Volume 10 (2019): Issue 1 (April 2019)

Background: Many studies found in literature only focus on specific aspects of the evaluation of the success of projects, such as the criteria for evaluation; and just a few are focused on the activities for evaluating success. Objectives: The goal of the paper is to present the process for evaluating the success of Business Intelligence (BI) projects in a large company. Methods/Approach: An exploratory case study was carried out at Tintas Robbialac, SA, a Portuguese company of the paint industry. Results: The specific company approach for evaluating the success of BI projects is presented and discussed. Conclusions: The process for evaluating the success of BI, as well as the evaluation criteria, should be formally defined; and the success should be evaluated and monitored along all the project lifecycle.

Background: Information technology (IT) requires substantial investments from enterprises to build competitive capabilities. IT products are supposed to provide value to customers and to increase the competitiveness of enterprises. Vendors of IT products should take the competitive strategy and value creation for enterprise buyers into account. Objectives: This article takes the perspective of IT vendors (ITVs) and attempts to answer the research questions “What types of customer value do ITVs consider?” and “Do ITVs consider the competitiveness of enterprises?” Methods/Approach: This research investigates descriptions from ITVs and analyzes patterns and correlations of coded content. The annual reports of 32 global market-leading ITVs were examined through direct content analysis. Results: Half of the annual reports mention the competitiveness of enterprise buyers; 84% of the samples relate to customer-value disciplines. Moderate positive and monotonic relationships were detected between customer value disciplines. Conclusions: ITVs consider the competitiveness of buyers and noticeably regard customer value disciplines, mainly operational excellence, that in turn refers to process efficiency and cost-effectiveness.

Background: Medicinal and Aromatic Plants (MAPs) are part of a few products that Albania exports in World’s level. The results showed us that the available MAPs value chain information in Albania through several cases is limited and doesn’t match with reality. Objectives: Our research aims to verify the actual situation of the information system between the actors of the MAPs value chain in Albania. Methods/Approach: In this research is used the systemic method, which takes into consideration the analysis through all the main value chain links. For each value of the chain links has been selected a statistical representation number or a sample. Results: The actors that operate through the MAPs market in Albania are in front of the asymmetric information. The sources and the methods used are not on the proper level to offer the real results in this value chain. There are many information system sources for the Albanian MAPs sector, but none of them offers any detailed data about the quantity and the value on plant’s level. Conclusions: The information system of the MAPs value chain is not functional through all the links, while the fabrication still remains on limited levels. The creation of a monitoring system database in time and space for the entire MAPs sector is a necessity.

Background: The crucial elements of a smart factory, employees, machines, and products, have an important effect on current business models. Objectives: The main aim of our study is to present a case study of the impact of Industry 4.0 on the business model in a smart factory. The paper discusses the changes of business models of the organisation and determines critical factors that influence the business models in a knowledge society. Methods/Approach: Our sample included managers, from the company TPV, who are in charge of implementing a digital business model, and who are the most knowledgeable informants on the topic of our study. Data was obtained from, most widely used method for data collection in qualitative research, semi-structured interviews with managers. Content analysis was conducted for the purpose of our study. Results: Results of our study show that the major change will be that machines will have a “mind” of their own, whose main goal will be to work in production, and the role of employees will be primarily in expressing their creativity, carrying out urgent interventions and performing custody of processes. The key critical factors influencing business models in a smart factory are top management and leadership orientations, motivation of employees, collective wisdom, creativity and innovations. Conclusions: The study represents useful guidelines for strategic management of innovative companies in the earliest stages of the process of decision-making process.

Background: Failures in e-government projects to deliver expected results are frequent in the context of developing countries. These are partly attributed to the lack of balanced attention to both technical and social aspects in the implementation. However, there has been limited research on these aspects in the least Developed Countries. Objectives: Taking a socio-technical perspective, this study aims at exploring the extent of changes and effects in the implementation of e-government service-oriented initiatives in Rwanda, one of the Least Developed Countries. Methods/Approach: An empirical investigation was conducted, via interviews at 8 agencies during the period from January 2017 to May 2018. This involved two case projects, an Enterprise Content Management System and a One-Stop e-government system. Furthermore, government documents and online material were analyzed. Results: A number of changes in technology, processes and people aspects were faced in both projects. However, those changes are coupled with secondary effects; there is a need for a better fit between technical systems and social systems of organizations implementing e-government; a larger gap was identified in the first case project. Conclusions: Addressing the issues as a socio-technical system would contribute to improved work systems of agencies and better services.

