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In Automated Machine Learning for Business, we teach the machine learning process using a new development in data science: automated machine learning. AutoML, when implemented properly, makes machine learning accessible to most people because it removes the need for years of experience in the most arcane aspects of data science, such as the math, statistics, and computer science skills required to become a top contender in traditional machine learning. Anyone trained in the use of AutoML can use it to test their ideas and support the quality of those ideas during presentations to management and stakeholder groups. Because the requisite investment is one semester-long undergraduate course rather than a year in a graduate program, these tools will likely become a core component of undergraduate programs, and over time, even the high school curriculum.

Discussions of the economic impact of open source software often generate more heat than light. Advocates passionately assert the benefits of open source while critics decry its effects. Missing from the debate is rigorous economic analysis and systematic economic evidence of the impact of open source on consumers, firms, and economic development in general. This book fills that gap, drawing on a new, large-scale database to show that open source and proprietary software interact in sometimes unexpected ways, and discussing the policy implications of these findings. The new data (from a range of countries in varying stages of development) documents the mixing of open source and proprietary software: firms sell proprietary software while contributing to open source, and users extensively mix and match the two. The book examines the ways in which software differs from other technologies in promoting economic development, what motivates individuals and firms to contribute to open source projects, how developers and users view the trade-offs between the two kinds of software, and how government policies can ensure that open source competes effectively with proprietary software and contributes to economic development.

Confronting Cyber Risk: An Embedded Endurance Strategy for Cybersecurity is a practical leadership handbook defining a new strategy for improving cybersecurity and mitigating cyber risk. Written by two leading experts with extensive professional experience in cybersecurity, the book provides CEOs and cyber newcomers alike with novel, concrete guidance on how to implement a cutting-edge strategy to mitigate an organization’s overall risk to malicious cyberattacks. Using short, real-world case studies, the book highlights the need to address attack prevention and the resilience of each digital asset while also accounting for an incident’s potential impact on overall operations. In a world of hackers, artificial intelligence, and persistent ransomware attacks, the Embedded Endurance strategy embraces the reality of interdependent digital assets and provides an approach that addresses cyber risk at both the micro level (people, networks, systems and data) and the macro level (the organization). Most books about cybersecurity focus entirely on technology; the Embedded Endurance strategy recognizes the need for sophisticated thinking about hardware and software while also extending beyond to address operational, reputational and litigation risk. This book both provides the reader with a solid grounding in important prevention-focused technologies—such as cloud-based security and intrusion detection—and emphasizes the important role of incident response. By implementing an Embedded Endurance strategy, you can guide your team to blunt major cyber incidents with preventative and resilience measures engaged systematically across your organization.

Government information systems are big business (costing over 1% of GDP a year). They are critical to all aspects of public policy and governmental operations. Governments spend billions on them — for instance, the United Kingdom alone commits £14 billion a year to public sector information technology (IT) operations. Yet governments do not generally develop or run their own systems, instead relying on private sector computer services providers to run large, long-run contracts to provide IT. Some of the biggest companies in the world (IBM, EDS, Lockheed Martin, etc.) have made this a core market. This book shows how governments in some countries (the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands) have maintained much more effective policies than others (in the United Kingdom, Japan, and Australia). It shows how public managers need to retain and develop their own IT expertise and to carefully maintain well-contested markets if they are to deliver value for money in their dealings with the very powerful global IT industry. This book describes how a critical aspect of the modern state is managed, or in some cases mismanaged.

Electronic health records are widely regarded as the ‘connective tissue’ of any modern healthcare system. For some they represent a ‘dangerous enthusiasm’ and for others a key enabler of ‘disruptive innovation’. Many governments have made major policy and financial investments in digitalizing health records but their implementation has frequently run into opposition from doctors, had lukewarm responses from patients, and raised considerable concerns for privacy advocates and others worried by the security of sensitive health data and risks of national databases. This book draws upon the concept of ‘orders of worth’ to reveal the moral dimensions of the medical division of labour and to delve deeper into understanding why electronic records have been so difficult to implement and the sources of opposition to them. The authors argue that digitalization disrupts the moral orders which define rights and responsibilities for the sharing and exchanging of patient medical data. This is illustrated through longitudinal studies of two of the most controversial attempts to introduce national systems—a patient-controlled electronic record in Australia and a national summary care record that was part of the ill-fated NHS National Program for IT in England. The authors conclude by using the lessons from these national experiences and insights from two regional projects in each country to suggest how the idea of electronic records might be rethought. It is a must read for anyone concerned about health information and the implications of how it is shared and exchanged in a digital world.

