Business Information Systems

Book Preface

The 17th edition of International Conference on Business Information Systems was held in Larnaca, Cyprus. The BIS conference was established in 1997 and since then it grew to a well-renowned event of the scientific community. Every year researchers and business practitioners conduct scientific discussions on upto- date issues that include the development, implementation, and application of business information systems. A wide scientific community and experts involved in the development of business computing applications participated in the 17th edition of BIS conference.

The BIS conference follows the trends in academic and business research; thus, the theme of the BIS 2014 conference was “Big data: problems solved and remaining challenges.”The amount of data available for analysis, especially economy-related data, are increasing rapidly. According to MGI and McKinsey’s Business Technology Group, big data is becoming a key basis of competition, an important contributing factor to productivity growth, innovation, consumer surplus as well as organizational effectiveness. Currently, big data is one of the most prominent trends in areas such as recommendation engines, network monitoring, sentiment analysis, fraud detection, risk modeling, marketing campaign analysis, and social graph analysis. However, there is a need to remodel technologies, applications, infrastructure, and business processes in order to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by big data.

In view of these, big data is becoming a very active area of research. Thus, the two first sessions of BIS 2014 were dedicated to relevant research. However, during the conference other research directions were also discussed, including business process management, ontologies and conceptual modeling, collaboration, service science and interoperability as well as specific BIS applications. The regular program was complemented by outstanding keynote speakers: Prof. George Giaglis (Athens University of Economics and Business, Greece), and Prof. Mike Papazoglou (University of Tilburg, The Netherlands) delivered enlightening and interesting speeches.