The way organizations make decisions today is very often purely based on intuition or gut-feeling. It does not matter whether decisions are of high risk for the company’s future or not, managers golden-gut is the only thing that determines whether invest- ments should be made or not. Analytics is the opposite of this intuition-based decision making. If taken seriously, almost all decisions in organizations are made on facts that are analytically derived from massive amount of data from internal and external sources such as customer relationship systems to social networks. Business leaders are becoming more aware of analytically based decisions, and some use it more than others. Analytics is usually practiced in finance, customer relationships or marketing. There is, however, one area where analytics is practiced by a small number of companies, and that is on the organization’s workforce. The workforce is usually seen as one of the most complicated areas to practice analytics. An employee is, of course, more com- plicated than a product. Despite this fact, companies usually forget that conducting analytics on employees is very similar to conducting analytics on customers, which has been practiced for many decades. Some organizations are showing great success with applications of Workforce Analytics (WA). Most of these organizations are located in the US or outside of Sweden. This thesis has conducted research on to what extent Workforce Analytics is practiced in Sweden. Empirical findings show that some com- panies use WA in Sweden. The practice is not of highest sophistication of WA. Also, they show aspiration towards the idea of WA and some are locally conducting various of applications.

Inledning Organisationer inom den offentliga och privata sektorn gör dagligen informationsuttag genom att använda olika datorbaserade verktyg för att kunna fatta bättre beslut genom det beslutsunderlag som tas fram. Dessa system används på olika nivåer i en organisation. Problemdiskussion Komplexiteten och intensiteten på marknaden är inga nya fenomen i dagens affärsmiljö då det ställer höga krav på beslutsfattarna. Därav finns det ett behov bland beslutsfattare att använda ett datorbaserat verktyg för att svara upp mot de höga kraven som ställs. Syfte Denna studie utvärderar analys- och rapporteringsverktyget QlikView och hur införandet av detta system i Jönköpings kommun påverkar första linjens chefer inom två av kommunens förvaltningar. Olika nyttoeffekter kommer att identifieras och utvärderas för att förstå vilket mervärde QlikView kan ge beslutsfattarna. Metod Kvalitativa och kvantitativa metoder har använts för att utvärdera faktorer i samband med införandet av QlikView. Dessa metoder har använts för att få en så rättvisande bild som möjligt av verkligheten. Kvalitativa intervjuer har utförts med olika nyckelpersoner och generaliserbarheten av studien har styrkts genom intervjuer med andra kommuner. Författarna har även utfört en gruppintervju med företaget QlikTech i Lund. Slutligen ingår även en observationsstudie i undersökningen. Slutsats Analysverktyget kan medföra olika nyttoeffekter som med stor sannolikhet kommer att realiseras vid användandet. Olika positiva effekter som är identifierade är tidsbesparingar vid informationsuttag, effektiv analys av information och en bättre kontroll av verksamheten. För att dessa nyttoeffekter ska realiseras så måste också användarna aktivt stödja denna förändringsprocess.

Företaget Nethouse har haft uppdraget att kravställa, utveckla och implementera ett verksamhetssystem åt Sveriges  Skorstensfejaremästares Riksförbund (SSR). Medlemsföretagen i SSR bedriver sotarverksamhet på uppdrag av Sveriges kommuner och är beroende av insamlad data kopplad till deras verksamhet. I det nyutvecklade systemet, som går under namnet Ritz, samlas informationen i en central databas och är tillgänglig för flertalet intressenter med hjälp av ny teknik och modernare lösningar. Systemet är helt webbaserat och körs som en molntjänst, tillgängligt via antingen en webbsida eller som mobilapplikation. Åtkomsten av data baseras på företagsnivå på ”stämplad” data i databasen och för att reglera åtkomsten för företagsanvändare till respektive företags data används rollbaserad åtkomstkontroll. Detta examensarbete har syftat till att utveckla en prototyp till en beslutsstödslösning för dynamisk åtkomst till de datamängder som lagras inom Ritz. Nethouse har efterfrågat en prototyp för en BI-lösning som visar på möjligheter och fördelar för intressenter till Ritz med att implementera en sådan. Då integration och förvaltning är viktiga faktorer för Nethouse har ett krav på prototypen varit att den utvecklats inom Microsofts programvaror, precis som resten av Ritz. Prototypen färdigställdes genom konstruerandet av ett centralt data warehouse enligt Ralph Kimballs metodologier och genom implementation av en OLAP-kub byggd i Microsoft SSAS. Dataöverföringen från datakällorna till beslutsstödslösningens data warehouse skedde genom utvecklandet av en ETL-process i Microsoft SSIS. Den resulterande kuben har främst utformats för att kunna besvara den sortens frågor som länsstyrelser ställer till sotarföretag i kontrollsyfte och stöder förfrågningar mot de två centrala affärsprocesserna sotning och brandskyddskontroll. Dessa förfrågningar kan filtreras på flertalet dimensioner som exempelvis tid, utförare, status och kontrollutfall. Prototypen begränsar även åtkomst till den information som användare har rätt att ta del av genom att koppla samman användare och objekt till geografiska indelningar som kallas distrikt. Denna dynamiska säkerhetslösning ger goda förutsättningar för att kunna hantera förändringar i användarnas behörighet i framtiden. Genom den utvalda lösningen behålls den dynamiska naturen i systemet, då åtkomst till beslutsstödstjänsten kan fås genom flertalet källor som stödjer uppkoppling mot Microsofts multidimensionella beslutsstödslösningar, bland annat Excel och SQL Server Reporting Services.

