The diploma thesis is focused on a specific area of self-service business intelligence. The advantage of this approach to the business intelligence is reduction of demands on IT development and using tools by end users. They can generate reports and outputs according to their requirements during the relevant time period. The theoretical part is dedicated to illustrate this concept with all benefits and risks. Furthermore, it describes trends occurring in the domain of business intelligence. These trends transcend outline the domain of business intelligence and are valid throughout IT. The practical part is dedicated to the analysis market of self-service business intelligence tools. On basis of established criteria are then compared these tools and deduced general conclusions regarding their functionality. Then, by using three selected tools is created comprehensive business intelligence task with the aim of clarifying a degree of self-service for these instruments. The main benefit of this thesis is based in the integrated analysis of market self-service business intelligence tools and determination of their functionality.

This Master’s thesis concerns with the description and evaluation of czech air carriers‘ business strategy. Because of their large number, selected carriers are Czech Airlines and Travel Service and these are described in detail as to their history, as well as their development in recent years and SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis is assembled by the author himself with the usage of knowledge gained from analysis in previous chapters. Each of aforementioned carriers is then compared with one of its competitors and finally, the evaluation of the strategy and the proposal of recommendations are set.

This study investigates the cryptocurrency called bitcoin. A cryptocurrency is a type of currency that depends on cryptography to issue new units instead of depending on government decree like fiat currencies. The study will first explain some of the technical details that make bitcoin work. This is necessary to lay groundwork to get to the actual aim of the study, namely investigating the economic aspects of bitcoin. The study will evaluate bitcoin, and other cryptocurrencies, along with fiat currencies against certain definitions. In the process it will introduce a new subclass of cryptocurrency - the sovereign cryptocurrency. Bitcoin’s implied monetary policy will also be discussed, as well as the problems it creates for central banks. A hypothesis on the behaviour of the bitcoin price will be explained and research will be provided to support the acceptance of the hypothesis. Using this hypothesis, a stochastic pricing model for bitcoin will be derived. Arbitrage trading strategies will also be provided that explain certain price constraints that operate in the bitcoin market. The dissertation will also introduce a means to improve the anonymity of a user of bitcoin and will reason that improvements such as these and others will increase the use of bitcoin. Therefore, improvements to anonymity will increase the economic relevance of bitcoin and increase its competitive edge over the traditional banking system. It will be reasoned, based on the possible problems created by bitcoin’s monetary policy, as well as the growth projections implied by the stochastic pricing model, and the increased economic relevance due to improvements in anonymity, that central banks would need to create their own cryptocurrency that conforms to certain requirements – the previously introduced sovereign cryptocurrency. The study will conclude by explaining the technical changes needed for a fork of bitcoin to become a sovereign cryptocurrency, as well as a mathematical model to control the monetary policy of the sovereign cryptocurrency. As its aim, adaptive monetary policy will have stable prices for the economy using the sovereign cryptocurrency to price its goods and services. Please note, that while every effort was made to use published references, the field of cryptocurrencies is very young and changing constantly. Thus, most publications on the subject are simply placed on websites on the internet. This is especially true for the work relating to the founding of the field, and the data sources of the operation of the cryptocurrencies. Therefore a lot of the references do refer to websites on the internet. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Mathematics and Applied Mathematics / MSc / Unrestricted

As data becomes a ubiquitous part of today’s business, trust in data is recognised as a crucialfactor for organisations on the data-driven journey to stay competitive in the fast-evolvingmarketplace. To support the journey, Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI) has emerged asa popular approach for organisations to empower business users and gain actionable insightfrom data faster and better. Despite its importance and relevance at the organisational level,SSBI has suffered sluggish adoption rates at the user level. The purpose of this thesis is toexplore the importance of trust in data and how it influences SSBI adoption by business users.Through seven semi-structured interviews, this thesis is able to establish that: 1) trust in data isa prerequisite for SSBI adoption by business users; 2) business users trust the people behind thedata; 3) trust in SSBI tools is essential; and 4) trust in data is necessary for user adoption.Furthermore, these findings lead to a descriptive model of how trust in data influences SSBIadoption by business users as well as how business users can transition between a vicious cycleof SSBI resistance and a benign cycle of SSBI adoption.

