The thesis discusses topics related to the development of business process management systems. Business process management systems have evolved on the basis of workflow management systems through incremental inclusion of standard information system functions, for example, resource and client management. The application of model driven development is required to deal with the complexity of business management systems and to increase development efficiency. In contrast to conventional information systems, the behavior of business management systems is strongly affected by the business models that they execute. Thus, business process models also can be used for designing and developing business management systems using sequentially applied model transformations that adapt models to a specific execution platform.
Generative AI can help small business owners automate tasks, increase efficiency, and improve their bottom line. However, despite the seemingly intuitive design of systems like ChatGPT, significant barriers remain for those less comfortable with technology. To address these disparities, prior work highlights accessory skills -- beyond prompt engineering -- users must master to successfully adopt generative AI including keyboard shortcuts, editing skills, file conversions, and browser literacy. Building on a design workshop series and 15 interviews with small businesses, we introduce BizChat, a large language model (LLM)-powered web application that helps business owners across digital skills levels write their business plan -- an essential but often neglected document. To do so, BizChat's interface embodies three design considerations inspired by learning sciences: ensuring accessibility to users with less digital skills while maintaining extensibility to power users ("low-floor-high-ceiling"), providing in situ micro-learning to support entrepreneurial education ("just-in-time learning"), and framing interaction around business activities ("contextualized technology introduction"). We conclude with plans for a future BizChat deployment.
Even though Turnitin generates AI (Artificial Intelligence) writing detection reports, these AI reports shall not be used for punitive purposes as Turnitin AI reports accuracy is way below the 98% claimed by Turnitin, as revealed in this study. To assist professors, teachers, and content evaluation stakeholders in their strive to identify AI-generated material, this study examines the stylistic features of case study, business correspondence, and academic writing ChatGPT-4 generated responses by exploring sentence length, paragraph structure, word choice, mood, tense, voice, pronouns, keywords density, lexical density, lexical diversity, and reading ease. The study revealed that ChatGPT-4 case study generated responses are produced in paragraphs of 2 to 3 sentences of 16 to 18 words each. The sentences are mainly formed in imperative mood. The use of the second-person pronoun ‘you’ and the second-person possessive determiner ‘your’ is prevalent. Keywords and lexical density are relatively low, lexical diversity is average, and the reading ease is relatively high. The study also found that ChatGPT-4 business correspondence responses are generated in paragraphs of 2 to 3 sentences of 16 to 20 words each. The sentences are mainly generated in declarative mood thru simple present tense in active voice using third-person singular pronouns. Technical words and abbreviations are used without outlining what they stand for. The keywords density, lexical density, and lexical diversity are high and the reading ease is low. The study also revealed that ChatGPT-4 academic writing generated responses are provided in paragraphs of 3 to 4 sentences of 16 to 19 words each. The sentences are mainly generated in declarative mood using active voice, agentless passive in times, with diverse present tenses. Keywords and lexical densities are high and the lexical diversity is low, which makes the reading ease average difficulty, except for the undefined abbreviations. Noticeably, ChatGPT-4 supports the transgender movement by intentionally using the third-person plural pronoun ‘they’ to refer to a singular.
Generative AI could disrupt professional writing instruction, but banning AI tools seems unproductive. This article outlines a rhetorical approach for adapting business writing instruction for the AI age: It suggests AI use cases that align with the rhetorical canons, illustrates each with real-world business examples, and ends with suggestions for using AI to build students’ critical genre awareness. This approach should prove useful for business writing instructors who want to ground their AI-related instruction in enduring pedagogical theory.
As generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) becomes more prevalent in academic circles, this article probes its ethical and practical integration in international business (IB) research. It explores the different phases of the research process where GenAI can be effectively employed, including idea generation, data analysis, and writing and communication. Notably, the article emphasizes the critical importance of upholding responsible and ethical standards when incorporating GenAI into IB research, guaranteeing that its utilization not only contributes to knowledge advancement but also conforms to the highest research integrity benchmarks.
