Ozgur Turetken

The Current State of Business Intelligence in Academia: The Arrival of Big Data

In December 2012, the AIS Special Interest Group on Decision Support, Knowledge and Data Management Systems (SIGDSS) and the Teradata University Network (TUN) cosponsored the Business Intelligence Congress 3 and conducted surveys to assess academia’s response to the growing market need for students with Business Intelligence (BI) and Business Analytics (BA) skill sets. This panel report describes the key findings and best practices that were identified, with an emphasis on what has changed since the BI Congress efforts in 2009 and 2010. The article also serves as a “call to action” for universities regarding the need to respond to emerging market needs in BI/BA, including “Big Data.” The IS field continues to be well positioned to be the leader in creating the next generation BI/BA workforce. To do so, we believe that IS leaders need to continuously refine BI/BA curriculum to keep pace with the turbulent BI/BA marketplace.

A model-based DSS for integrating the impact of learning in project control

Earned Value Method (EVM) is a popular project control technique. In this paper, we discuss the extended version of EVM (EVM/LC) that addresses the effect of learning on the performance of project teams. These effects have so far been ignored in most EVM applications. We present a spreadsheet-based decision support tool that automates the calculations and analyses in EVM/LC. Using this tool would save the project manager from having to perform complicated calculations while still taking advantage of the relatively accurate estimates generated by EVM/LC. Consequently, this paper contributes to both research and practice in project management.

An Empirical Investigation of the Impact of Individual and Work Characteristics on Telecommuting Success

Individual and work characteristics are used in telecommuting plans; however, their impact on telecommuting success is not well known. We studied how employee tenure, work experience, communication skills, task interdependence, work output measurability, and task variety impact telecommuter productivity, performance, and satisfaction after taking into account the impact of communication technologies. Data collected from 89 North American telecommuters suggest that in addition to the richness of the media, work experience, communication skills, and task interdependence impact telecommuting success. These characteristics are practically identifiable and measurable; therefore, we expect our findings to help managers convert increasing telecommuting adoption rates to well-defined and measurable gains.

Comparing the understandability of alternative data warehouse schemas: An empirical study

An easily understood data warehouse model enables users to better identify and retrieve its data. It also makes it easier for users to suggest changes to its structure and content. Through an exploratory, empirical study, we compared the understandability of the star and traditional relational schemas. The results of our experiment contradict previous findings and show schema type did not lead to significant performance differences for a content identification task. Further, the relational schema actually led to slightly better results for a schema augmentation task. We discuss the implications of these findings for data warehouse design and future research.

Is your back-up IT infrastructure in a safe location?

Building redundant capacity into an organization’s information technology (IT) infrastructure is a standard part of business continuity planning (BCP). Traditionally, cost concerns have dominated the decision of where to locate the redundant facilities. However; recently managers are becoming more aware of the fact that the very issues that make the main IT facilities vulnerable to disruption (i.e. man-made or natural disasters) are likely to impact the redundant (back-up) facilities as well. This complicates the process of selecting redundant facility location(s). The problem is essentially a multi-criteria decision problem, and can be addressed using the location analysis techniques that have been used in other domains in the past. Meanwhile, what make this context somewhat unique are the decision criteria and the rather subjective nature of the decision process. This paper provides a simple decision model for the problem, and illustrates the model with a case where relevant decision criteria are identified and the solution is obtained using a mix of objective and subjective decision techniques. We believe the paper is valuable because it presents an actionable methodology for practitioners involved in BCP.

Managing E-Mail Overload: Solutions and Future Challenges

Effective e-mail management tools must treat messages as useful information, not simply as data congesting the network, the hard disk, or a users inbox. Solutions that economize on scarce cognitive resources at the expense of the relatively cheap additional CPU power, disk capacity, or network bandwidth will ultimately prevail over those that pursue the opposite strategy. With proper application of automatic filtering, clustering, and new user interface metaphors, e-mail can once again become an effective knowledge management tool rather than a source of information overload

Star Ratings versus Sentiment Analysis -- A Comparison of Explicit and Implicit Measures of Opinions

A typical trade-off in decision making is between the cost of acquiring information and the decline in decision quality caused by insufficient information. Consumers regularly face this trade-off in purchase decisions. Online product/service reviews serve as sources of product/service related information. Meanwhile, modern technology has led to an abundance of such content, which makes it prohibitively costly (if possible at all) to exhaust all available information. Consumers need to decide what subset of available information to use. Star ratings are excellent cues for this decision as they provide a quick indication of the tone of a review. However there are cases where such ratings are not available or detailed enough. Sentiment analysis -text analytic techniques that automatically detect the polarity of text- can help in these situations with more refined analysis. In this study, we compare sentiment analysis results with star ratings in three different domains to explore the promise of this technique.

Location analytics and decision support: Reflections on recent advancements, a research framework, and the path ahead

The expansion in analytics and big data over the past decade has included a rapid growth in locational analytics, spatial analysis, and geographic information systems and science. Although research in Decision Support Systems (DSS) has typically tackled spatial decision problems through connections to geographic information systems (GISs), recent research has focused on the benefits from combining the two bodies of knowledge and research streams in addressing important challenges in delivering quality decisions in settings with locational/spatial components. Consequently, research in spatial decision support now seeks to take advantage of the advances in analytics, big data and cloud based decision support. This work incorporates spatiotemporal big data, mobile location-based services, 3-D, location in the sharing economy, space-time, and location-based social media. The goal of this special issue is to present explorations and knowledge enhancement on the cutting edges of decision making involving location and place. The work presented includes new problem areas, data sources, methodologies, and applications in todays more complex and data-rich decision-making environments. To provide a context for the ideas and findings in the special issue articles, this editorial reviews and extracts broad themes and categorizations from a selection of over two dozen past articles published in DSS that combine location analytics (LA), non-location analytics (NLA), and decision support (DS). We then propose a generic framework for LA/NLA/DS research, briefly summarize the eight articles in the special issue, and then outline the directions the field of location analytics and decision support is moving towards. Finally we discuss what gaps in the LA/NLA/DS research landscape need to be addressed by future research.

The impact of cultural differences on smartphone adoption by organizations

This study aims to investigate the effects of cultural differences on smartphone adoption by organizations in Canada and Turkey. Structural equation modeling was used to test the hypothesized relationships based on the data collected by a survey of 141 Canadian and 213 Turkish organizations. Results indicate that cultural differences have a significant impact on adoption behavior, and therefore there are significant differences in adoption factorsbetween the countries.

A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Smartphone Adoption by Canadian and Turkish Organizations

The objective of this study is to identify the impact of cultural differences on adoption of smartphones in Canada and Turkey and investigate the differences in patterns between the adoption behaviors of the two countries. Sequential explanatory design mixed-method research strategy, which incorporates quantitative and qualitative approaches, was used in this research. A multi-group structural equation model analysis was conducted to assess the model based on the data collected from senior and middle managers at 213 and 141 private sector organizations in Turkey and Canada, respectively. Constant comparative method was used to analyze follow-up data that resulted from transcription of the interviews. Results show that national culture has a significant effect on adoption behavior and there are major differences in adoption characteristics between the two countries. For example, organizational characteristics, especially top management support, have a stronger effect on adoption of smartphones by organizations in Canada, while environmental characteristics, including competitive pressure, partner expectations, and customer expectations have a stronger effect on the adoption in Turkey. Implications of these results are discussed.