Using big data for customer centric marketing

This chapter deliberates on “big data” and provides a short overview of business intelligence and emerging analytics. It underlines the importance of data for customer-centricity in marketing. This contribution contends that businesses ought to engage in marketing automation tools and apply them to create relevant, targeted customer experiences. Today’s business increasingly rely on digital media and mobile technologies as on-demand, real-time marketing has become more personalised than ever. Therefore, companies and brands are striving to nurture fruitful and long lasting relationships with customers. In a nutshell, this chapter explains why companies should recognise the value of data analysis and mobile applications as tools that drive consumer insights and engagement. It suggests that a strategic approach to big data could drive consumer preferences and may also help to improve the organisational performance.peer-reviewe

Indicators for managing human centred manufacturing

Establishing indicators for managing human factors (HF) aspects in the design of production systems remains a challenge. We address the problem in two dimensions – firstly, what aspects of HF are to be considered, and secondly, where in the development process HF is to be measured. In these dimensions a large number of HF metrics are possible in the perceptual, cognitive, physical and psychosocial domains of HF. The relevance of these measures to injury, productivity, quality and organizational strategy continue to be poorly understood. From this perspective we make propositions on the need for: 1) strategic HF metrics selection, 2) metrics application throughout the development process, 3) predictive ‘virtual’ HF metrics approaches, 4) metrics based design guidelines, 5) connecting metrics with design choices and strategies, 6) integrating HF metrics within existing approaches, 7) continuous improvement of the metrics system, and 8) the need to evaluate metrics system quality

Virtuality in human supervisory control: Assessing the effects of psychological and social remoteness

Virtuality would seem to offer certain advantages for human supervisory control. First, it could provide a physical analogue of the 'real world' environment. Second, it does not require control room engineers to be in the same place as each other. In order to investigate these issues, a low-fidelity simulation of an energy distribution network was developed. The main aims of the research were to assess some of the psychological concerns associated with virtual environments. First, it may result in the social isolation of the people, and it may have dramatic effects upon the nature of the work. Second, a direct physical correspondence with the 'real world' may not best support human supervisory control activities. Experimental teams were asked to control an energy distribution network. Measures of team performance, group identity and core job characteristics were taken. In general terms, the results showed that teams working in the same location performed better than team who were remote from one another

A Case Study for Business Integration as a Service

This paper presents Business Integration as a Service (BIaaS) to allow two services to work together in the Cloud to achieve a streamline process. We illustrate this integration using two services; Return on Investment (ROI) Measurement as a Service (RMaaS) and Risk Analysis as a Service (RAaaS) in the case study at the University of Southampton. The case study demonstrates the cost-savings and the risk analysis achieved, so two services can work as a single service. Advanced techniques are used to demonstrate statistical services and 3D Visualisation services under the remit of RMaaS and Monte Carlo Simulation as a Service behind the design of RAaaS. Computational results are presented with their implications discussed. Different types of risks associated with Cloud adoption can be calculated easily, rapidly and accurately with the use of BIaaS. This case study confirms the benefits of BIaaS adoption, including cost reduction and improvements in efficiency and risk analysis. Implementation of BIaaS in other organisations is also discussed. Important data arising from the integration of RMaaS and RAaaS are useful for management and stakeholders of University of Southampton

Enabling Adaptive Grid Scheduling and Resource Management

Wider adoption of the Grid concept has led to an increasing amount of federated computational, storage and visualisation resources being available to scientists and researchers. Distributed and heterogeneous nature of these resources renders most of the legacy cluster monitoring and management approaches inappropriate, and poses new challenges in workflow scheduling on such systems. Effective resource utilisation monitoring and highly granular yet adaptive measurements are prerequisites for a more efficient Grid scheduler. We present a suite of measurement applications able to monitor per-process resource utilisation, and a customisable tool for emulating observed utilisation models. We also outline our future work on a predictive and probabilistic Grid scheduler. The research is undertaken as part of UK e-Science EPSRC sponsored project SO-GRM (Self-Organising Grid Resource Management) in cooperation with BT

Adaptive Traffic Fingerprinting for Darknet Threat Intelligence

Darknet technology such as Tor has been used by various threat actors for organising illegal activities and data exfiltration. As such, there is a case for organisations to block such traffic, or to try and identify when it is used and for what purposes. However, anonymity in cyberspace has always been a domain of conflicting interests. While it gives enough power to nefarious actors to masquerade their illegal activities, it is also the cornerstone to facilitate freedom of speech and privacy. We present a proof of concept for a novel algorithm that could form the fundamental pillar of a darknet-capable Cyber Threat Intelligence platform. The solution can reduce anonymity of users of Tor, and considers the existing visibility of network traffic before optionally initiating targeted or widespread BGP interception. In combination with server HTTP response manipulation, the algorithm attempts to reduce the candidate data set to eliminate client-side traffic that is most unlikely to be responsible for server-side connections of interest. Our test results show that MITM manipulated server responses lead to expected changes received by the Tor client. Using simulation data generated by shadow, we show that the detection scheme is effective with false positive rate of 0.001, while sensitivity detecting non-targets was 0.016+-0.127. Our algorithm could assist collaborating organisations willing to share their threat intelligence or cooperate during investigations.Comment: 26 page

A value oriented conceptual model for innovation in local government

The political rhetoric that accompanied the introduction of eGovernment expected it to produce innovation in the way government agencies conducted themselves with citizen and business alike. It was assumed that innovation was both "good" and inevitable. This paper challenges these assumptions and presents a more realistic model of how innovation might occurs in UK local government. The model is supported by anecdotal evidence, literature and a recent study of eGoverment achievement in the UK - VIEGO. A key element in the model is the notion of innovation value