Background: Text classification is a very important task in information retrieval. Its objective is to classify new text documents in a set of predefined classes, using different supervised algorithms. Objectives: We focus on the text classification for Albanian news articles using two approaches. Methods/Approach: In the first approach, the words in a collection are considered as independent components, allocating to each of them a conforming vector in the vector’s space. Here we utilized nine classifiers from the scikit-learn package, training the classifiers with part of news articles (80%) and testing the accuracy with the remaining part of these articles. In the second approach, the text classification treats words based on their semantic and syntactic word similarities, supposing a word is formed by n-grams of characters. In this case, we have used the fastText, a hierarchical classifier, that considers local word order, as well as sub-word information. We have measured the accuracy for each classifier separately. We have also analyzed the training and testing time. Results: Our results show that the bag of words model does better than fastText when testing the classification process for not a large dataset of text. FastText shows better performance when classifying multi-label text. Conclusions: News articles can serve to create a benchmark for testing classification algorithms of Albanian texts. The best results are achieved with a bag of words model, with an accuracy of 94%.

Background: Using a variety of alternative accounting policies brings about different effects on the stated business results and the value of the company. Objectives: The objective of this paper is to develop a fuzzy logic solution for determining bias in financial reports on low-activity financial markets, and to find a method applicable to unquoted entities. Methods/Approach: A fuzzy logic system was developed using data on Croatian companies, the MatLab software, and the Mamdani fuzzy inference method. Results: The paper provides the summary of results obtained using a fuzzy logic system, and they indicate that the model has relevant validity. Conclusions: The model can serve as a stimulus for more detailed studies of biased financial statements elements. The fuzzy logic model should be further tested on a larger sample of companies classified based on their activity and under different business conditions.

Background: Twitter is the most popular microblog platform. Individuals, companies, organizations, and even governments use Twitter on a daily bases and get vast benefits from it. Twitter also has been valuable for the tourism sector, especially in developing business strategies, planning and studying tourist decision-making processes. Objectives: Goal of the paper is to identify the trends, patterns and the research gaps of the research focusing on the Twitter usage in tourism. Methods/Approach: A bibliometric analysis was conducted in order to identify significant authors, journals, and institutions who engaged in the research-oriented towards Twitter utilization in tourism. In addition, text-mining analysis has been conducted in order to extract and identify the topics of the papers investigating the utilization of Twitter for tourism research. Results: Research of Twitter utilization in tourism has increased substantially in the last decade, with most of the research conducted in the United States and Japan. Extracted topics are focused on distinctive themes, such as network analysis, word of mouth, and destination management. Conclusions: New topics have emerged, such as the utilization of Twitter in crisis communication and terrorist attacks, as well as the integration of Twitter and other social media such as Flickr.

Background: An ageing workforce is a challenge for businesses that are increasingly expected to adapt workplaces to enable employees to remain in work longer. Emerging evidence highlights employer practices to attract or retain older workers. This paper explores employers’ motivations for introducing measures to accommodate an older workforce in three European case study countries. Objectives: The objective is to illustrate and understand different approaches to, and stages in, adjusting workplaces to accommodate an ageing workforce. Methods/Approach: The study combines case studies, including site visits and interviews, with expert consultations. Results: The research finds marked between-country differences, with United Kingdom case studies highlighting a strong emphasis on age-neutral practices shaped by legislation; age-confident practices in Germany resulting from collaborative arrangement between employers and trades unions (with legislation permissive towards age discrimination); business in Spain remaining relatively inactive, despite evidence of people expecting to work longer in life. Conclusions: Diverging employer motivations and responses to the challenge of an ageing workforce risk a multi-speed Europe in age-confident workplace innovation. A concerted effort that draws on the multiple factors that motivate initiative would be required to achieve good working conditions for older workers across Europe.