Att ha lojala kunder har blivit avgörande för företag i servicebranschen. När en kris uppstår i samhället där viktiga delar av människors liv förändras, där råd och rekommendationer från myndigheter gör att man inte längre rör sig ute på samma sätt tvingas företag till förändringar och uppoffringar. När denna studie utförs pågår det en pandemi av viruset Covid-19 som påverkar hela världen. För att bibehålla citykärnan i en mellanstor stad krävs det att konsumenter är lojala och fortsätter stötta servicebranschen i den mån det är möjligt. Här är alltså kundlojalitet avgörande för många företag. I denna studie har vi undersökt hur kundlojaliteten ser ut hos företag och konsumenter i Linköpings city samt hur man kan bibehålla den under en kris. Syftet med studien var då att studera vilka aspekter konsumenter anser är viktigast för att vara en lojal kund samt vilka åtgärder företagen inom servicebranschen har gjort för att på bästa sätt anpassa sig för den rådande situationen. Studien är baserad på kvantitativ data i form av enkätundersökningar hos både konsument och företag i Linköping city för att få en bredare och ett mer valid resultat. Konsumentrespondenterna var totalt 156 stycken och företagsrespondenterna var sammanlagt 20 stycken där alla är baserade i Linköpings city. En kvalitativ analys har sedan utförts genom en tematisk analysmetod där empiri och teorier från teoretiska referensramen ligger till grund för analys och slutsatsen för studien. I slutsatsen besvaras studiens tre forskningsfrågor där vi bland annat kommit fram till vilka aspekter som företagen bör fokusera på för att bibehålla kundlojalitet, vad kundlojalitet innebär, hur kundlojalitet ser ut i Linköping city samt hur den har förändrats under en kris. I slutet av studien ger vi även rekommendationer för framtida forskning. / Having loyal customers has become vital for companies in the service business. When a crisis occurs in a society where important parts of people’s lives change, where advice and recommendations from authorities makes it difficult to live like we used to, companies have to make changes and sacrifices to survive. When this research is done a global pandemic from the virus Covid-19 are affecting the whole world in many different ways. To maintain the city center customers have to stay loyal and support their local businesses to the extent possible. In this study we have examined how companies and consumers customer loyalty looks like and also how you maintain customer loyalty during a crisis. The aim of this study was to see what aspects consumers think are most important to become a loyal customer and also what actions companies within the service business have done to best adjust to the ongoing situation. The study is based on quantitative data made from surveys that got answered from both companies and consumers to obtain a wider and more valid result. It was 156 consumer respondents and 20 company respondents that answered where all the respondents were based in Linköping city. A qualitative analysis has been made with a thematic analysis where empirical data and theoretical information builds the foundation to the analysis and the conclusion. In the conclusion we answer our three research questions where we among many things answer what aspects companies should focus on in to be able to maintain customer loyalty, what customer loyalty is, how customer loyalty looks like in Linköping city center and how it has changed during a crisis. In the end of the study we give recommendations for future research within this subject.

Service-oriented environments are central backbone of todays enterprise workflows. These workflow includes traditional process types like travel booking or order processing as well as data-intensive integration processes like operational business intelligence and data analytics. For the latter process types, current execution semantics and concepts do not scale very well in terms of performance and resource consumption. In this paper, we present a concept for data streaming in business processes that is inspired by the typical execution semantics in data management environments. Therefore, we present a conceptual process and execution model that leverages the idea of stream-based service invocation for a scalable and efficient process execution. In selected results of the evaluation we show, that it outperforms the execution model of current process engines.