The health care industry has been slow to join the information technology revolution; handwritten records are still the primary means of organizing patient care. Concerns about patient privacy, the difficulty of developing appropriate computing tools and information technology, high costs, and the resistance of some physicians and nurses have hampered the use of technology in health care. In 2009, the U.S. government committed billions of dollars to health care technology. Many questions remain, however, about how to deploy these resources. This book uses diabetes—a costly, complex, and widespread disease that involves nearly every facet of the health care system—to examine the challenges of using the tools of information technology to improve patient care. The book focuses on the patient, charting the information problems patients encounter in different stages of the disease. Chapters discuss ubiquitous computing as a tool to move diabetes care out of the doctor’s office, technology and chronic disease management, educational gaming as a way to help patients understand their disease, patient access to information, and methodological and theoretical concerns. We need both technologists and providers at the drawing board in order to design and deploy effective digital tools for health care. This book examines and exemplifies this necessary collaboration.

This book explores the emergence of a new class of expert—the industry analyst—whose advice has enormous impacts across IT markets. In just over 30 years, Gartner Inc. has emerged as market leader with 40 per cent of the revenue of this $4.4 billion industry. Gideon Gartner in establishing the firm that bears his name created a distinctive model for offering and trading advisory services that could primarily help technology adopters facing difficult procurement decisions. The book will provide detailed empirical focus on Gartner’s innovations which include novel approaches to generating, validating, and defending their pronouncements about the digital futures (‘IT predictions’), their differential assessments of the capabilities and prospects of vendors in the market (through its signature product the ‘Magic Quadrant’), and its potent naming interventions (‘product classifications’). These assessments, though much criticised, are all highly influential, having reshaped understandings and actions within emerging and current technology fields. Drawing on recent debates within science and technology studies, economic sociology, accounting, marketing and organisation studies, the book examines the extent to which industry analysts’ advice is ‘performative’: framing understandings within sectors and pushing or ‘nudging’ innovation pathways or technology procurement choices in particular directions. The book argues that what may be at stake is less the performativity of knowledge and more how knowledge is performed.

In today's fast-moving, e-commerce economy, information is power. For years, companies have been investing in IT, expecting to develop their ability to exploit the power of information and achieve better business performance. Frequently, a company's investment has been a cost with no clear payback; a competitive necessity rather than a strategic advantage. The book presents a framework for evaluating IT strategies: Information Orientation. Information Orientation does this by determining the degree to which a company implements and realizes the synergies across three information capabilities: information behaviours and values; information management practices; and information technology practices. This book provides a description of the dimensions of each of the capabilities, along with the analytical basis which validates the research, finding that a company must integrate all three information capabilities as a precondition for achieving superior business performance. It presents the Information Orientation Dashboard as a diagnostic tool to measure and evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a company's information capabilities.

Silicon Valley has been considered as the model that societies must imitate to succeed in the information age. However, recently another alternative has attracted strong international interest: the Finnish model. This is equally dynamic in technological and economic terms, but combines the information society with the welfare state. This book looks at what the Finnish model really is. The chapters analyse the factors that have enabled Nokia to become the world's leading telecommunications company, for example, and Linux to become the biggest challenger to Microsoft in the operating systems market. They discuss the development of Nokia and the Finnish innovation model, with important lessons for businesses and national technology policies. However, the Finnish model's most radical and interesting feature is its attempt to combine technological and economic success with social justice and equality. The book shows how Finland has uniquely created a ‘virtuous cycle’ out of the information society and the welfare state: the successful information society makes the continued financing of the welfare state possible and the welfare state generates well-educated people in good shape for the information society's continued success. This model has significant implications for all societies where policy debates about the information society and/or public policy are on the agenda. Ultimately, the Finnish model proves that there is no one model for the information age, but that there is room for different policies and values.

This book is concerned with the ways in which organizations design, build and use information technology (IT) systems. In particular it looks at the interaction between these IT-centred activities and the broader management processes within organizations. The authors adopt a critical social science perspective on these issues, and are primarily concerned with advancing theoretical debates on how best to understand the related processes of technological and organizational change. To this end, the book examines and deploys recent work on power/knowledge, actor-network theory and critical organization theory. The result is an account of the nature and significance of information systems in organizations, which is an alternative perspective to pragmatic and recipe-based approaches to this topic that dominate much contemporary management literature on IT.