Background: Transfer of knowledge from academia to business is one of the crucial issues for creating innovation. Creation of university spin-offs could significantly improve this transfer. Objectives: The main scientific aim is to examine the differences between universities in European countries and identify factors affecting the probability of creating the university spin-off. The paper is also focused on the differences in the specialization and financial sources of universities. Methods/Approach: We compare selected indicators for higher education institutions in European countries and examine potential determinants affecting the probability of academic spin-off formation. With respect to the main aim, the logit and probit regression analyses have been used. Results: Our results show that the creation of spin-offs is typical on the one hand for highly specialized universities or on the other hand for universities with a wide variety of study programs. They should also have an optimum number of doctoral students and have mostly less funding from tuition fees. Conclusions: Several indicators appear to play an important role in the formation of university spin-off. These indicators are the level of specialization, the share of tuition fees in the University budget, and the share of Ph.D. and foreign students.

Background: In recent years’ income inequality has been an economic issue. The primary instrument for redistributing income is personal income tax. However, based on economic theory income inequality concerns indicators such as wages, transfer payments, taxes, social security contributions, and geographical mobility. Objectives: The objective of this paper is to examine the impact of certain labor market indicators on personal income taxation in Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina (FB&H). Methods/Approach: Since personal income taxation consists of a very broad definition and for the purpose of this research only, income from dependent (employment) activity is observed. The econometric analysis is conducted using error correction modeling, as well as forecast errors variance decomposition. Results: The error correction model is estimated, and the cointegrating equation indicates that monthly wage and number of employees statistically significantly positively affect personal income taxes in FB&H in the long-run. After two years, the selected labor market indicators explain a considerable part of forecasting error variance of personal income tax revenues. Conclusions: The implementation of reforms in the labor market and tax policies of the FB&H is suggested. In order to achieve necessary reforms, efficient governance and general stable political environment are required.

Background: Efficient management of the knowledge requires implementation of new tools and refinement of the old ones - one of them is visualization. As visualization turns out to be an efficient tool for transfer of acquired knowledge, understanding of the influence of visualization techniques on the process of knowledge sharing is a necessity. Objectives: The main objective of the paper is to deepen the understanding of the relation of visualization to other knowledge sharing paths. The supplementary goal is a discussion of constraints on visualization styles in relation to readability and efficiency. Methods/Approach: Due to the ambiguous nature of the problem, case analysis was selected as a research method. Two research papers have been selected for that. The first one focused on agrotourism, introduces a general use theoretical tool suitable for various purposes, such as consumer sentiment analysis. The second one evaluates possibilities of revealing an implicit organizational structure of an organization by means of visual analysis using interaction graphs. Results: Visualization is an important part of data analysis and knowledge transfer process. Hybrid visualization styles enhance information density but may decrease clarity. Conclusions: In order to maximise the role of visualization in a knowledg tranfer process, the special care must be devoted to clarity, the optimal level of details and information density in order to avoid obfuscation.

Background: Recently the European Union, through its Horizon 2020 fund has awarded numerous research projects tasked with the development of cloud-based health technology solutions. A number of these projects have a specific focus on ambient assisted living (AAL) technologies; solutions that offer a unique opportunity to improve the quality of life of persons with mild cognitive impairments. The diffusion of these solutions across a European wide cloud infrastructure presents a novel opportunity to reduce economic pressures currently experienced by European health systems. However, no route to market framework currently exists for a European wide healthcare delivery system. Objectives: The goal of the paper is to conduct the review and develop the literature around technology assessment for AAL technologies and route to market frameworks. Methods/Approach: We highlight the role of Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when conducting a technology assessment by reviewing existent literature. Results: We discuss three TCO models that can support the assessment of AAL technologies. Conclusions: There is a gap in the analysis of TCO models in the context of AAL technologies particularly in public and private sector collaborations. TCO process should be developed into a key award criterion when conducting AAL technology assessment and procurements, thus aiding long term strategic decision making.