Prediction Analysis Research Articles

Business Intelligence For Educational Purpose

AbstractThe paper follows three main directions: business intelligence – as a software tool, companies – as an application field and top management – as target of intelligent efforts. From this symbiosis does result an advantage, scientific and data based educational tool, having the goal to give the students a tool to explore data collections and analysis methods in order to improve the management of a company and forecast its evolution. The purpose of Business Intelligence (BI) software is to help the firms on acquiring knowledge about highlights and dangerous trends, to observe the connections and to forecast the future market evolutions. From this perspective, we consider that students need to learn theory and practical application about BI. After an overview of the BI main concepts, we choose to use the facilities of Jaspersoft BI software; to model the most frequently used analysis requirements, displaying the most relevant data and key indicators, following the steps of a BI system.

Business Intelligence Fusion Based on Multi-agent and Complex Network

A fusion method of heterogeneous business intelligence (BI) technologies is put forward, named agent-network. This method treats BI system as a complex network composed of agents as its nodes. One agent is a unit of intelligence resource (IR) representing a computing model or an algorithm. A BI technology is a group of agents. Three basic mechanisms are discussed in detail. The IR aggregating and optimizing mechanisms can improve BI software to be a dynamical and flexible system. New technologies can be added into BI software continuously and less value existing technologies can be deleted from it. The IR using mechanism can always let the BI system to select an or a group of optimal technology (technologies) to respond to every specific user request by using some marketing mechanism such as negotiation, bidding and auction. The IR optimizing mechanism can keep the best agent and delete inferior agent by the performance of agents. The BI architecture is proposed based on our method. Different enterprises can customize their own BI service at a lower cost by using our method. In the future, we will develop a prototype software system based on our agent-network method to improve the decision level of enterprise.

The Impact of Business Intelligence Recognition on Goodwill Valuation

The purpose of this paper is to determine the value of business intelligence software in the adjusted net assets value used in the process of evaluating a company's goodwill. The paper starts with a literature based approach for asserting the added value brought by business intelligence software in a company which will be used as a support for proposing a new method of determining the adjusted net assets value. These new market value oriented approaches are benchmarked for a diverse sample consisting of both BVB and NYSE listed companies. The estimated result of this research is the determination of an adjusted net assets valuation method that will take into account the value of business intelligence software a company uses and correct its goodwill. The research presents an extensive literature review and adopts a positivist paradigm in evaluating the theoretically constructed method. It also consists of a critical approach of case studies presented by literature. The importance of this research is to provide the investors with a better way of valuating adjusted net assets and, as a consequence, a company's goodwill, which can lead to better investing, practices in the future. Also, this research can provide a new and improved tool for anyone who wishes to adapt their valuation instruments to the changes resulted from technological progress.

A business intelligence software made in Romania: A solution for Romanian companies during the economic crisis

The paper focuses on a modern prospective of IT&C sector. The methodology used is both quantitative and qualitative, and the results were obtained with the use of a questionnaire. Our purpose was to demonstrate some hypothesis concerning the size of the organization, the management method and the IT&C based decision. The study is limited to the SIVECO companies portfolio and has a high level of originality, such a study has been never conducted before for computer based advanced management methods implementation. The present interest of the approach consists in the powerful impact IT&C technologies have upon the development of nowadays organizations as well as upon the daily life of each individual; nevertheless, one should not ignore the special condition Romanian economy and especially Romanian society as a whole is confronted with during the current period.

Editorial note 2013 Vol 3 No 2

The sixth issue of JISIB marks the journal’s second anniversary. Again we are delighted to welcome contributions by academics from so many different countries, with so many different backgrounds. The academic contributions of our female authors continue to show also in this issue. If this issue should have one common theme it would be related to Brazil. It is not a special issue on Brazil, but we saw the possibility to include three articles which relates to the experience of competitive intelligence in this country. However, the first article by Sheila Wright, Christophe Bisson, and Alistair Duffy entitled “Competitive Intelligence and Information Technology Adoption of SMEs in Turkey: Diagnosing Current Performance and Identifying Barriers“ is on another topic and deals with SMEs need to improve intelligence-based output to decision-makers. Based on empirical findings the aim has been to identify and classify CI behaviour and attitudes of SMEs in Turkey.The second article by A.S.A. du Toit is entitled “Comparative Study of Competitive Intelligence Practices between Two Retail Banks in Brazil and South Africa” , where it is concluded that respondents in the bank in Brazil cope better with changes in the external environment.The next article by Zhanna Abzaltynova and Janice Williams entitled “Developments in Business Intelligence Software” is an evaluation of BI vendors and software with extensive rankings.The article by Francisco Carlos Paletta entitled “Brazil - Evolutions in CI and some aspects of a current scenario”, is a summary of research done on the introduction of competitive intelligence in Brazil. The article also gives a brief idea about its current status.In the opinion section we have included an article by Francisco Carlos Paletta and Nilson Dias Vieira Junior entitled “ICT Lifecycle and its Major Role in The Development of Strategic Intelligence”. It is an evaluation of the existing ICT framework for competitive intelligence in Brazil.As always we would first of all like to thank the authors for their contributions to this issue of JISIB.

