to sustainability has attracted global attention. Since the “Reform & Opening Up” policy, China’s rapid pace of both urbanization and industrialization has made its being the second largest economy but meantime a heavy environmental price has been paid over the past few decades for addressing the economic developmental target. Today, as the biggest developing country, China needs to take more responsibilities for constructing its local ecological-civilization society as well as for addressing the global challenges such as climate change, resources scary and human beings well-fare; therefore, we need to have deeper understandings into China’s way to sustainability at very different levels, both spatially and structurally, concerns ranging from generating sustainable household livelihoods to global climate change, from developing technological applications to generate institutional changes. In this spirit, this publication, “Sustainability in China: Bridging Global Knowledge with Local Action” aims to investigate the intended and spontaneous issues concerning China’s road to sustainability in a combined top-down and bottom-up manner, linking international knowledge to local-based studies

Performance in Consumer Financial Services Organizations: Framework and Results from the Pilot Study

Financial services comprise over 4 percent of the gross domestic product of the United States and employ over 5.4 million people. By offering vehicles for investment of savings, extension of credit and risk management, they fuel the modern capitalistic society. While the essential functions performed by the organizations that make up the financial services industry have remained relatively constant over the past several decades, the structure of the industry has undergone dramatic change. Liberalized domestic regulation, intensified international competition, rapid innovations in new financial instruments and the explosive growth in information technology fuel this change. With this change has come increasing pressure on managers and workers to dramatically improve productivity and financial performance. This paper summarizes the first year of a multi-year effort to understand the drivers of performance in financial services organizations. Financial services are the largest single consumer of information technology in the economy, investing $38.7 billion dollars in 1991 (National Research Council, 1994). While this investment has had a profound effect on the structure of the industry and the products it provides, its effect on financial performance of the industry remains elusive. Why this "productivity paradox" (Brynjolfsson and Hitt,1993) exists is an important part of this project. The authors describe the differences in productivity in services from manufacturing. In the service world, the consumer co-produces the product with the firm, ofte nadding labor to the creation of the service. In addition, the scope of the service enterprise typically is quite vast, with components of the service production process being both producers and deliverers of the service. In addition, the quality of the services provided is forever changing. Thus, the authors suggest that productivity gains from human resource improvements or technology investments may not show up in standard performance measures, but may rather be used to improve the quality of the service provided. What appears to be a stagnation in productivity may actually be an increase in value delivered to the customer. Delivering value to the customer may provide the institution with sales opportunities and much needed information about the institution's customer base. The pilot survey conducted by the authors examines the relationship between technological advancement and the relational part of service delivery by studying time spent with the customer in relation to technological sophistication and time spent on the entire delivery process. The authors adopt the view that processes are the central "technology" of an organization. As with any technology, the process must be maintained. After a process has reached its useful life, it should be scrapped or rebuilt. Thus, the authors suggest that researchers should take a life-cycle view of processes when undertaking efficiency studies. The authors rely heavily on a process-oriented methodology in their analysis of performance drivers in financial services. The study does not focus on traditional measures of productivity or financial performance. Rather, the authors base comparisons on intermediary measures which evaluate the drivers of performance from the perspective of all participants in the co-productive process. This pilot study starts with consumer financial services and in particular, retail banking. The authors review the relevant literature on financial services performance and then propose a conceptual framework for the study. The framework assumes that industry conditions and firm strategy are given. The authors focus is to examine the components of performance that managers can affect, given a strategy and industry operating conditions. Thus, their initial focus is guided by their desire to direct attention to issues of implementation and their effects on performance. The authors attempt to bridge the gap between traditional productivity measures and difficult-to-measure financial performance by developing a set of value creation components as an intermediary set of performance indicators. Based on pilot interviews, these indicators reflect effective performance in ways that are more meaningful than the more traditionalmeasure of productivity, as they are the goals toward which bank management strives. The key values the study attempts to measure are customer convenience, precision, efficient cost structure, adaptability and market penetration. The survey conducted by the research team benchmarks two types of management decisions that are presumed to drive these outcomes. The first set of management choices are implementation choices, human resources choices, technology implementation processes and product/servicedelivery processes. The second set of choices relates to management infrastructure, resource management processes, the information architecture of the firm, the performance management and control systems and the organizational structure of the firm. Based on interviews and the work of previous productivity studies, the research team developed a pilot survey focused on the practices of the functional areas, business lines, product groups and the retail distribution network. The pilot measured the outcomes and choices made by managers in seven large commercial banks. The pilot results will lead to a large scale survey of practices for the entire retail banking sector. Based on early pilot results, the researchers concluded that managers in consumer financial services firms typically assume that improvement in one area of performance is largely at the expense of decreased performance in other areas. The authors believe this is only partly true. Based on the pilot results, the authors believe that better management practices can move outcomes in a number of areas simultaneously. Through effective process design, use of technology and management of human resources, institutions can improve performance in multiple categories. The successful financial services organizations will be those which find processes and practices that enhance multiple measures of performance. The results of the large scale survey of practices will be available in early 1996.

