Towards the realisation of an integratated decision support environment for organisational decision making

Traditional decision support systems are based on the paradigm of a single decision maker working at a stand‐alone computer or terminal who has a specific decision to make with a specific goal in mind. Organizational decision support systems aim to support decision makers at all levels of an organization (from executive, middle management managers to operators), who have a variety of decisions to make, with different priorities, often in a distributed and dynamic environment. Such systems need to be designed and developed with extra functionality to meet the challenges such as collaborative working. This paper proposes an Integrated Decision Support Environment (IDSE) for organizational decision making. The IDSE distinguishes itself from traditional decision support systems in that it can flexibly configure and re‐configure its functions to support various decision applications. IDSE is an open software platform which allows its users to define their own decision processes and choose their own exiting decision tools to be integrated into the platform. The IDSE is designed and developed based on distributed client/server networking, with a multi‐tier integration framework for consistent information exchange and sharing, seamless process co‐ordination and synchronisation, and quick access to packaged and legacy systems. The prototype of the IDSE demonstrates good performance in agile response to fast changing decision situations

Intelligent student engagement management : applying business intelligence in higher education

Advances in emerging ICT have enabled organisations to develop innovative ways to intelligently collect data that may not be possible before. However, this leads to the explosion of data and unprecedented challenges in making strategic and effective use of available data. This research-in-progress paper presents an action research focusing on applying business intelligence (BI) in a UK higher education institution that has developed a student engagement tracking system (SES) for student engagement management. The current system serves merely as a data collection and processing system, which needs significant enhancement for better decision support. This action research aims to enhance the current SETS with BI solutions and explore its strategic use. The research attempts to follow socio-technical approach in its effort to make the BI application a success. Progress and experience so far has revealed interesting findings on advancing our understanding and research in organisation-wide BI for better decision-making

Connecting with the Y Generation: an analysis of factors associated with the academic performance of foundation IS students

[Abstract]: A strategy to overcome challenges associated with teaching a foundation Information Systems (IS) course to large cohorts of Business students has been highly successful. To further refine the strategy, a survey was conducted to better understand attitudes and computer experience of the students. This study revealed that factors such as gender, age, study mode, type of secondary school attended, level of previous computing studies, perceived knowledge, frequency of use and attitudes towards using computers did not predict academic performance. Academic performance and characteristics of students belonging to the Y Generation were also compared with those of the Older Generation. Differences between these generations were found to exist in relation to perceived knowledge, level of previous computing studies, and experience of formal computing studies. It is imperative that educators be aware of the characteristics of the growing Y Generation students. This research has raised critical curriculum issues for the development of foundation IS pedagogy

A conceptual model for EAI adoption in an e-government environment

The non-integrated nature of Local Government Authority (LGA) Information Systems (IS) is strongly associated with the inconsistency and duplication of data, reduction in data integrity and quality, and high operational and maintenance cost. The reason is that legacy IS within the LGAs are usually tailored to support particular business processes and functions and are as a consequence usually difficult to integrate. This gives rise to a strong need for an integrated architecture that facilitates reuse of existing applications and flexibly implementing business processes across the functional boundaries within the LGAs. This paper examines a potentially important area of IS integration in the United Kingdom (UK) LGAs through Enterprise Application Integration (EAI) technology. A review of the literature indicates that EAI has been a focal technology for several organisations in solving their integration problems. However, is new in the LGAs; thus research literature around it is limited. Yet the effect of IS integration using EAI technology remains under explored, as little research has been conducted to comprehend the LGAs perception of integration that influences their decisions and actions. The author demonstrates that it is of high importance to investigate this area within LGAs and result in research that contributes towards successful EAI adoption. Therefore, resulting in the development of a conceptual model that may be used to assist the government decision-making process for EAI adoption in an electronic Government (e-Government) environment

Big data in higher education: an action research on managing student engagement with business intelligence

This research aims to explore the value of Big Data in student engagement management. It presents an action research on applying BI in a UK higher education institution that has developed and implemented a student engagement tracking system (SES) for better student engagement management. The SES collects data from various sources, including RFID tracking devices across many locations in the campus and student online activities. This public funded research project has enhanced the current SES with BI solutions and raised awareness on the value of the Big Data in improving student experience. The action research concerns with the organizational wide development and deployment of Intelligent Student Engagement System involving a diverse range of stakeholders. The activities undertaken to date have revealed interesting findings and implications for advancing our understanding and research in leveraging the benefit of the Big Data in Higher Education from a socio-technical perspective

The INCF Digital Atlasing Program: Report on Digital Atlasing Standards in the Rodent Brain

The goal of the INCF Digital Atlasing Program is to provide the vision and direction necessary to make the rapidly growing collection of multidimensional data of the rodent brain (images, gene expression, etc.) widely accessible and usable to the international research community. This Digital Brain Atlasing Standards Task Force was formed in May 2008 to investigate the state of rodent brain digital atlasing, and formulate standards, guidelines, and policy recommendations.

