A Conceptual Framework for Business Intelligence Based on Activities Monitoring Systems

Abstract: Most enterprises have spent an enormous amount of money and time, managing information about their business elements. Such information is often scattered in disparate legacy, operational and enterprise information systems, appointing the aggregation of valuable information and decision-making support quite difficult. Business Intelligence (BI) and their associated processes and tools are helping enterprises to solve this problem. This paper presents the principles and challenges of BI domain and evaluates its current approaches. The limitations of the above approaches will provide the basis for the design and development of a framework that pursues real time insight to business information, as well as, instantaneous awareness and appropriate response to critical business events across the entire enterprise. The proposed framework is based on Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) systems paradigm and attempts to create a unified enterprise-reporting environment. It was applied in a large Northern Greek manufacturing company in the last six months

Derivación del Proceso de Explotación de Información desde el Modelado del Negocio

Existen metodologías de explotación de información que destacan la importancia del planeamiento de una elicitación de requerimientos a lo largo de todo el proyecto de una manera ordenada, documentada, consistente y trazable. Sin embargo, dadas las características de este tipo de proyectos, el abordaje que propone la ingeniería de requerimientos clásica no es aplicable al proceso de identificar el problema de explotación de información, ni inferir el proceso que lo resuelve a partir del modelado del dominio del negocio. En este trabajo se propone un procedimiento basado en formalismos de Ingeniería del Conocimiento que permite derivar el proceso de explotación de información a partir de las representaciones del dominio de negocio y del problema de explotación de información

Business intelligence for sustainable competitive advantage: the case of telecommunications companies in Malaysia

The concept of Business Intelligence (BI) as an essential competitive tool has been widely emphasized in the strategic management literature. Yet the sustainability of the firms’ competitive advantage provided by BI capability is not well explained. To fill this gap, this study attempts to develop a model for successful BI deployment and empirically examines the association between BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage.Taking the telecommunications industry in Malaysia as a case example, the research particularly focuses on the influencing perceptions held by telecommunications decision makers and executives on factors that impact successful BI deployment. The research further investigates the relationship between successful BI deployment and sustainable competitive advantage of the telecommunications organizations. Another important aim of this study is to determine the effect of moderating factors such as organization culture, business strategy and use of BI tools on BI deployment and the sustainability of firm’s competitive advantage.This research uses combination of theoretical foundation of resource-based theory and diffusion of innovation theory to examine BI success and its relationship with firm’s sustainability. The research adopts the positivist paradigm and a two-phase sequential mixed method consisting of qualitative and quantitative approaches are employed. A tentative research model is developed first based on extensive literature review. Qualitative field study then is carried out to fine tune the initial research model. Findings from the qualitative method are also used to develop measures and instruments for the next phase of quantitative method. A survey is carried out with sample of business analysts and decision makers in telecommunications firms and is analyzed by Partial Least Square-based Structural Equation Modeling.The findings revealed that some internal resources of the organizations such as BI governance and the perceptions of BI’s characteristics influence the successful deployment of BI. Organizations that practice good BI governance with strong moral and financial support from upper management will have better chance in realizing their dreams of having successful BI initiatives in place. The scope of BI governance includes providing sufficient support and commitment in BI funding and implementation, laying out proper BI infrastructure and staffing and establishing a corporate-wide policy and procedures regarding BI. The perceptions about the characteristics of BI such as its relative advantage, complexity, compatibility and observability are also significant in ensuring BI success. It thus implied that the executives’ positive perceptions towards BI initiatives are deemed necessary. Moreover, the most important results of this study indicated that with BI successfully deployed, executives would use the knowledge provided for their necessary actions in sustaining the organizations’ competitive advantage in terms of economics, social and environmental issues.The BI model well explained how BI was deployed in Malaysian telecommunications companies. This study thus contributes significantly to the existing literature that will assist future BI researchers especially in achieving sustainable competitive advantage. In particular, the model will help practitioners to consider the resources that they are likely to consider when deploying BI. Finally, the applications of this study can be extended through further adaptation in other industries and various geographic contexts

The Key 2002

Bowling Green State University 2002 Key Yearbookhttps://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/yearbooks/1162/thumbnail.jp

Users’ information seeking behaviours, their interactions and experience with the academic library web interface

The websites provided by academic libraries are challenged by the rapid developments in information and communication technology (ICT). These developments have created diverse options and channels for information sources that can be accessed easily by users through the Internet. Because of these alternate sources, many users no longer physically visit the library. Instead, they depend on the library’s website to obtain information online, or they use Internet searches to obtain the information they require.This research addresses the following question: How do the users of academic libraries search for information and interact with the libraries’ web interfaces? The research draws on models from the disciplines of information-seeking behaviour (ISB) and human-computer interaction (HCI). A unified model based on the models in ISB and HCI is created and investigated. In addition, a qualitative study has been conducted to investigate users’ information needs, information-seeking behaviours, and difficulties and experiences with the websites of academic libraries. Interpretive case studies were conducted at two universities, one in the UK and one in Kuwait. Qualitative data were collected in interviews, focus groups, and observations of diverse groups of library users. Furthermore, a content analysis approach was applied to analyse the data.The findings revealed seven steps taken in searching for information and interacting with academic libraries’ web interfaces, but exposed variance in the order in which users executed these steps. The findings also revealed several issues regarding the use of library websites to search for information. In particular, these concerned the complexity of finding information, the content organisation of the library websites and the use of incomprehensible terms on the library websites. As a result, the library users relied heavily on Google to find information. The thesis concludes with suggested guidelines for how academic library interfaces can best support the way users search for information, as well as their interactions, experiences and needs.Keywords: information-seeking behaviour, human-computer interaction, users’ needs, user experience, academic library website, usability, content analysis, postgraduate students, academics, library staff, Kuwait, UK

Procesos de explotación de información basados en sistemas inteligentes

En esta tesis se caracterizan los procesos de explotación de información asociados a los problemas de inteligencia de negocio: descubrimiento de reglas de comportamiento, descubrimiento de grupos, descubrimiento de atributos significativos (atributos importantes para el entorno de negocio que se aplica), descubrimiento de reglas de pertenencia a grupos y ponderación de reglas de comportamiento o de pertenencia a grupos. Se identifican las tecnologías de sistemas inteligentes que pueden utilizarse para los procesos caracterizados, validando estos procesos a través de casos aceptados por la comunidad internacional. Se proponen las funcionalidades de un ambiente de explotación de información que integra las tecnologías identificadas. Este ambiente administra en forma unificada los distintos procesos explotación de información que requieren las tecnologías referenciadas.This PhD thesis proposes a characterization of data mining processes associated to the following business intelligence problems: behavior rules discovering, group discovering, significant attributes discovering, group belonging rules discovering, behavior rules and group belonging rules weighting. The intelligent systems technologies that may be used in the characterized data mining processes are identified. Processes are validated through cases of study accepted by international community. Data mining environment functionalities which integrates the intelligent systems technology identified is proposed. This environment is able to manage in unified way the different data mining process that uses the technologies previously referenced.Facultad de Informátic

INSYDER - An Information Assistant for Business Intelligence

The WWW is the most important resouree for external business information. This paper presents a tool called INSYDER, an information assistant for finding and analysing business information from the WWW. INSYDER is a system using different agents for crawling the Web, evaluating and visualising the results. These agents, the used visualisafions, and a first summary of user studies are presented. Keywords Uls/visualization organizing and displaying retrieval results, (semi) automated search assistants, user studies