Transactive memory systems as a collective filter for mitigating information overload in digitally enabled organizational groups

With the increasing processing power and plummeting costs of information and communication technologies, the ability of employees to ubiquitously access and disseminate information grows. However, emerging research shows that individuals are struggling to process information as fast as it arrives. The problem of information overload is a significant one for contemporary knowledge-intensive organizations because it can adversely affect productivity, decision making, and employee morale. To combat this problem, organizations often invest in technical solutions such as business intelligence software or semantic technologies. While such technical approaches can certainly aid in reducing information overload, less attention has been directed at understanding how collective behavior, and in particular transactive memory systems, might enhance the ability of organizations to cope with information overload. In this study, we ask whether (and, if so, how do) transactive memory systems act as a collective filter to enable organizational groups to mitigate the potential for information overload. We used social network analysis and interview evidence from the R&D departments of two high-technology firms in the life science industry and found that individuals spontaneously organized without any centralized control to create a collective filter. For example, we found that one set of individuals specialized in filtering external information into the group while another set specialized in filtering that information for internal use. We conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

Using the SSAV model to evaluate Business Intelligence Software

Choosing the right Business Intelligence (BI) software is critical to increasing productivity and effectiveness in organizations today. At the same time it is a very elaborating and complex process to choose the right software due to the fact that a large number of BI products exist on the market, which are quite different and updated frequently. The objective of this study is to develop and test a model for the evaluation of BI Software. The findings of the study revealed that it is difficult to declare what is the most competitive BI software as what is good for one user might not be good for another depending on their different business needs. Having said that the study initiated a new classification of BI Software vendors depending on the degree to which they comply with the functions in the Competitive Intelligence (CI) cycle. The software tested was divided into five categories: Fully complete, Complete, Semi Complete, Incomplete and Insubstantial. We conclude that the SSAV (Solberg Søilen, Amara, Vriens) Model Together with some proposed non technological variables and a classification developed can be used as a user's selection tool for deciding which BI Software to purchase.

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 2, NO 3 (2012)

JISIB has entered into an electronic licensing relationship with EBSCO Publishing. It has also been selected to appear in EBSCO’s Business Source Complete database, which according to the company publishes “Superior Academic Journals (…) with premium content of peer-reviewed, business related journals. “ JISIB now also fulfills the official criteria of Thomson Reuters to be cited in their ISI Web of Knowledge database. As such it has applied to be included in the database. However, by experience with other journals, we know this process can still take considerable time. After having had the journal’s first annual meeting for editors in December we would like to thank the old board members who are leaving and welcome the new ones. Most contributions continue to come from best papers from a number of conferences related to Intelligence Studies. Two out of five articles come from ECKM 2012, which was held 6-7 September in Cartagena, Spain. Track co-chairs for the Mini Track on Competitive Intelligence and KM was G. Scott Erickson, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY and Helen N. Rothberg, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York. Two other articles are revised versions of papers presented at ECIS, but not previously published in journals. The article by Helen N. Rothberg and G. Scott Ericksonis about how to benchmark competitive intelligence activities. The paper identifies and measures different circumstances in which knowledge development and knowledge protection can have greater or lesser importance for a company. The authors believe that the results will start to move scholarly work in the field into the new areas of macro studies and strategic choice. The article by Stéphan Goria is on board wargames for businesses. It also gives a broad background of this field of study with the history of wargames and numerous historical examples. Moreover Goria shows the benefits with wargames by creating a new game and testing it for a market situation which found place in France between Nintendo and Sony. The article by Yasmina Amara, Klaus Solberg Søilen and Dirk Vriens proposes a way to evaluate business intelligence software by introducing a new model, the SSAV model. The article by Marisela Rodriguez Salvador and Luis Francisco Salinas Casanova applies a Competitive Intelligence model to analyze Thermoplastics Elastomers (TE), a class of polymers, for a company in Mexico. The model shows numerous novel findings with important implications for the company. Finally, the article by Klaus Solberg Søilen and Anders Hasslinger show how vendors of Business Intelligence software try to differentiate themselves in this market.