This dissertation joins an ongoing discussion in the business management and information technology literature surrounding the measurement of an organization’s business analytic capability, the benefits derived from maturing the capability and the improvements being made toward maturity. The dissertation specifically focuses on the healthcare industry in the United States and more specifically independent physician practices specializing in orthopaedics. After an extensive literature review along with expertise from industry leaders and experienced academic faculty, a survey instrument was developed to measure organizational capabilities, technology capabilities and people capabilities which together measured an organizations overall business analytic capability maturity. The survey instrument was delivered to 89 C-suite executives in the target population. A response rate of 36% was achieved resulting in a total of 32 completed responses. The research study provides evidence that improving an organization’s business analytic capability leads to an improvement in the use of analytics to drive business performance. The research study also explored whether or not the use of analytics would improve business outcomes. The results were inconclusive. This could be due to the lag time between the use of analytics and business performance. In addition, the study did not have access to actual outcome data but rather asked the CEO’s whether or not performance in several areas had improved, remained stable or had declined. This measure may not have been precise enough to provide the predictive value needed. As such, this is an area that should be explored further. Finally, the research shows that over the past two years, physician practices have been focused on and successful in improving their business analytic capabilities. Despite these improvements, opportunities exist for physician practices to further their maturity, particularly in the areas of technology capabilities and people capabilities.

The Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality (BCMM), situated in the second largest province in South Africa, the Eastern Cape, is an unfortunate victim of low economic development and high unemployment. The South African Government, through the Department of Trade and Industry, identified the need for SMMEs to address these issues with the inception of the White Paper on National Strategy for the Development and Promotion of Small Business in South Africa over 20 years ago. SMMEs in South Africa are noted to have a failure rate of around 70% which does not bode well for the efforts to improve economic development and reduce unemployment through SMMEs. This research sets out to determine the significance of variables such as human resources, financial resources, information systems, government assistance and competitive intelligence on the sustainability of SMMEs. The researcher examined the literature relating to the challenges and issues faced by SMMEs with particular emphasis on the use of competitive intelligence as a tool to assist in sustainability. The literature review was followed by an analysis and interpretation of a qualitative study of SMMEs within the BCMM. Through an analysis of the results it was possible to determine the nature of the relationships between the independent variables and sustainability. Finally, the researcher was able to make recommendations based on the research.

Dans le cadre de l’informatique décisionnelle, la programmation physico-financière doit permettre à des acteurs d’une collectivité provenant de divers domaines de faire converger leurs problématiques vers un objectif commun. L’une des principales difficultés de la modélisation d’une programmation physico-financière est que chaque acteur exprime ses problématiques dans des échelles de temps différentes. Dans cette thèse CIFRE, un métamodèle de calcul en temps continu appliqué à la programmation physico-financière est proposé afin de permettre aux acteurs de regrouper leurs visions dans un modèle unique, tout en se plaçant sur des échelles de temps différentes. La modélisation continue développée est confrontée à la modélisation discrète (représentative de l’état de l’art) au travers d’un cas d’étude, montrant les avancées de la première vis-à-vis de la seconde. Ce métamodèle innovant a été implémenté au sein de la société MGDIS, dans le cadre d’une convention CIFRE, à l’aide d’une architecture orientée service. Cette architecture se base sur un style innovant conçu dans cette thèse afin de maximiser la capacité à paralléliser l’évaluation des modèles. La solution développée dans cette thèse a été conçue pour permettre la programmation physico-financière de gros volumes de données à l’échelle réelle. Elle a été validée sur un cas d’étude et répond aux exigences exprimées par les experts de la modélisation de programmation physico-financière de MGDIS qui ont émis un avis positif quant à l’applicabilité de la solution proposée. / In the scope of Business Intelligence, planning aims to support multiple actors in their process of converging different views and problematics from different domains to get a shared business planning model. A major difficulty in business planning is that each actor states her/his views and problematics with a different time scale. Integrating them into a unique model that represents a common state of reality becomes very costly and awkward to manage when basing the construction of these models on discrete modeling techniques used by current tools of business planning. This doctorate thesis proposes a novel solution, beyond the state-of-the-art, for addressing these issues: it conceives a novel metamodel based on a continuous time calculus. Through the developed approach, it allows multiple actors to integrate the different business logics of their planning domain in a shared model as well as to observe it from different time scales. The advantages of our solution based on continuous time against solutions based on discrete time are presented through a case study. The conceived metamodel was implemented within a real industrial set in MGDIS (a company specialized in business planning for local governments) following an innovative service oriented architecture: this architecture segregates the modeling from the evaluation to allow the parallelization of model evaluation for big volumes of data. The overall solution conceived and implemented in this thesis was designed to be a real scale prototype to be applied to real scale problems. Besides the case study, it was validated by MGDIS experts on business planning against real requirements.