The simulation hypothesis suggests that we live in a computer simulation. That notion has attracted significant scholarly and popular interest. This article explores the simulation hypothesis from a business perspective. Due to the lack of a name for a universe consistent with the simulation hypothesis, we propose the term simuverse. We argue that if we live in a simulation, there must be a business justification. Therefore, we ask: If we live in a simuverse, what is its business model? We identify and explore business model scenarios, such as simuverse as a project, service, or platform. We also explore business model pathways and risk management issues. The article contributes to the simulation hypothesis literature and is the first to provide a business model perspective on the simulation hypothesis. The article discusses theoretical and practical implications and identifies opportunities for future research related to sustainability, digital transformation, and Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Existing Spatial Interaction Models (SIMs) are limited in capturing the complex and context-aware interactions between business clusters and trade areas. To address the limitation, we propose a SIM-GAT model to predict spatiotemporal visitation flows between community business clusters and their trade areas. The model innovatively represents the integrated system of business clusters, trade areas, and transportation infrastructure within an urban region using a connected graph. Then, a graph-based deep learning model, i.e., Graph AttenTion network (GAT), is used to capture the complexity and interdependencies of business clusters. We developed this model with data collected from the Miami metropolitan area in Florida. We then demonstrated its effectiveness in capturing varying attractiveness of business clusters to different residential neighborhoods and across scenarios with an eXplainable AI approach. We contribute a novel method supplementing conventional SIMs to predict and analyze the dynamics of inter-connected community business clusters. The analysis results can inform data-evidenced and place-specific planning strategies helping community business clusters better accommodate their customers across scenarios, and hence improve the resilience of community businesses.
The study aims at analyzing Thai students’ perception as EFL learners on advanced writing courses taught and learned online. The participants are 100 Nakhon Sawan Rajabhat University students in Year 3 and 4 majoring in English, English Education, and English for Business Communication. The participants have experienced online writing courses in Research Report Writing, Essay Writing, Creative Writing, and Business Writing subject. The data were collected using a survey and an in-depth interview to 20 of the participants. The results show that the challenges that the students face in learning advanced writing courses online outweigh the advantages. The students’ main problem were the difficulty in comprehending the lessons and the teachers’ explanations as well as the feedback. The second challenge were the poor internet connection. They are problems due to the lack of skills and technical devices. The other problem was due to the more workload in having an online advanced writing courses. And finally the last problem is that online classes make the learners feel alienated, disengaged, and demotivated. Besides the problems faced, the learners admitted that learning advanced writing online provides more flexible time in constructing the pieces of writing and they feel less pressured in writing since the teachers do not supervise them in person.
Commercial organisations are holding and processing an ever-increasing amount of personal data. Policies and laws are continually changing to require these companies to be more transparent regarding the collection, storage, processing and sharing of this data. This paper reports our work of taking Booking.com as a case study to visualise personal data flows extracted from their privacy policy. By showcasing how the company shares its consumers' personal data, we raise questions and extend discussions on the challenges and limitations of using privacy policies to inform online users about the true scale and the landscape of personal data flows. This case study can inform us about future research on more data flow-oriented privacy policy analysis and on the construction of a more comprehensive ontology on personal data flows in complicated business ecosystems.
Objective: To provide a working guide which facilitates the accuracy, transparency, and usefulness for academics and practitioners of case report papers as an article type which are fit for publishing in impact journals. In this way, we aim to increase the use and dissemination of recommendations in aid of the writing and publication of case study and action research. Theoretical framework: A case report paper presents a story in narrative form and includes current individual or organisational concerns, situational diagnoses, interventions, outcomes including adverse events, and follow-up. The narrative should include a discussion of the rationale for any conclusions and lessons learned. Method: We analysed the prevalence of these type of articles in publications as indexed in Web of Science (WOS) and in Scopus; we explain how we customised the case report guidelines (CAse REport or CARE) to optimise them for the scientific field of Management focussing particularly on Operations Management and Human Resources Management. We shared for discussion and feedback the adapted proposal among a group of academics and professionals in the field of Management. Outcomes/Implications: Robust reporting guidelines help to improve research performance, reduce bias risk, provide information on the implementation of management practices, support the training of management professionals, and enable informed editorial decisions by journal editors and reviewers.