Our first objective has been the preparation of a detailed document that includes the vision and specific description of an infrastructure, systems and methods capable of serving the scientific goals of the community, as well as practical issues for achieving
the goals. This report builds on the 1st INCF Workshop on Mouse and Rat Brain Digital Atlasing Systems (Boline et al., 2007, _Nature Preceedings_, doi:10.1038/npre.2007.1046.1) and includes a more detailed analysis of both the current state and desired state of digital atlasing along with specific recommendations for achieving these goals

Environments to support collaborative software engineering

With increasing globalisation of software production, widespread use of software components, and the need to maintain software systems over long periods of time, there has been a recognition that better support for collaborative working is needed by software engineers. In this paper, two approaches to developing improved system support for collaborative software engineering are described: GENESIS and OPHELIA. As both projects are moving towards industrial trials and eventual publicreleases of their systems, this exercise of comparing and contrasting our approaches has provided the basis for future collaboration between our projects particularly in carrying out comparative studies of our approaches in practical use

Towards improved performance and interoperability in distributed and physical union catalogues

Purpose of this paper: This paper details research undertaken to determine the key differences in the performance of certain centralised (physical) and distributed (virtual) bibliographic catalogue services, and to suggest strategies for improving interoperability and performance in, and between, physical and virtual models. Design/methodology/approach: Methodically defined searches of a centralised catalogue service and selected distributed catalogues were conducted using the Z39.50 information retrieval protocol, allowing search types to be semantically defined. The methodology also entailed the use of two workshops comprising systems librarians and cataloguers to inform suggested strategies for improving performance and interoperability within both environments. Findings: Technical interoperability was permitted easily between centralised and distributed models, however the various individual configurations permitted only limited semantic interoperability. Significant prescription in cataloguing and indexing guidelines, greater participation in the Program for Collaborative Cataloging (PCC), consideration of future 'FRBR' migration, and greater disclosure to end users are some of the suggested strategies to improve performance and semantic interoperability. Practical implications: This paper informs the LIS research community and union catalogue administrators, but also has numerous practical implications for those establishing distributed systems based on Z39.50 and SRW, as well as those establishing centralised systems. What is original/value of the paper?: The paper moves the discussion of Z39.50 based systems away from anecdotal evidence and provides recommendations based on testing and is intimately informed by the UK cataloguing and systems librarian community

Towards Design Principles for Data-Driven Decision Making: An Action Design Research Project in the Maritime Industry

Data-driven decision making (DDD) refers to organizational decision-making practices that emphasize the use of data and statistical analysis instead of relying on human judgment only. Various empirical studies provide evidence for the value of DDD, both on individual decision maker level and the organizational level. Yet, the path from data to value is not always an easy one and various organizational and psychological factors mediate and moderate the translation of data-driven insights into better decisions and, subsequently, effective business actions. The current body of academic literature on DDD lacks prescriptive knowledge on how to successfully employ DDD in complex organizational settings. Against this background, this paper reports on an action design research study aimed at designing and implementing IT artifacts for DDD at one of the largest ship engine manufacturers in the world. Our main contribution is a set of design principles highlighting, besides decision quality, the importance of model comprehensibility, domain knowledge, and actionability of results

Enterprise portals: addressing the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems

Enterprise portals are being viewed as the next generation application platform of choice, offering benefits over both client/server and thin client arrangements. By providing a mediating layer between the information applications and resources of the organisation and the individuals using them, enterprise portals appear to provide a unique context to allow both the organisational and individual perspectives of information systems to be addressed. This study seeks to examine these often competing perspectives of information systems by using an exploratory empirical survey to investigate the actual deployment of enterprise portals within a range of different organisations. It is found that both the individual and organisational benefits that enterprise portals can offer appear to have been recognised, and coherent sets of services addressing each of these perspectives are being developed. Consistent with diffusion and acceptance of technology models, organisations appear to be commencing their portal developments with services that will ensure utilisation by individuals, and are subsequently seeking to realise organisational level benefits