Anita Lee-Post

A unified foundation for business analytics

Synthesizing prior research, this paper designs a relatively comprehensive and holistic characterization of business analytics - one that serves as a foundation on which researchers, practitioners, and educators can base their studies of business analytics. As such, it serves as an initial ontology for business analytics as a field of study. The foundation has three main parts dealing with the whence and whither of business analytics: identification of dimensions along which business analytics possibilities can be examined, derivation of a six-class taxonomy that covers business analytics perspectives in the literature, and design of an inclusive framework for the field of business analytics. In addition to unifying the literature, a major contribution of the designed framework is that it can stimulate thinking about the nature, roles, and future of business analytics initiatives. We show how this is done by deducing a host of unresolved issues for consideration by researchers, practitioners, and educators. We find that business analytics involves issues quite aside from data management, number crunching, technology use, systematic reasoning, and so forth. Holistic foundation of business analytics introduced, as an ontology for the fieldCharacterization business analytics as evidence-based problem recognition and solvingAdvance a framework of business analytics for a cohesive unifying view of the fieldStimulates thinking about nature, role and future of business analytics initiativesDeduces unresolved issues for considerations by researchers/educators/practitioners

Universal Design for Learning in Teaching Large Lecture Classes

To augment traditional lecture with instructional tools that provide options for content representation, learner engagement, and learning expression, we followed the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) principles to design and implement a learning environment for teaching and learning in large lecture classes. To this end, we incorporated four carefully selected instructional tools (PowerPoint, lecture notes, clickers, and MindTap) in the proposed UDL environment for an introductory marketing class of over 600 students. Self-reported and objective measures were collected to assess the effectiveness of the UDL environment by evaluating its impact on perceived learning, satisfaction with the instructional tools, and actual learning. Our study aims to provide educators with suggestions on how to meet the needs of a diverse group of students in large lecture classes without compromising the quality of teaching and learning.

Systems for Supporting Operations Management Decisions

This chapter surveys the state of the art of decision support systems (DSSs) for operations management (OM) with the intent to highlight the important role that DSSs play in facilitating decision processes in OM. Organized along the temporal dimension of OM decisions, our discussion starts with DSSs for long-term OM decisions including operations strategy, capacity planning, location planning, product/process design and design/manufacturing integration. This is followed by a discussion on DSSs for medium- and short-term OM decisions on production planning and control that includes systems such as communication- oriented production information and control systems, material requirements planning, manufacturing resources planning, distribution requirements planning, enterprise resources planning, and operations/project scheduling. After a brief discussion on DSSs for service operations, we conclude our book chapter by providing some perspectives on future development in DSSs for OM.

Success factors in developing and delivering online courses in operations management

This paper reports the experience in using an e-learning success model to promote e-learning quality and success. The model was adapted from DeLone-McLeans Information Systems Success Model to make explicit a process approach to success assessment, whereby the overall success of an e-learning initiative depends on the attainment of success at each of the three stages of e-learning systems development: quality design, quality delivery and quality outcome. The proposed model was tested in two cycles of action research using a web-based learning module on facility location. Findings from the study confirmed the validity of using the proposed success model for e-learning quality and success assessment.

The Expert’s Opinion

classic applications of accounting, finance, the processing of orders, managing of inventories, etc. However, what we see developing is that information resources is becoming increasingly important in all aspects of our business. Before, we had to focus primarily on our competitors and their activities. Now, we have to be equally sensitive and, in some incidences, more sensitive to what our customers are expecting of us and to the opportunities available in dealing with our suppliers. The challenge is to identify these opportunities, establish a consensus that the information systems opportunities are worth pursuing versus other opportunities outside the information systems area such as advertising and promotions or R&D, and then execute them effectively.

Solving the partitioning problem in database design

Response time of a database system is largely determined by the number of secondary disk accesses required to process database transactions. To minimize disk accesses, a database file should be structured in such a way as to closely match data requirements of these transactions. The way in which data are organized for efficient processing of database transactions is called database partitioning. As data are stored in the form of tables in a relational database, data partitioning can be performed either vertically (i.e, along the attributes or columns) or horizontally (i.e., along the tuples or rows).