The domains of Business Intelligence (BI) and social media have meanwhile become significant research fields. While BI aims at supporting an organization’s decisions by providing relevant analytical data, social media is an emerging source of personal and individual knowledge, opinion, and attitudes of stakeholders. For a while, a convergence of the two domains can be observed in real-world implementations and research, resulting in concepts like social BI. Many research questions still remain open – or even worse – are not yet formulated. Therefore, the paper aims at articulating a research agenda for social BI. By means of a literature review we systematically explored previous work and developed a framework. It contrasts social media characteristics with BI design areas and is used to derive the social BI research agenda. Our results show that the integration of social media (data) into a BI system has impact on almost all BI design objects.

The domains of Business Intelligence (BI) and social media have meanwhile become significant research fields. While BI aims at supporting an organization’s decisions by providing relevant analytical data, social media is an emerging source of personal and individual knowledge, opinion, and attitudes of stakeholders. For a while, a convergence of the two domains can be observed in real-world implementations and research, resulting in concepts like social BI. Many research questions still remain open – or even worse – are not yet formulated. Therefore, the paper aims at articulating a research agenda for social BI. By means of a literature review we systematically explored previous work and developed a framework. It contrasts social media characteristics with BI design areas and is used to derive the social BI research agenda. Our results show that the integration of social media (data) into a BI system has impact on almost all BI design objects.

Despite the availability of numerous models for knowledge translation into practice and policy, research uptake remains low in resource-limited countries. This study was aimed at developing a model to facilitate research uptake in healthcare practice and policy development. The study used a two-phase exploratory sequential approach (QUAL→QUAN). Qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews with a total of 21 participants, categorised as researchers (6), frontline workers/practitioners (7), programme/policy managers (4), and directors/senior managers (4) from government, private sector and academic institutions of higher learning (universities and colleges). Quantitative data were collected through an online cross-sectional survey, administered to 212 respondents who conducted research studies in the Mpumalanga Province between 2014 to 2019. The most significant findings seem to be lack of awareness of research findings and champions to lead engagements among research stakeholders on research uptake. In addition, the research has established a failure by researchers to align public health research projects to existing local contexts and available resources. Conversely, there is a growing propensity of using informal research without consideration of data quality issues. It was further observed that establishing and sustaining beneficial collaboration between all research stakeholders is required to promote effective research uptake for practice and policy development. The survey results established a total of 13 components: four individual factors (support, experience, motivation & time factor); four organisational factors (research agenda, funding, resources & partnerships), and five research characteristics factors (gatekeeping, local research committees, accessibility of evidence, quality of evidence & critical appraisal skills). However, the Spearman’s correlation coefficient revealed that of the 13 factors, only six factors had a significant positive correlation with research uptake, namely: support, experience, motivation, time factor, resources, and critical appraisal skills. Consequently, a model for institutionalising research uptake is proposed. The roles of local research committees have been clarified, and a logical framework has been incorporated with pathways and channels of engagements to enable successful implementation of the research uptake model. / Health Studies / Ph. D. (Public Health)