The Sharing Economy is an innovative social, economic and technological paradigm which is shaping worldwide production and consumption patterns of many industries. Its strength relies on factors of competitiveness such as the use of idle capacity, temporary access to resources without transfer of ownership, the flexibility and adaptability of its models, and the participation of a growing number of players allowed by peer-to-peer digital platforms. From the management perspective, the conditions for lasting competitiveness lies on sustainability, the paradigm integrating the supply, demand, and technological dimensions in a holistic, or ecosystem, perspective. Tourism is among the industries making extensive use of sharing digital platforms and experiencing changes that foster the sustainability debate. The PhD Thesis aims to investigate the relationships between competitiveness and sustainability in the tourism and hospitality accommodation industry in the Sharing Economy Era. Its investigation is multifaced and is addressed through three studies adopting a post-modernist perspective that builds on qualitative approaches and strategies for data collection and analysis. The Part I of the Thesis explores the Sharing Economy concept’s evolution and the sustainability issues through an in-depth review of the literature. Results reveal the leading economic-technological evolution of the paradigm over the social one, and its dual links with sustainability in relation to the extensive use of peer-to-peer digital platforms. Therefore, the evolution of the Sharing Economy activities have shown that today competitiveness is built on the interactions of an ever-increasing number of actors and factors, both off-line and on-line, within a complex ecosystem for the creation of – shared – value. The tourism industry strongly challenges this relationship between extended competition and sustainability. The Part II evaluates the competitiveness model and its evolution during the Sharing eTourism Era in the tourism and hospitality accommodation sector introducing an ecosystem perspective for the creation and distribution of shared value. Specifically, it investigates how the non-traditional and informal tourist services have affected the structure of the industry and have altered the competition among the actors, through semi-structured in-depth interviews. Results show that competitiveness is given by the balance among the complex interactions of internal and external ecosystem’s actors and factors. On a micro level this imply that businesses must adopts an ecosystem vision compensating for negative externalities which translate into the adoption of Business Models promoting sustainability for the creation of sustainable shared value. Therefore, the Part III investigates through the use of an illustrative case study how peer-to-peer digital platforms in the tourist accommodation service can boost profitability while strengthening economic, social and environmental sustainability by applying the innovative Business Model for Sustainability. The research sheds light on the complex Sharing Economy literature and lays the theoretical foundations for the implementation of managerial strategies aimed at promoting extended sustainable competition-cooperation.

With the increasing amount of valuable data that companies have access to the need for tools visualizing this data have reached a wider group of users, many of which are not tech-savvy. Self-service Business Intelligence applications aim to meet this need and many guidelines regarding the general design of Business Intelligence have been produced in recent years. In this thesis some of these guidelines are interpreted and applied during the development of a Qlik Sense application for the Device Connection Platform department at Ericsson. The purpose of this thesis is to produce more specific guidelines that aim to complement existing general guidelines on Self-service Business Intelligence design; guidelines that should be taken into account when developing Qlik Sense applications. As a result, five guidelines that concerns conditional dimensions, screen resolutions, naming conventions for master items, the data layer and Qlik Sense conventions for visualizations are presented. Pros and cons regarding these guidelines are discussed along with alternative approaches. The conclusion states that the general guidelines interpreted in this project work were helpful for the workflow and readability of the application, but that more specific guidelines such as the ones presented in the result could be well needed when it comes to customizabil ity and flexibility for end users. / Allt eftersom mängden värdefull data som företag har tillgång till ökar har behovet av verktyg som visualiserar dessa data nått en bredare grupp användare, där många är mindre tekniskt kunniga. Self-service Business Intelligence applikationer syftar till att möta detta behov och många generella riktlinjer för hur sådana applikationer ska designas har tagits fram under senare år. I denna rapport blir dessa riktlinjer tolkade och därefter applicerade under tiden av skapandet av en Self-service Business Intelligence applikation i mjukvaran Qlik Sense och för Ericsson Device Connection Platform. Syftet med rapporten är att utforma och presentera specifika riktlinjer för Qlik Sense att användas som komplement till de existerande och mer generella riktlinjerna för design av Self-service Business Intelligence i allmänhet. Rapportens resultat består av fem riktlinjer som avser villkorliga dimensioner, skärmupplösning, namnkonventioner för original, datalagret och Qlik Sense egna konventioner för visualiseringar. Föroch nackdelar med de framtagna riktlinjerna diskuteras tillsammans med alternativa tillvägagångssätt. Vi drar slutsatsen att de generella riktlinjerna som tolkats genom projektet i denna rapport var speciellt hjälpfulla för att uppnå läsbarhet och ett bra arbetsflöde för slutanvändaren i applikationen. Vidare konstateras att fler mjukvaruspecifika riktlinjer kan vara välbehövliga när det kommer till anpassningsbarhet av applikationer och flexibilitet för slutanvändare.