HSE management system and efficiency evaluation of construction projects

The strategy of Belt and Road Initiative actively advocates the establishment of economic partnerships with countries along the belt and road, and makes infrastructure construction a field for preferential development. It provides good development opportunities for domestic and foreign engineering contracting enterprises. The "Strategic Implementation Guidance Document" mentions that infrastructure construction and operation should be green and efficient. However, most state owned engineering contracting enterprises do not attach importance to HSE management, which obviously affects the engineering efficiency and hinders the sustainable development of enterprises. However, China's engineering contracting enterprises pay less attention to HSE management, which obviously affects project efficiency and hinders the sustainable develop ment of enterprises. This study takes a typical large project contracting enterprise (Enterprise A) in China as the research object, adopts the SWOT analysis method, analyzes the weakness of project management at the organization level, and consummates th e organization level project HSE management system of the enterprise at the organization layer and the project layer. Through the enterprise interview, questionnaire design and investigation, this study puts forward the suitable indicators and methods of H SE management performance evaluation, and verifies the effectiveness of the methods through the empirical analysis of eight projects. Then, this study proposes incorporating the project HSE management performance into the comprehensive evaluation methods o f project efficiency. The empirical analysis shows that the HSE management system proposed in this study at the organization layer and at the project layer can improve the HSE management performance of the project. Project HSE management performance has a positive impact on project efficiency, that is, the more enterprises attach importance to project HSE management, the higher the degree of completion of project objectives. The above research results are helpful to improve project management system at the organizational level and enhance the competitiveness of project contracting enterprises.A estratégia da "Belt and Road Initiative" defende ativamente o estabelecimento de parcerias económicas com os países ao longo de uma determinada faixa e faz da construção de infraestruturas um campo preferencial para desenvolvimento. Este campo fornece boas oportunidades de desenvolvimento para as empresas de engenharia nacionais e estrangeiras. O "Documento de Orientação de Implementação Estratégica" menciona que a construção e operação de infraestruturas deve ser eficiente e sustentável. No entanto, a grande maioria das empresas públicas contratadas não atribuem a devida importância aos sistemas de gestão de saúde e segurança (HSE) o que, obviamente, afecta a eficiência da engenharia e dificulta o desenvolvimento sustentável das empresas. As empresas privadas chinesas de engenharia ignoram a gestão HSE o que, obviamente, afecta, também, a eficiência dos projetos de sustentabilidade das empresas. Neste trabalho foi considerada uma grande empresa Chinesa de contratação (Empresa A) na China como referência de pesquisa, que adota a análise swot, analisa as fraquezas na gestão de projetos ao nível da organização e consuma a gestão de projetos em HSE ao nível da organização e do projeto em si. Através de entrevistas, questionários e investigação, este projeto apresenta os indicadores e métodos a dequados de avaliação de desempenho e verifica a efetividade dos métodos através da análise empírica de oito projetos. Em suma, este projeto propõe incorporar métodos de avaliação da eficiência através dos indicadores de gestão do HSE. A análise empírica demonstrou que o sistema proposto de gestão HSE, ao nível da organização e de projeto, pode aumentar efetivamente a gestão de performance do HSE em projeto. A gestão da performance do projeto HSE teve um impacto positivo na eficiência do projeto, ou seja, quanto mais as empresas atribuirem importância à gestão de projetos HSE maior será o nível de conclusão dos objetivos sustentáveis do projeto. Os resultados deste projeto são úteis para melhorar o sistema de gestão de projetos ao nível organizacional e aum entar a competitividade das empresas na contratação de projectos