The Role of Big Data and Business Analytics in Decision Making

The amount of data in our world has been exploding, and big data represents a fundamental shift in business decision-making. Analyzing such so-called big data is today a keystone of competition and the success of organizations depends on fast and well-founded decisions taken by relevant people in their specific area of responsibility. Business analytics (BA) represents a merger between data strategy and a collection of decision support technologies and mechanisms for enterprises aimed at enabling knowledge workers such as executives, managers, and analysts to make better and faster decisions. The authors review the concept of BA as an open innovation strategy and address the importance of BA in revolutionizing knowledge towards economics and business sustainability. Using big data with open source business analytics systems generates the greatest opportunities to increase competitiveness and differentiation in organizations. In this chapter, the authors describe and analyze business intelligence and analytics (BI&A) and four popular open source systems – BIRT, Jaspersoft, Pentaho, and SpagoBI.

Dimensions of Researches for Open Innovation in SMEs

Innovation has been treated as a recognized driver of economic prosperity of a country through the sustained growth of its entrepreneurships. Moreover, the recently coined term open innovation is increasingly taking the lead in enterprise management in terms of value addition and knowledge building. Foci of academics, researchers, and practitioners nowadays are revolving around various innovation models, comprising innovation techniques, processes, and strategies. This chapter seeks to find out open innovation research and practices that are being carried out circumscribing development of entrepreneurships, particularly the sector belonging to the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) through a longitudinal study.

Open Innovation

While talking about successful entrepreneurship and value addition within an enterprise through innovation, one could comprehend that the innovation paradigm has been shifted from simple introduction of new thoughts and products to accumulation of diversified actions, actors, and agents along the process. Furthermore, when the innovation process is not being constrained within the closed nature of it, the process takes many forms during its evolution. Innovations have been seen as closed innovation or open innovation, depending on its nature of action, but contemporary world may have seen many forms of innovation, such as technological innovation, products/service innovation, process/production innovation, operational/management/organizational innovation, business model innovation, or disruptive innovation, though often they are robustly interrelated.

An Evaluation of Measuring the Publicness Level of Interiors in Public Building Design

This study examines the publicness level of the interior spaces of public buildings. As a method, VGA (visual graph analysis) is used for analyzing the early design phases of selected municipal service buildings. In this study, the authors utilized from VGA for quantifying the publicness level of the two selected architectural competitions of municipality buildings. The method allows us analyzing the floor plans of each project in obtaining an eventual assessment of permeability and accessibility which give an idea of the levels of publicness comparatively. Subsequently, representation parameters are compared under two main criteria: connectivity and integration. The aim of the study is to understand the level of publicness and efficiency of spatial settings for the users circulating in the public buildings, which have dissimilar plan schemes. This method would be used by the designers for early design stage and provide useful feedback for understanding the level of accessibility and permeability of the structures and adjust their schemes accordingly.

Varieties of Sharing

This chapter focuses on one element in the digitalisation of work: the forms and conditions of working in the so-called ‘sharing economy' (SE). Based on an analysis of 67 SE platforms, it distinguishes three segments, each of which constitutes a distinctive institutional sphere within the sharing economy: these are an ‘exchange and gift economy', a ‘niche and sideline economy', and the ‘platform economy'. In a further step, the study then identified and compared five dimensions of work within these segments: the type of activity, the form of compensation or recompense involved (monetary or non-monetary), skills and competencies required, the role of technology, and control mechanisms. Each segment is associated with a particular pattern of these dimensions. The chapter then discusses the shift in the traditionally understood determinants of work now observable in the sharing economy. While some of these determinants are being added to by new factors, others are being displaced by internet communities and the socio-technical structures and strategies of the platform providers.

E-Government Policy Implementation in Thailand

This chapter investigates the current e-government and ICT policy in Thailand from an actor-centered perspective. It reviews existing literature on e-government implementation, while looking into the interaction of government institutions and citizens. It seeks to answer questions, such as the following: What are the key actors in driving the implementation of e-government policies in Thailand? How do Thai citizens perceive e-government efforts and ICT policy implementation especially in the context of present military government power? What are some of the risk factors typically embedded in e-government initiatives and policies implemented in Thailand? Some scholars specifically emphasize the key role of central government institutions in driving the e-government and ICT policy implementation pointing at its readiness to transform toward E-Government 4.0. These observations notwithstanding, issues related to the often-omitted crucial role of citizens and local customers in driving policy implementation and the problem of digital divide remain across much of the developing world.

Online Collaborative Learning Tools and Types

Online/web-based collaborative tools enable teachers and students to perform a wide range of tasks, such as interactive discussions, online collaboration activities, sharing and accessing electronic learning resources, and many more others. It not only promotes critical thinking and reflection in students but also encourages them to develop a sense of community, thus enabling the creation of an environment in which further collaborative work can take place. The author has categorised various tools into 11 types that deal with idea generation and brainstorming, live conference, robotics and coding tools, mapping, design, online group work and document collaboration, and online communication and content development. The chapter explains the online collaboration with its features, preparation required by institution and role of teacher presence in online learning. It also emphasizes that library consultations (i.e., librarians) directly boost student learning, so the active collaboration of librarians is a must.

ICT Integration in Education

Information and communication technologies (ICT) are influencing every discipline under the sun including education. It is affecting every aspect of education from teaching-learning to assessment and evaluation. It improves the effectiveness of education. It aids literacy movements. It enhances scope of education by facilitating mobile learning and inclusive education. It facilitates research and scholarly communication. Impact of ICT and its potential for the education field is manifold. It positively affects all the stakeholders of the education field. The chapter discusses the same along with the various projects and schemes adopted by the country to spread ICT literacy and competency.

Citizen Participation in Community Surveillance

Despite their recent emergence, WhatsApp neighbourhood crime prevention (WNCP) groups are an already pervasive phenomenon in the Netherlands. This study draws on interviews and focus groups to provide an in-depth analysis of the watchfulness and surveillance activities within these groups. The conceptualisation of WNCP through the lens of practice theory shows that the use of ICTs in the form of WhatsApp amplified all three dimensions of neighbourhood watchfulness practices. It examines how friction at the intersections of materialities, competencies, and meanings affect neighbourhood dynamics as well as the personal lives and experiences of people involved. While voluntary citizen participation in crime prevention leads to an increase in social support, feelings of safety, and active prevention of break-ins, it also defaults to forms of lateral surveillance which transcend digital monitoring practices. Pressing issues related to social media use, participatory policing, surveillance, and the normalisation of distrust and intolerance have an impact beyond its localised Dutch context.

Reading and Collaboration

The introduction of digital media into university writing courses, while leading to innovative ideas on multimedia as a rhetorical enhancement means, has also resulted in profound changes in writing pedagogy at almost all levels of its theory and practice. Because traditional approaches to examining and discussing assigned texts in the classroom were developed to help students analyze different genres of print-based texts, many university educators find these methods prohibitively deficient when applied to digital reading environments. Even strategies in reading and text annotation need to be reconsidered methodologically in order to manage effectively the ongoing shift from print to digital or electronic media formats within first year composition. The current study proposes one of the first and most extensive attempts to analyze fully how students engage with digital modes of reading to demonstrate if and how students may benefit from reading digital texts using computer-assisted text analysis (CATA) software.