Factors shaping vendor differentiation in the Business Intelligence software industry

This paper is investigating, through a mixed-method research combining interviews and an online survey, how BI vendors differentiate themselves when it comes to application integration, security issues and pricing strategies. The conclusion is that BI vendors differentiated themselves mainly by having individual definitions of what BI is. Buyers are therefore advised to compare vendors through the vendor’s definition of Business Intelligence. Security issues were mainly user centric and pricing strategies implied that vendors approach buyers in a similar way where they offered standardized software bundles that would require some degree of customization in order for the buyer to derive the maximum benefit from the applications. It can be deduced from the obtained results that most competitive BI vendors are acting more homogenous towards buyers when they offer their products and handle customers, compared to niche BI vendors.

An evaluation of Business Intelligence Software systems in SMEs – a case study

This article proposes a simple model for evaluating the performance of Business Intelligence software systems based on what companies themselves find to be most important; efficiency, user friendliness, overall satisfaction, price and adaptability. Companies want to know the different systems used, why they are used and how effective they are for different tasks. They are also concerned about the systems’ compatibilities. The study builds on a deep interview with eight Swedish SMEs. The results show what terms are used by users, how they have solved their information needs and what problems arise in each company. It also shows that the decisions about what system to use are related to the experience specific individuals have had in other companies.

EDITORIAL NOTE VOL 2, NO 2 (2012)

The third issue of JISIB marks the journal’s first anniversary. Again we are delighted to welcome contributions by academics from all over the world, from so many different backgrounds. We also delighted to have contributions from a large number of female authors. This together shows, we believe, that the field of intelligence studies has a truly global reach.Most contributions continue to come from best papers from a number of conferences related to Intelligence Studies. For the articles in this issue we would like to thank in particular our American Editor, Prof. G. Scott Erickson. Four out of six articles this time come from ECKM 2012, which was held 6-7 September in Cartagena, Spain. Track co-chairs for the Mini Track on Competitive Intelligence and KM was G. Scott Erickson, Ithaca College, Ithaca, NY and Helen N. Rothberg, Marist College, Poughkeepsie, New York.The article by Brigitte Gay shows how graphs can be used to illustrate and understand relations between organizations and companies. It illustrates well the degree to which the field of Competitive Intelligence relies heavily today on the development of new software. The article by Scott Ericson and Helen Rothberg clarifies much around the importance of knowledge assets and the study of Knowledge Management with that of Competitive Intelligence. Few have done more to understand this area than these two authors. Their findings have also been published in a new book this year, “Intelligence in action” (Palgrave Macmillan). The contribution by Jihene Chebbi Ghannay and Zeineb Ben Ammar Mamlouk Zeineb is a literature review that shows the same interdependence between CI and KM. The article by Olivier Mamavi shows what you can do with graphs to identify and understand networks for problems containing big data, in this case companies who have obtained French procurement contracts. The article by Gabriela López, Steve Eldridge, Salomón Montejano and Patricia Silva shows how to improve supply chain knowledge by a continuous evaluation and contextualization of a company’s own practices. The last article by Mattias Nyblom, Jenny Behrami, Tung Nikkilä and Klaus Solberg Søilen is an investigation into what kind of Business Intelligence software is used by SMEs, why, and how companies evaluate their systems. As such its aim is to narrow a gap between theory and practice.On behalf of the Editorial Board,Sincerely Yours,Dr. Klaus Solberg Søilen

Customers’ Expectations and Needs in the Business Intelligence Software Market

This paper aims to find out what companies desire when choosing a Business Intelligence (BI) system. We look at what their needs are and what they expect and understand from this software system, which can make them work more efficient and gain better knowledge about the business they are in. A web questionnaire was used for 67 Swedish companies from various industries. The results are summarized and analyzed in cross tables for comparison. A model called The PET-model of BI implementation was created as a result of the theoretical findings. The model is used to finalize the results and the conclusions of the paper. The paper provides an argument for and an analysis of what is expected from a valuable BI Software Solution. It provides relevant facts about companies’ BI usage habits, which again is a guideline for BI software product development.