Studien syftar till att undersöka hur utbildning av de anställda påverkar deras arbetssätt med Self-Service Business Intelligence (SSBI). SSBI kan sammanfattas som en arbetsmetod baserad på dataunderlag som ger beslutstöd för anställda inom verksamheten. Vid tidigare beslutstöd som Business intelligence (BI) fanns det specifika roller som använde sig av dataunderlag och skapade rapporter. Dessa roller befann sig i IT-avdelningen och fick förfrågningar av anställda som var i behov av rapporter för att ta beslut. Syftet med SSBI är att möjliggöra för anställda att vara oberoende av IT-avdelningen och självständigt kunna analysera och tolka data för att sedan skapa rapporter. Detta är något som effektiviserar arbetet hos företag och skapar mer värde genom att underlätta för IT-avdelningen. Även om SSBI tillåter anställda till att bli mer självständiga inom sitt arbete, finns det utmaningar vid införandet. Den väsentliga utmaningen som denna uppsats fokuserar på är hur utbildning påverkar BI-användarna i sitt arbete med SSBI. Studien baseras på kvalitativa intervjuer med totalt fyra företag och fem respondenter. Frågorna som ställts har utgått från det teoretiska ramverket med teorier och modeller om självständighet, kunskap, utbildning och värdeskapande. Detta har varit en substantiell aspekt för att kunna generera kunskap om huruvida utbildning påverkar anställdas arbetssätt med SSBI.   Resultatet av uppsatsen presenterade att utbildning har en tydlig påverkan och en stor roll vid användningen av SSBI. Införandet av SSBI har lett till att anställda känner sig mer självständiga med en större frihet, däremot klarar de med formell utbildning mer avancerade arbetsuppgifter med SSBI. Arbetet inom organisationen har förenklats med SSBIeftersom navigering, definitioner och tolkning av data kan ske självständigt. Uppsatsen visar en tydlig indikation att deltagarna blivit påverkade av införandet av SSBI på olika nivåer framför allt beroende på utbildning men även tidigare kunskap och hur engagerade företag är med att kontinuerligt utveckla SSBI inom verksamheten. / The purpose of this study is to investigate how the education of employees affect their way of working with Self-Service Business intelligence (SSBI) as a working method. SSBI can be summarized as a working method based on data that provides decision support for employees within the business. In previous decision support such as Business intelligence (BI), there were specific roles that were used for data and creating of reports. These roles were in the IT department and received inquiries from employees who needed reports to make decisions. The purpose of SSBI is to enable employees to be independent of the IT department and to be able to independently analyze and interpret data so that reports can be created. With this method implemented in companies, it will create more value by creating more relief for the IT department. Although SSBI applies to employees to become more independent in their work, there are challenges with the implementation. The significant challenges that this study focuses on are how education affects BI users in their work with SSBI. The study has been conducted with qualitative interviews with a total of four companies and five respondents. The questions are based on the theories and models of independence, education, knowledge and value creation to generate knowledge whether training affects employees' working methods.  The results of the study showed a clear impact on how education plays a major role in the use of SSBI. The implementation of SSBI has made employees feel more independent with greater freedom, but with a formal education they can handle more advanced tasks with SSBI. The work within the organization has been simplified with SSBI because navigation, definitions and interpretation of data independently. The study shows a clear indication that the participants have been affected by the introduction of SSBI at different levels, primarily due to training but also previous knowledge and how committed companies are to continuously developing SSBI within the business.