In the world of increasing car sales and limited count of available parking spaces it is hard to imagine the parking space management issues would fade away anytime near. In a simi-lar way the Business Intelligence holds its position as one of the continuous trends in company IT environment. After the parking space navigation systems started to make its first appearance into the public parking lots, it started to be clear that their outputs could be potentially used to gain new information about the way the drivers behave and how the parking space is being used. That is the reason this thesis covers the field of acquirement of data from the parking space navigation system and its initial analytical use using the BI tools. Following the theoretic introduction of both Business Intelligence and BI project management comes the detailed info about the parking space navigation systems & the parking lot covered in the practical part of this text. These are followed by details of how the data collection procedures and navigation system data processing should be handled to allow building and filling of the data warehouse. On top of this DWH the analytic layer is both designed & implemented, followed by reports providing the information parking space owner requested. As the data warehouse contains a lot of additional data with expected possible use in the analytic processing, ie. using data mining tools, the last part of the thesis covers specifying single research question about the data available, which is later confirmed/denied using statistical analysis.

Diploma Thesis focuses on integrating Hadoop platform into current data warehouse architecture. In theoretical part, properties of Big Data are described together with their methods and processing models. Hadoop framework, its components and distributions are discussed. Moreover, compoments which enables end users, developers and analytics to access Hadoop cluster are described. Case study of batch data extraction from current data warehouse on Oracle platform with aid of Sqoop tool, their transformation in relational structures of Hive component and uploading them back to the original source is being discussed at practical part of thesis. Compression of data and efficiency of queries depending on various storage formats is also discussed. Quality and consistency of manipulated data is checked during all phases of the process. Fraction of practical part discusses ways of storing and capturing stream data. For this purposes tool Flume is used to capture stream data. Further this data are transformed in Pig tool. Purpose of implementing the process is to move part of data and its processing from current data warehouse to Hadoop cluster. Therefore process of integration of current data warehouse and Hortonworks Data Platform and its components, was designed

The University of Arizona Library, in collaboration with the campus commercialization unit, created a partnership that contributes to the early development of inventions in the commercialization pipeline. The library-commercialization business intelligence workgroup was incorporated into the overall campus commercialization business-development workflow in 2014 and is comprised of librarians and commercialization professionals working together to provide insight and decision support for development of commercialization strategies for inventions emerging from university research that aligns with market drivers. These efforts are recognized by university leadership as critical to the strategic plan of the university. This article discusses the impact of the workgroup and how the group of librarians contributed to the development of new companies, new licenses, and financial impact of economic development at a large land-grant university and larger community.

The research focuses on the utilisation of open-source information in augmentation of the all-source counterespionage endeavour. The study has the principal objective of designing, contextualising and elucidating a micro-theoretical framework for open-source environmental scanning within the civilian, statutory counterespionage sphere. The research is underpinned by the central assumption that the environmental scanning and the contextual analysis of overt information will enable the identification, description and prioritisation of espionage risks that would not necessarily have emerged through the statutory counterespionage process in which secretly collected information predominates. The environmental scanning framework is further assumed to offer a theoretical foundation to surmount a degenerative counterespionage spiral driven by an over-reliance on classified information. Flowing from the central assumption, five further assumptions formulated and tested in the research are the following: (1) A methodically demarcated referent premise enables the focusing and structuring of the counterespionage environmental scanning process amid the exponential proliferation of overt information. (2) Effective environmental scanning of overt information for counterespionage necessitates a distinctive definition of ‘risk’ and ‘threat’, as these are interlinked yet different concepts. It is therefore asserted that current notions of ‘threat’ and ‘risk’ are inadequate for feasible employment within an overt counterespionage environmental scanning framework. (3) A framework for overt counterespionage environmental scanning has as its primary requirement the ability to identify diverse risks, descriptively and predicatively, on a strategic as well as a tactical level. (4) The degree of adversity in the relationship between a government and an adversary constitutes the principal indicator and determinant of an espionage risk. (5) The logical accommodation of a framework for overt counterespionage environmental scanning necessitates a distinctive counterintelligence cycle, as existing conceptualisations of the intelligence cycle are inadequate. The study’s objective and the testing of these five assumptions are pursued on both the theoretical and pragmatic-utilitarian levels. The framework for counterespionage, open-source environmental scanning and risk assessment is presented as part of a multilayered unison of alternative theoretical propositions on the all-source intelligence, counterintelligence and counterespionage processes. It is furthermore advanced from the premise of an alternative proposition on an integrated approach to open-source intelligence. On a pragmatic-utilitarian level, the framework’s design is informed and its application elucidated through an examination of the 21st century espionage reality confronting the nation state, contemporary statutory counterintelligence measures and the ‘real-life’ difficulties of open-source intelligence confronting practitioners. Although with certain qualifications, the assumptions are in the main validated by the research. The research furthermore affirms this as an exploratory thesis in a largely unexplored field. / Thesis (Ph.D)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Political Sciences / Unrestricted