Languages vary when it comes to linguistic manifestations of formal politeness, but what particularly marks professional email communication is the flexibility of the genre compared to traditional, formal business letters. This poses the question of how individual email writers navigate without clear standards and clearly prescribed formulae. This study focuses on the individual email writer and, specifically, opening salutations and closing valedictions in 927
Norwegian workplace emails, followed by metapragmatic interviews with their senders. In an egalitarian society with few explicit linguistic manifestations of formal politeness, individual choices of formulations provide a rich source of data. Linguistic content analysis reveals a significant degree of consistency in each person’s individual use, which indicates that when there are no commonly held norms, people make their own rules. The interviewees are aware of
which openings and closings they prefer, but often not why. Further analysis of the data reveals that hierarchical social distance is not a motivational factor, but the intentions to be either personally close or professionally distant are. Both are regarded as viable options in formal workplace emails by their users. However, the informants’ perception of which linguistic items represent these motivations depends on individual preferences rather than on any established
or institutionalised practises. The latter is not a uniquely Norwegian problem, but concerns email correspondents in general because of the flexibility innate to the email genre.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
An observation of organizations as social cells allows us to identify that they act within a framework of instrumental rationality, described and instrumented from the statements of the nascent sociology and, especially, by the thinking of Max Weber, pioneer of the bureaucratic school, who focused his statements on a teleological and at the same time procedural approach based on the interaction of the duality “should be” and “what to do”. This thinking became dominant in the so-called management sciences, generating actions characterized by domination over the human, its freedom and autonomy.The intellectual effort of this work is to find or contribute to a different approach in the management sciences, starting from the recognition of the historical context of the emergence of critical thinking, in the conception of the Frankfurt School, in a scenario of spiritual and cultural crisis that addressed the tasks of a redefinition of culture, the revision of ideal, hegemonic and central legacies of the thought of classical modernity, enlightened modernity, bourgeois modernity and its crisis of concepts such as reason, subjectivity, time, narrative, reality, progress, truth and value. Great importance is given to the production of Jürgen Habermas, identifying in his work the categories of “lifeworld”, “rationality” and “communication” and his critique of integrating mechanisms such as money through the market, power in the structure of organizations and solidarity generated by virtue of norms, values and communication.On these bases, the need for the theory of communicative action is justified in order to understand and overcome “instrumental rationality” so that social management (or inclusion) colonizes strategic management (or exclusion) and not as it has been happening socio-historically. Under the above perspectives, the aim of the article is to contribute to the debate on how to achieve an “economically efficient” and “humanly viable” management in order to find a reification of the empowerment of subjects, never their annihilation, since organizations are networks of the human fabric that transcends instrumental processes.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Alistair P. Barros, Arthur H. M. ter Hofstede, Henderik A. Proper
et al.
By incorporating aspects of coordination and collaboration, workflow implementations of information systems require a sound conceptualisation of \EM{business processing} semantics. Traditionally, the success of conceptual modelling techniques has depended largely on the adequacy of conceptualisation, expressive power, comprehensibility and formal foundation. An equally important requirement, particularly with the increased conceptualisation of business aspects, is \EM{business suitability}. In this paper, the focus is on the business suitability of workflow modelling for a commonly encountered class of (operational) business processing, e.g. those of insurance claims, bank loans and land conveyancing. A general assessment is first conducted on some \EM{integrated} techniques characterising well-known paradigms - structured process modelling, object-oriented modelling, behavioural process modelling and business-oriented modelling. Through this, an insight into business suitability within the broader perspective of technique adequacy, is gained. A specific business suitability diagnosis then follows using a particular characterisation of business processing, i.e.\ one where the intuitive semantics and inter-relationship of business services and business processes are nuanced. As a result, five business suitability principles are elicited. These are proposed for a more detailed understanding and (synthetic) development of workflow modelling techniques. Accordingly, further insight into workflow specification languages and workflow globalisation in open distributed architectures may also be gained.
Any firm whose business strategy has an exposure constraint that limits its potential gain naturally considers expansion, as this can increase its exposure. We model business expansion as an enlargement of the opportunity set for business policies. However, expansion is irreversible and has an opportunity cost attached. We use the expected optimization of utility to formulate this as a novel stochastic control problem combined with an optimal stopping time, and we derive an explicit solution for exponential utility. We apply the framework to an investment and a reinsurance scenario. In the investment problem, the cost and incentives to increase the trading exposure are analyzed, while the optimal timing for an insurer to launch its reinsurance business is investigated in the reinsurance problem. Our model predicts that the additional income gained through business expansion is the key incentive for a decision to expand. Interestingly, companies may have this incentive but are likely to wait for a period of time before expanding, although situations of zero opportunity cost or specific restrictive conditions on the model parameters are exceptions to waiting. The business policy remains on the boundary of the opportunity set before expansion during the waiting period. The length of the waiting period is related to the opportunity cost, return, and risk of the expanded business.