The Stanford Data Miner: a novel approach for integrating and exploring heterogeneous immunological data

BackgroundSystems-level approaches are increasingly common in both murine and human translational studies. These approaches employ multiple high information content assays. As a result, there is a need for tools to integrate heterogeneous types of laboratory and clinical/demographic data, and to allow the exploration of that data by aggregating and/or segregating results based on particular variables (e.g., mean cytokine levels by age and gender).MethodsHere we describe the application of standard data warehousing tools to create a novel environment for user-driven upload, integration, and exploration of heterogeneous data. The system presented here currently supports flow cytometry and immunoassays performed in the Stanford Human Immune Monitoring Center, but could be applied more generally.ResultsUsers upload assay results contained in platform-specific spreadsheets of a defined format, and clinical and demographic data in spreadsheets of flexible format. Users then map sample IDs to connect the assay results with the metadata. An OLAP (on-line analytical processing) data exploration interface allows filtering and display of various dimensions (e.g., Luminex analytes in rows, treatment group in columns, filtered on a particular study). Statistics such as mean, median, and N can be displayed. The views can be expanded or contracted to aggregate or segregate data at various levels. Individual-level data is accessible with a single click. The result is a user-driven system that permits data integration and exploration in a variety of settings. We show how the system can be used to find gender-specific differences in serum cytokine levels, and compare them across experiments and assay types.ConclusionsWe have used the tools and techniques of data warehousing, including open-source business intelligence software, to support investigator-driven data integration and mining of diverse immunological data.

P-315 - Anxiety levels and awareness of God in adolescents

Spirituality and mental health have always been in a very dynamic relationship. One can wonder if spirituality should be taken out of psychiatry or if psychiatry lost its faith. The goal of this research is to analyze how anxiety levels are influenced by religious beliefs and practices in children and adolescents. 72 respondents participated in our study. They were pupils in the eighth grade at Scoala Generala Horea, Cluj-Napoca, Romania. The exclusion criteria was any psychiatric disorder diagnosed prior to the research. We used the questionnaire for anxiety, S.T.A.I. - State Trait Anxiety Inventory (Charles D. Spielberger Ph.D., 1970). The questionnaires about religious beliefs, behaviors and personal motivation: SAI -Spiritual Assessment Inventory (Todd W. Hall, Ph.D&Keith J. Edwards, Ph.D, 1996) and two questions from DUREL - Duke University Religion Index (Koenig HG, Meador K, Parkerson G., 1997). These questionnaires are adapted for a monotheist religion. To analyze the results, we used SPSS, a Business Intelligence software which includes statistical analysis modules, version 17. The results identified a valid statistical correlation between anxiety levels and the degree of awareness of God in religious practices and beliefs. (Pearson correlation −0.227, p = 0.05). Depending on the results from SAI questionnaire concerning the level of awareness, we formed 2 groups and we studied the anxiety levels. The analysis of these 2 groups sustained the prior association. The anxiety levels are lower in children with high degree of spiritual awareness and religious practices and beliefs.

A Service Oriented Analytics Framework for Multi-Level Marketing Business

Today’s enterprises have accumulated vast amount of data and keep exploding by business activities. These datasets may contain potential undiscovered business strategies as a key basis of competition; underpin new waves of productivity growth, innovation, and consumer surplus. Data analysis is crucial in making managerial decisions. Although there are many Business Intelligence (BI) software of commercial and open source, but serving statistical purpose as exuberant as GNU-R (R) is rare. R is a highly extensible language and environment for providing a variety of statistical and graphical features. In enterprise environment, the source data are stored in various forms such as files, database, and streaming data. Currently analysts conduct data analysis in offline mode using statistical software. The offline mode means analysts 1) extract the desired data; 2) store extracted data into files; 3) manipulate software; 4) draw analytical results; 5) generate the inferences. Automating the statistical procedures by directly pulling source data will make critical decision sooner and less costly. It is a common practice that enterprise adopts Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) to achieve its operation excellence. Since the business applications populate the source data during the operation processes, pulling the source data directly under SOA is the most effective way of data analysis. This paper demonstrates how service-oriented statistics engine was developed and how such a system benefits the business decision-making.

