IGI Global Disseminator of Knowledge

ARTICLE 1

Business Intelligence Strategy: A Utilities Company Case Study

Paul Hawking (Institute for Logistics and Supply Chain Management, College of Business, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia), Carmine Sellitto (Institute for Logistics and Supply Chain Management, College of Business, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia)

Although Business Intelligence is seen as priority by many companies, the level of benefits achieved varies significantly between firms. Researchers have indicated that not having an effective Business Intelligence strategy is a significant issue in regards to trying to realize organizational benefits. This paper adopting a case study method investigates an Australian energy company's Business Intelligence adoption and the development of a Business Intelligence strategy that directly informed the firm's information needs. The important elements of this strategy included using a set of guiding principles to ensure that there was a close alignment of Business Intelligence outcomes with the company's needs. The paper provides insights for researchers and practitioners on the important factors need to be considered to achieve effective Business Intelligence.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/business-intelligence-strategy/124781

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=124781

ARTICLE 2

Monitoring Organizational Transactions in Enterprise Information Systems with Continuous Assurance Requirements

Rui Pedro Marques (Higher Institute for Accountancy and Administration, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal & Algoritmi, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal), Henrique Santos (Department of Information Systems, University of Minho, Guimarães, Portugal), Carlos Santos (Higher Institute for Accountancy and Administration, University of Aveiro, Aveiro, Portugal)

This work focuses on issues typically encountered in organizations whose core business largely depends on ICT: continuous monitoring, continuous auditing, controlling and assessment of transactions risk. Organizations have been making efforts to implement methods and systems which enable them to increase reliability of their business and, simultaneously, to be in accordance with their organizational objectives and compliant with external regulations. Thus, this work presents and validates an innovative solution to implement Continuous Assurance services in information systems applicable to any organizational transaction, regardless of its type, dimension, business area or even its information system support technology. This last objective is pursued having as support an ontological model at an abstraction level that guarantees that independence. This research culminated with the development of a prototype and consequent results analysis, using data collected from the near-real implementation, allowing us to ensure the feasibility and the effective use of the proposal.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/monitoring-organizational-transactions-in-enterprise-information-systems-with-continuous-assurance-requirements/124782

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=124782

ARTICLE 3

Obtaining Value from the Customization of Packaged Business Software: A Model and Simulation

Bryon Balint (College of Business Administration, Belmont University, Nashville, TN, USA)

Businesses that purchase packaged application software – for example, an Enterprise Resource Planning system – must make choices about customization. Packaged software vendors, anecdotal evidence, and practitioner-oriented research all recommend that businesses should customize software as little as possible, and instead adapt their processes to meet the “best practices” of the software. However, businesses continue to outspend their budgets on implementing and maintaining customized software, often to a significant extent. This suggests that either these businesses are making poor decisions, or that the conventional wisdom about customization is incorrect. In this paper the authors model the primary factors in the customization decision: “fit” between the desired business process and the packaged software; costs related to development, maintenance, integration, and performance; and benefits related to increased fit, integration, performance, and user acceptance. They use simulation techniques to illustrate the conditions under which customization is likely to provide value to the organization, as well as conditions under which customization should be avoided.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/obtaining-value-from-the-customization-of-packaged-business-software/124783

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=124783

ARTICLE 4

Chinese Text Categorization via Bottom-Up Weighted Word Clustering

Yu-Chieh Wu (Ming-Chuan University, Taipei, Taiwan)

Most of the researches on text categorization are focus on using bag of words. Some researches provided other methods for classification such as term phrase, Latent Semantic Indexing, and term clustering. Term clustering is an effective way for classification, and had been proved as a good method for decreasing the dimensions in term vectors. The authors used hierarchical term clustering and aggregating similar terms. In order to enhance the performance, they present a modify indexing with terms in cluster. Their test collection extracted from Chinese NETNEWS, and used the Centroid-Based classifier to deal with the problems of categorization. The results had shown that term clustering is not only reducing the dimensions but also outperform than bag of words. Thus, term clustering can be applied to text classification by using any large corpus, its objective is to save times and increase the efficiency and effectiveness. In addition to performance, these clusters can be considered as conceptual knowledge base, and kept related terms of real world.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/chinese-text-categorization-via-bottom-up-weighted-word-clustering/124784

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=124784

ARTICLE 5

Mapping Critical Success Factors for IT Outsourcing: The Providers' Perspective

João Correia dos Santos (Department of Management Science, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal), Miguel Mira da Silva (Department of Computer Engineering, Instituto Superior Técnico, Lisbon, Portugal)

During the last decades, IT Outsourcing gained considerable management attention and is considered a strategic decision used to promote success on its variable dimensions, like: cost reduction, quality improvement, access to new technologies, among others. The existing literature presents many studies on IT Outsourcing. However, there are few studies from the provider's perspective. Therefore, the objective is to focus on providers' critical success factors and their relationships in IT Outsourcing contracts. To analyse this subject a qualitative approach based on cognitive mapping process was applied. Cognitive or causal maps are widely employed in problem-structuring, since they permit a rich representation of ideas, through the modelling of a complex network of actions. This approach is innovative compared to the traditional quantitative methods used. As a result, they were able to map a network of means and ends and in parallel were found new success factors like service standardization, price flexibility, cost management and service catalogue, which allowed obtaining new insights into the structure of today's IT Outsourcing contracts.

To obtain a copy of the entire article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/article/mapping-critical-success-factors-for-it-outsourcing/124785

To read a PDF sample of this article, click on the link below.
www.igi-global.com/viewtitlesample.aspx?id=124785

For full copies of the above articles, check for this issue of the International Journal of Enterprise Information Systems (IJEIS) in your institution's library. This journal is also included in the IGI Global aggregated "InfoSci-Journals" database: www.igi-global.com/isj.