Sohini Upadhyay, Vatche Isahagian, Vinod Muthusamy
et al.
AI business process applications automate high-stakes business decisions where there is an increasing demand to justify or explain the rationale behind algorithmic decisions. Business process applications have ordering or constraints on tasks and feature values that cause lightweight, model-agnostic, existing explanation methods like LIME to fail. In response, we propose a local explanation framework extending LIME for explaining AI business process applications. Empirical evaluation of our extension underscores the advantage of our approach in the business process setting.
The purpose of this article is to explore the link between knowledge management and organizational performance, as a fundamental aspect for increasing the level of organizational competitiveness. Knowledge management (KM) aims to manage, store and transmit information to create or maintain competitive advantages in organizations. Organizational performance is basically understood as the real results of an organization from different points of view or indicators. The importance of this process requires a systematic review of research that has focused on establishing the impact of knowledge management on the performance of organizations. The article was approached from a theoretical perspective, the literature was reviewed and analyzed establishing the link between knowledge management and organizational performance. The research that was analyzed was pulled from databases including Emerald, ScienceDirect, Google Scholar, Scopus and Ebscohost by searching for the keywords. It was established that knowledge management has a significant and positive relationship in organizational performance and that it is a process affected by internal and external factors
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
This article presents a review of theories related to the debate that accounting has generated, to define its position as a scientific discipline linking this to the support it offers to the move towards sustainable development. A theoretical and empirical map of the relationship that exists amongst accounting, the environment and the interaction with society is proposed. This is done through teory documentary review structure which includes: i) the evolution of accounting through its history; ii) epistemological fundamentals; iii) the application of ethics; iv) finally, it contextualizes accounting from the social and environmental dimensions, including the three-dimensional theory of accounting and contamety. It concludes, firstly, the key role accounting plays, as a social science, in guaranteeing the creation of environmental and social value, from accounting and financial management to sustainable development. Secondly, it models the scientific research of the accounting from of epistemology and knowledge between reasonableness and truth, reflecting on the types of accounting research, among them: the principal, the normative, the interpretative, the critical and the positivist. Finally, it defines corporate social responsibility, in the sense of real and transparent Financial Statements in accordance with the environmental and social reality, referring to the term integral sustainability through the three-dimensional theory of accounting and the contametry in terms of the accounting research.
Business communication. Including business report writing, business correspondence
Saeed Nosratabadi, Gergo Pinter, Amir Mosavi
et al.
Sustainable business models also offer banks competitive advantages such as increasing brand reputation and cost reduction. However, no framework is presented to evaluate the sustainability of banking business models. To bridge this theoretical gap, the current study using A Delphi-Analytic Hierarchy Process method, firstly, developed a sustainable business model to evaluate the sustainability of the business model of banks. In the second step, the sustainability performance of sixteen banks from eight European countries including Norway, the UK, Poland, Hungary, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy, assessed. The proposed business model components of this study were ranked in terms of their impact on achieving sustainability goals. Consequently, the proposed model components of this study, based on their impact on sustainability, are respectively value proposition, core competencies, financial aspects, business processes, target customers, resources, technology, customer interface, and partner network. The results of the comparison of the banks studied by each country disclosed that the sustainability of the Norwegian and German banks business models is higher than in other counties. The studied banks of Hungary and Spain came in second, the banks of the UK, Poland, and France ranked third, and finally, the Italian banks ranked fourth in the sustainability of their business models.
This paper investigates the contribution of business model innovations in improvement of food supply chains. Through a systematic literature review, the notable business model innovations in the food industry are identified, surveyed, and evaluated. Findings reveal that the innovations in value proposition, value creation processes, and value delivery processes of business models are the successful strategies proposed in food industry. It is further disclosed that rural female entrepreneurs, social movements, and also urban conditions are the most important driving forces inducing the farmers to reconsider their business models. In addition, the new technologies and environmental factors are the secondary contributors in business model innovation for the food processors. It is concluded that digitalization has disruptively changed the food distributors models. E-commerce models and internet of things are reported as the essential factors imposing the retailers to innovate their business models. Furthermore, the consumption demand and the product quality are two main factors affecting the business models of all the firms operating in the food supply chain regardless of their positions in the chain. The findings of the current study provide an insight into the food industry to design a sustainable business model to bridge the gap between food supply and food demand.