Prestigious Publisher Springer Nature Published a Book by VU Professor

A renowned science publisher, Springer Nature, has published a monograph by a Vilnius university professor Rimvydas Skyrius from faculty of Economics and business administration, titled “Business Intelligence. A Comprehensive Approach to Information Needs, Technologies and Culture”.

This monograph by professor Rimvydas Skyrius comes at a time when the situation in the field experiences both significant developments and challenges. In the field of business intelligence, fast and tumultuous developments bring possibilities, expectations, and a good deal of confusion to accompany them. The developments are rather visible: larger surge of interest in analytics, fast development of artificial intelligence techniques, utilization of global information resources, to name a few. The challenges, however, are no less visible: despite huge technical advances, many obstacles still remain, numerous contradictions remain unsolved, and many BI projects fail or do not bring the promised benefits. As numerous research works and real-life cases show, mere possession of advanced technology and voluminous information resources is no longer considered adequate for fulfilling business information needs. This explains the rising interest in managerial and human issues.

“In the area of informatics and informing there is an information value chain from singular atomic data to information which, in the ideal case, is presented to right people at the right time and in the right place. These people make sense of received information and project it into their activities and needs. Lately, one can notice a gap between the attention given to data technologies, and business needs for insights – high-quality information that is essential for well-grounded decisions in a turbulent business environment. A person and human information behavior are the least-changing part of this chain, if compared to technology development, but also the least-researched”, - R. Skyrius said.

This is exactly why the focus of the book is under-researched managerial and human issues in BI. The book addresses several important research gaps – relation between BI maturity and agility, role and features of BI culture, definition of and relations between soft assets – attention, sense, trust. The book steps carefully in a rather vague and ill-defined field of managerial and human issues of BI by relating phenomena to their origins and history, and deliberately leaves technology issues in the background.

The monograph has been preceded by author’s research, performed for more than a quarter of the century in the area of business information needs. The research has been concentrating mostly on the complex part of information needs range, covering business decision support, business intelligence and related areas that may be joined under the umbrella term of advanced informing. The research coverage has not been limited by Lithuanian organizations and companies – at some research stages, cooperation with foreign researchers (USA) had shown that the features of business informing activities and information behavior are quite similar. The materials of former research, published in numerous previous research papers and conferences, give ground to arguments presented in the book.