Denna uppsats syftar till att undersöka hur ett införande av Self-Service Business Intelligence och SSBI-verktyg kan påverka organisationsstruktur samt anställdas roll inom organisationen. Self-Service Business Intelligence kan definieras som ett verktyg som möjliggör decentralisering av Business Intelligence vilket innebär att BI-användaren i en verksamhet kan utföra diverse uppgifter på egen hand utan att vara beroende av IT-avdelningen (Sarkar 2017). För att konkretisera arbetet undersöks fyra organisationer. Fem intervjuer som bestod av fyra semistrukturerade intervjuer och en strukturerad intervju genomfördes för att erhålla kunskap om hur dessa företag använder Self-Service Business Intelligence i praktiken. Därtill erhålls kunskap om innebörden för organisationen och dess anställda när verktyget tillgängliggjordes. I studien har bland annat TOE-ramverk använts för att analysera vilka faktorer som har en betydelse vid införande av en ny teknologi. Teorin om Organisatorisk IT mognadsnivå (OITM) användes för att analysera organisationens beredskap för att skapa värde ur informationsteknologi. Andra teorier om olika roller av BI-användare, utbildning och organisationsförändring användes för att få en djupare inblick kring de faktorer som påverkar organisationsstrukturen och anställdas roller.  Resultatet av studien visade att de anställdas roller och organisationsstrukturen påverkades av Self-Service Business Intelligence i olika grader. Det noterades en tydlig indelning av användarroller, avancerade BI-användare och vanliga BI-användare, inom samtliga organisationer. Konkreta förändringar inom organisationerna var bättre beslutfattningsprocess, avlastning hos IT-avdelningen och effektivare arbetsflöde. Bland de organisationer där Self-Service Business Intelligence har fått stor spridning noterades det en större påverkan på organisationsstruktur och anställdas roller medan de organisationerna med en mindre spridning av verktyget hade en mindre inverkan på deras verksamhet. Detta förutsätter dock att organisationerna utbildar sina anställda genom ett strukturellt träningsprogram och motiverar syftet med Self-Service Business Intelligence för en större spridning av verktyget och således en större inverkan på organisationen och de anställdas roller. / In this essay we have chosen to investigate how an implementation of Self-Service Business Intelligence can affect organizational change and the role of users within the organization. Self-Service BI is a tool that enables decentralization of BI which means that the user in a business can perform various tasks themselves without being dependent on the IT department. To concretize the work, we have chosen to examine four companies. The survey was conducted via five interviews (four semi-structured and one structured interviews) to gather insight on how these companies use Self-Service Business Intelligence and the result for their organization and employees when the tool was applied in the organization. In the study, TOE-framework has been used to analyze which factors play a role in the implementation of a new technology. The theory of Organizational IT maturity (OITM) was used to analyze the organizations and its employees' different attitudes towards IT while other theories of different roles of users, training and organizational change were used to gain a deeper insight into the factors that affect organizational structure, employee roles and factors which causes the changes. The results of the study showed that the roles of the employees and the organizational structure were affected by Self-Service Business Intelligence to varying degrees. There was a clear division of user roles, power users and casual users, within all organizations. Concrete changes in the organizations were better decision-making processes, relieves in the IT department and more efficient workflow. Among the organizations where Self-Service Business Intelligence has become widespread, a greater impact on organizational structure and employee roles has been noted, while it has been noted that those organizations with a smaller spread of the tool have seen a smaller impact on their operations. However, this presupposes that the organizations train their employees through a structural training program and justifies the purpose of Self-Service Business Intelligence for a greater spread of the tool and thus a greater impact on the organization and the employees' roles.