Searching for Herbert Simon

Since Herbert Simon’s seminal work (Simon, 1957) on bounded rationality researchers and practitioners have sought the “holy grail” of computer-supported decision-making. A recent wave of interest in “business analytics” (BA) has elevated interest in data-driven analytical decision making to the forefront. While reporting and prediction via business intelligence (BI) systems has been an important component to business decision making for some time, BA broadens its scope and potential impact in business decision making further by moving the focus to prescription. The authors see BA as the end-to-end process integrating the production through consumption of the data, and making more extensive use of the data through heavily automated, integrated and advanced predictive and prescriptive tools in ways that better support, or replace, the human decision maker. With the advent of “big data”, BA already extends beyond internal databases to external and unstructured data that is publicly produced and consumed data with new analytical techniques to better enable business decision makers in a connected world. BI research in the future will be broader in scope, and the challenge is to make effective use of a wide range of data with varying degrees of structure, and from sources both internal and external to the organization. In this paper, we suggest ways that this broader focus of BA will also affect future BI research streams

Information technology supporting healthcare and social care services: an e-marketplace case study

The authors are developing a pilot project for a Municipality in the North of Portugal, envisaging the definition and implementation of an e-marketplace for healthcare and social services, in order to facilitate the interaction between healthcare and social services professionals and people with special needs (or their relatives). Based on the results of a survey on user needs analysis and expectations conducted in 2011, the paper discusses the relevance and interest of such platforms and the main drivers and motivations of the population for using such services, as well as which services would motivate citizens to use the platform. The results of the study will be used to select the products and services perceived to be the most desired by the potential users. The paper thus makes three main contributions: (1) the results of the study confirm the interest and the perceived potential of such a service, from the end-users perspective; (2) the findings support the advantage of expanding this pilot project to a full scale implementation; and (3) the performed analysis improves our understanding of the relations between the characteristics of the inquired population and the perceived interest in such platforms.FCT -Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia(PEst-C/CTM/LA0025/2013