Evaluation of Information Awareness and Understanding through Different Internal Communication Tools

We are living at a time when change is the only constant in our lives. This is also true for organizations, which have to communicate these changes effectively to their employees. Internal communications are therefore increasingly garnering attention. In this regard, immense efforts should be made to create high levels of awareness and understanding about a new change project. Organizations use a variety of tools to communicate this information effectively. However, employee awareness and understanding can also vary on the choice of internal communications tools. This chapter presents the results of research carried out in Slovenia in 2012, where an experiment was conducted on 165 individuals. The individuals who took part in the experiment were exposed to information distributed through three different tools used in internal communications. Empirical data concerning the views of awareness and understanding of information according to the three internal communications tools are evaluated and presented.

Data, Information, and Knowledge

This chapter examines the similarities and differences between big data and knowledge management. Big data has relatively little conceptual development, at least from a strategy and management perspective. Knowledge management has a lengthy literature and decades of practice but has always explicitly focused only on knowledge assets as opposed to precursors like data and information. Even so, there are considerable opportunities for cross-fertilization. Consequently, this chapter considers data from McKinsey Global Strategies on data holdings, by industry, and contrasts that with data on knowledge development, essentially the intangible assets found in the same industries. Using what we know about the variables influencing the application of intangible assets such as knowledge and intelligence, we can then better identify where successful employment of big data might take place. Further, we can identify specific variables with the potential to grant competitive advantage from the application of big data and business analytics.

Predictive Analytics

Predictive analytics and modeling are analytical tools for knowledge discovery through examining and capturing the complex relationships and patterns among the variables in the existing data in efforts to predict the future organizational performances. Their uses become more common place due largely to collecting massive amount of data, which is referred to as “big data,” and the increased need to transform large amounts of data into intelligent information (knowledge) such as trends, patterns, and relationships. The intelligent information can then be used to make smart and informed data-based decisions and predictions using various methods of predictive analytics. The main purpose of this chapter is to present a conceptual and practical overview of some of the basic and advanced analytical tools of predictive analytics. The chapter provides a detailed coverage of some of the predictive analytics tools such as Simple and Multiple-Regression, Polynomial Regression, Logistic Regression, Discriminant Analysis, and Multilevel Modeling.

Business Analytics and Big Data

Big Data Analytics has changed the way organizations make decisions, manage business processes, and create new products and services. Business analytics is the use of data, information technology, statistical analysis, and quantitative methods and models to support organizational decision making and problem solving. The main categories of business analytics are descriptive analytics, predictive analytics, and prescriptive analytics. Big Data is data that exceeds the processing capacity of conventional database systems and is typically defined by three dimensions known as the Three V's: Volume, Variety, and Velocity. Big Data brings big challenges. Big Data not only has influenced the analytics that are utilized but also has affected technologies and the people who use them. At the same time Big Data brings challenges, it presents opportunities. Those who embrace Big Data and effective Big Data Analytics as a business imperative can gain competitive advantage.

Using Big Data Opinion Mining to Predict Rises and Falls in the Stock Price Index

In light of recent research that has begun to examine the link between textual “big data” and social phenomena such as stock price increases, this chapter takes a novel approach to treating news as big data by proposing the intelligent investment decision-making support model based on opinion mining. In an initial prototype experiment, the researchers first built a stock domain-specific sentiment dictionary via natural language processing of online news articles and calculated sentiment scores for the opinions extracted from those stories. In a separate main experiment, the researchers gathered 78,216 online news articles from two different media sources to not only make predictions of actual stock price increases but also to compare the predictive accuracy of articles from different media sources. The study found that opinions that are extracted from the news and treated with proper sentiment analysis can be effective in predicting changes in the stock market.

Default Probability Prediction of Credit Applicants Using a New Fuzzy KNN Method with Optimal Weights

Credit scoring has become a very important issue due to the recent growth of the credit industry. As the first objective, this chapter provides an academic database of literature between and proposes a classification scheme to classify the articles. The second objective of this chapter is to suggest the employing of the Optimally Weighted Fuzzy K-Nearest Neighbor (OWFKNN) algorithm for credit scoring. To show the performance of this method, two real world datasets from UCI database are used. In classification task, the empirical results demonstrate that the OWFKNN outperforms the conventional KNN and fuzzy KNN methods and also other methods. In the predictive accuracy of probability of default, the OWFKNN also show the best performance among the other methods. The results in this chapter suggest that the OWFKNN approach is mostly effective in estimating default probabilities and is a promising method to the fields of classification.

An Exploration of Backpropagation Numerical Algorithms in Modeling US Exchange Rates

This chapter applies the Backpropagation Neural Network (BPNN) trained with different numerical algorithms and technical analysis indicators as inputs to forecast daily US/Canada, US/Euro, US/Japan, US/Korea, US/Swiss, and US/UK exchange rate future price. The training algorithms are the Fletcher-Reeves, Polak-Ribiére, Powell-Beale, quasi-Newton (Broyden-Fletcher-Goldfarb-Shanno, BFGS), and the Levenberg-Marquardt (LM). The standard Auto Regressive Moving Average (ARMA) process is adopted as a reference model for comparison. The performance of each BPNN and ARMA process is measured by computing the Mean Absolute Error (MAE), Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD), and Mean of Squared Errors (MSE). The simulation results reveal that the LM algorithm is the best performer and show strong evidence of the superiority of the BPNN over ARMA process. In sum, because of the simplicity and effectiveness of the approach, it could be implemented for real business application problems to predict US currency exchange rate future price.

Using Supervised Machine Learning to Explore Energy Consumption Data in Private Sector Housing

Smart electricity meters allow capturing consumption load profiles of residential buildings. Besides several other applications, the retrieved data renders it possible to reveal household characteristics including the number of persons per apartment, age of the dwelling, etc., which helps to develop targeted energy conservation services. The goal of this chapter is to develop further related methods of smart meter data analytics that infer such household characteristics using weekly load curves. The contribution of this chapter to the state of the art is threefold. The authors first quadruplicate the number of defined features that describe electricity load curves to preserve relevant structures for classification. Then, they suggest feature filtering techniques to reduce the dimension of the input to a set of a few significant ones. Finally, the authors redefine class labels for some properties. As a result, the classification accuracy is elevated up to 82%, while the runtime complexity is significantly reduced.

Process Improvements in Supply Chain Operations

The nature of SCM research is constantly evolving and must address a variety of concerns like poor service, large inventory levels, and friction among suppliers and manufacturers. Analytical databases and techniques in SCM are an important part of this research. Many researchers and practitioners have depended on secondary data, but given the dynamic nature of global competition, more recent and relevant data must be gathered. These efforts need to be geared to the development of properly managed supply chain relationships and corporate sustainability initiatives that ultimately promote broad-based sustainable development objectives for the good of people, plants, and profits (i.e., triple bottom-line).

Business Analytics for Business Analysts in Manufacturing

Many of the skills that define analytics are not new. Nonetheless, it has become a new source of competitive advantage for many corporations. Today's workforce, therefore, must be cognizant of its power and value to effectively perform their jobs. In this chapter, the authors differentiate the role of a business analyst by defining the appropriate skill level and breadth of knowledge required for them to be successful. Business analysts fill the gap between the experts (data scientists) and the day-to-day users. Finally, the section on Manufacturing Analytics provides real-world applications of Analytics for companies in a production setting. The ideas presented herein argue in favor of a dedicated program for business analysts.