Adoption of business intelligence systems in Indian fashion retail

Using a classical framework in innovation adoption, this study focussed on BI systems adoption in two Indian retail organisations belonging to two different segments. One case site belonged to a small scale fashion retail which was owned by a single individual with two outlets. The owner made most major decisions usually based on intuition. The use of software was usually limited to spreadsheets. The other type involved a retailer who had numerous outlets all over India. With a professional management and major investments in centralised information technology infrastructure and applications, business decisions were sometimes supported by business intelligence software developed solely for the purpose of assessing sales and managing stocks scientifically. However BI systems were not yet strategically deployed as an engine for competition.

Experiences in building and scaling an enterprise application on multicore systems

SUMMARYEven though Java is the de facto programming language for enterprise applications, there exist only a limited number of Java‐based benchmarks to understand the performance on emerging multicore systems. To bridge this gap, this paper presents a report generation benchmark that is developed on top of Open Source Apache Geronimo's DayTrader benchmark. Report generation and rendering is at the heart of many enterprise business analytics and business intelligence software products, and it is used by many enterprise applications. We evaluate the performance scalability of this benchmark on a state‐of‐the‐art Power7 multicore system with 8 Power7 cores and 32 hardware threads. The benchmark throughput scales linearly up to eight hardware threads, but beyond that point, the throughput falls sharply. Significant locking in the Java class libraries for non‐shared objects results in this performance drop. Splitting the locks on these shared classes results in near linear scaling from eight to 32 threads and improved the throughput by 80%. We also show that the Linux operating system load balancing could result in a degraded application performance in hardware multithreaded systems and simultaneous‐multithreads‐aware task scheduling results in uniform core‐resource utilization as well as improved application performance. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Identification and representation of information resources for construction firms

Large amounts of information are being accumulated nowadays due to the use of information systems in construction firms. Among them, the reusable legacy information can be referred to as ‘information resources’ and two approaches have been adopted to utilize them, i.e. to utilize them by using general-purpose software such as Microsoft Office, or by using specialized software such as BI (Business Intelligence) software. Identifying and representing the information resources is the essential step in both approaches. This research identified decision activities and information resource items through literature reviews and two expert workshops: an evaluation workshop and a verification workshop. The reusability of information resource items was evaluated in the evaluation workshop and validated in the verification workshop. A way to represent information resources by using IFC was formulated and an extension of IFC was developed and validated based on the analysis of information resources. This research will benefit construction firms in utilizing the information resources more effectively and efficiently to support decision-making in their project and enterprise management.

New frontiers in business intelligence

Business intelligence (BI) software is a collection of decision support technologies for the enterprise aimed at enabling knowledge workers such as executives, managers and analysts to make better and faster decisions. The past two decades have seen explosive growth, both in the number of products and services offered and in the adoption of these technologies by industry. This growth has been fueled by the declining cost of acquiring and storing very large amounts of data arising from sources such as customer transactions in banking, retail as well as in E-businesses, RFID tags for inventory tracking, email, query logs for websites, blogs and product reviews. Enterprises today collect data at a finer granularity which is therefore of much larger volume. Businesses are leveraging their data assets aggressively by deploying and experimenting with more sophisticated data analysis techniques to drive business decisions and deliver new functionality such as personalized offers and services to customers. Today, it is difficult to find a successful enterprise that has not leveraged BI technology for their business. For example, BI technology is used in manufacturing for order shipment and customer support, in retail for user profiling to target grocery coupons during checkout, in financial services for claims analysis and fraud detection, in transportation for fleet management, in telecommunications for identifying reasons for customer churn, in utilities for power usage analysis, and in E-business for identifying customers who are likely to respond to a product catalog mailing campaign.

Managing user acceptance: an empirical investigation in the context of business intelligence standard software

This study suggests and tests a model for the systematic evaluation of management activities in company-wide standard software implementations using the example of a business intelligence (BI) software package. The proposed model builds on an extended technology acceptance model (TAM), previous research on IT implementation success factors and reviews of relevant change management variables. Using structural equation modelling, several hypotheses are tested. The investigated management variables demonstrate significant influences on the psychological acceptance factors included in the model. Seven out of ten hypotheses are confirmed. In addition, the model explains a substantial amount of variance in actual user behaviour measured with a system-based indicator. Practical implications for the implementation of company-wide standard software in organisations are discussed.