Information Technology (IT) has become symbolic of modernity and progress almost since its inception. The nature and boundaries of IT have also meant that it has shaped, or become embedded within, a wide range of other scientific, technological, and economic developments. Governments, from the outset, saw the computer as a strategic technology, a keystone of economic development, and an area where technology policy should be targeted. This was true for those economies interested in maintaining their technological and economic leadership, but also figured strongly in the developmental programmes of those seeking to modernize or catch up. So strong was this notion that predominant political economic ideologies have frequently been subverted or distorted to allow for special efforts to promote either the production or use of IT. This book brings together country-based studies to examine in depth the nature and extent of IT policies, as they have evolved from a complex historical interaction of politics, technology, institutions, and social and cultural factors. In doing so, many key questions are critically examined. Where can we find successful examples of IT policy? Who has shaped policy? Who did governments turn to for advice in framing policy? Several chapters outline the impact of military influence on IT. What is the precise nature of this influence on IT development? How closely were industry leaders linked to government programmes and to what extent were these programmes, particularly those aimed at the generation of ‘national champions’, misconceived through undue special pleading? How effective were government personnel and politicians in assessing the merits of programmes predicated on technological trajectories extrapolated from increasingly complex and specialised information?

The focus of this book is on educating on the strategic principles fundamental to using information technology to gain market control. It provides case examples of how to use IT to enhance existing core competencies and strategies. The book is designed to help managers struggling with how to advantageously harness the new information revolution. It can also support executive and business education programs on managing technology when few such studies exist. While Internet and information technologies are currently hot topics, many firms and executives are without the tools and knowledge of how to actually use them to improve results. This book describes how major non-information technology companies are doing this and the strategic principles employed.

This book analyses different aspects of life and work within ‘the heart of the ICT Revolution’. The book engages with the disciplines of sociology, political science, media and communication studies, and management, providing information for business practitioners and policy makers who wish to understand the significance of digital technologies for society, the economy, and social organisation.

This book presents a stunning insight on the impact of the Internet and communication technologies on society in the beginning of the twenty-first century. The author puts forward the case that the Internet is not just a technology, but the very fabric and backbone of the New Economy, and of the Network Society. It is essential that people understand its language, its logic, its constraints, and its freedoms in order to manage and to change their reality.

This book provides an exposition of key issues in the development, steering, and management of the Internet. Much of its focus is on the governance of the infrastructure for Internet communication, particularly data transmission protocols, protocol addresses, and corresponding domain names. It also maps the development and application of core principles of network design for the Internet. A recurrent theme of the book is the challenges associated with establishing global, multi-stakeholder governance structures based on bottom-up, consensus-seeking decisional procedures, without direct foundation in a treaty framework. The book's basic argument is that the success of the Internet is largely due to its development within open and democratic cultures, and that Internet governance structures ought accordingly to continue to cultivate such cultures.

The use of information and communication technologies (ICT) in organizations and the management of their impact has been the traditional domain of computer specialists and management consultants. The former have offered multiple ways to represent, model, and build applications that streamline and accelerate data flows, while the latter have been busy linking the deployment of ICTs with strategy and the redesign of business processes. This book takes quite a different approach altogether. It uses a string of metaphors, such as Bricolage, Krisis, Gestell, etc., to place a concern for human existence and our working lives at the centre of the study of ICTs and their diffusion in business organizations, and looks at our practices, improvisations, and moods. It draws upon the author's own extensive research and consulting experience to throw a fresh light on some key questions: why are systems ambiguous? Why do they not give us more time to do things? Is there strategic value in tinkering even in high-tech settings? What is the value of age-old practices in dealing with new technologies? What is the role of moods and affections in influencing action and cognition? The book presents an alternative to the current approaches in management, software-engineering, and strategy.

The concentration of private power over media has been the subject of intense public debate around the world. Critics have long feared waves of mergers creating a handful of large media firms that would hold sway over public opinion and endanger democracy and innovation. But others believe with equal fervor that the Internet and deregulation have opened the media landscape significantly. How concentrated has the American information sector really become? What are the facts about American media ownership? In this contentious environment, the book provides a comprehensive survey of media concentration with a methodical, scientific approach. It assembles a wealth of data from the last twenty-five years about mass media such as radio, television, film, music, and print publishing, as well as the Internet, telecommunications, and media-related information technology. After examining 100 separate media and network industries in detail, the book provides a powerful summary and analysis of concentration trends across industries and major media sectors. It also looks at local media power, vertical concentration, and the changing nature of media ownership through financial institutions and private equity. The results reveal a reality much more complex than the one painted by advocates on either side of the debate. They show a dynamic system that fluctuates around long-term concentration trends driven by changing economics and technology.

This book examines the interaction between social, regulatory, and market developments underlying the growing use of new technologies such as the personal computer and the Internet. Based upon empirical research by an international team, it offers insights needed to understand public policy, corporate strategy, and individual choices taken in response to the deluge of new technological opportunities. A principal theme of the book is that changes are governed by public decisions that establish the institutional framework in which the private sector operates. The quality and value of the information society for the citizen is not the inevitable consequence of market and technological forces. Policy choices that however fail to take market and technical influences into account will prove ineffective. The book lays the foundation for improved theories of the process of change, more appropriate strategies to achieve desired aims, and more effective policies for mitigating the effects of dislocation and exclusion from the information society.