Systems Of Insight Overview

Decision making is a critical function in any enterprise. The decision-making process that is enhanced by analytics can be described as consuming and collecting data, detecting relationships and patterns, applying sophisticated analysis techniques, reporting, and automation of the follow-on action. The IT system that supports decision making is composed of the traditional "systems of record", "systems of engagement", and the "systems of insight". This IBM® Redbooks® Solution Guide introduces the concept of systems of insight based on what is detailed in the IBM Redbooks publication "Systems of Insight for Digital Transformation," SG24-8293, found at: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpieces/abstracts/sg248293.html?Open

Systems of record (SORs) are engines that generates value for your business. Systems of engagement (SOE) are always evolving and generating new customer-centric experiences and new opportunities to capitalize on the value in the systems of record. The highest value is gained when systems of record and systems of engagement are brought together to deliver insight. Systems of insight (SOI) monitor and analyze what is going on with various behaviors in the systems of engagement and information being stored or transacted in the systems of record. SOIs seek new opportunities, risks, and operational behavior that needs to be reported or have action taken to optimize business outcomes. Systems of insight are at the core of the Digital Experience, which tries to derive insights from the enormous amount of data generated by automated processes and customer interactions. Systems of Insight can also provide the ability to apply analytics and rules to real-time data as it flows within, throughout, and beyond the enterprise (applications, databases, mobile, social, Internet of Things) to gain the wanted insight. Deriving this insight is a key step toward being able to make the best decisions and take the most appropriate actions. Examples of such actions are to improve the number of satisfied clients, identify clients at risk of leaving and incentivize them to stay loyal, identify patterns of risk or fraudulent behavior and take action to minimize it as early as possible, and detect patterns of behavior in operational systems and transportation that lead to failures, delays, and maintenance and take early action to minimize risks and costs. IBM® Operational Decision Manager is a decision management platform that provides capabilities that support both event-driven insight patterns, and business-rule-driven scenarios. It also can easily be used in combination with other IBM Analytics solutions, as the detailed examples will show. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced, along with complementary IBM software offerings that also provide capability for systems of insight, provides a way to deliver the greatest value to your customers and your business. IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced brings together data from different sources to recognize meaningful trends and patterns. It empowers business users to define, manage, and automate repeatable operational decisions. As a result, organizations can create and shape customer-centric business moments. This IBM Redbooks® publication explains the key concepts of systems of insight and how to implement a system of insight solution with examples. It is intended for IT architects and professionals who are responsible for implementing a systems of insights solution requiring event-based context pattern detection and deterministic decision services to enhance other analytics solution components with IBM Operational Decision Manager Advanced.

This IBM® Redbooks® publication documents and addresses topics to set up a complete infrastructure environment and tune the applications to use an IBM POWER9TM hardware architecture with the technical computing software stack. This publication is driven by a CORAL project solution. It explores, tests, and documents how to implement an IBM High-Performance Computing (HPC) solution on a POWER9 processor-based system by using IBM technical innovations to help solve challenging scientific, technical, and business problems. This book documents the HPC clustering solution with InfiniBand on IBM Power SystemsTM AC922 8335-GTH and 8335-GTX servers with NVIDIA Tesla V100 SXM2 graphics processing units (GPUs) with NVLink, software components, and the IBM SpectrumTM Scale parallel file system. This solution includes recommendations about the components that are used to provide a cohesive clustering environment that includes job scheduling, parallel application tools, scalable file systems, administration tools, and a high-speed interconnect. This book is divided into three parts: Part 1 focuses on the planners of the solution, Part 2 focuses on the administrators, and Part 3 focuses on the developers. This book targets technical professionals (consultants, technical support staff, IT architects, and IT specialists) who are responsible for delivering cost-effective HPC solutions that help uncover insights among clients' data so that they can act to optimize business results, product development, and scientific discoveries.

In the 20th century, the dominance of firms in a market was based mainly on scale and large resources (George & Bock 2011). In contrast, firm success in the 21st century is influenced less by arguments about economies of scale in production and distribution (McQuivey 2013; Jin Zhang et al. 2015). It has become more important to explore novel ways of engaging customers and getting them to pay (Baden-Fuller & Mangematin 2015). This is the age of the customer, and customers alone dominate the purpose of business (e.g., Morris et al. 2005; Johnson et al. 2008).

The classic book on systems thinking—with more than half a million copies sold worldwide! "This is a fabulous book... This book opened my mind and reshaped the way I think about investing."—Forbes "Thinking in Systems is required reading for anyone hoping to run a successful company, community, or country. Learning how to think in systems is now part of change-agent literacy. And this is the best book of its kind."—Hunter Lovins In the years following her role as the lead author of the international bestseller, Limits to Growth—the first book to show the consequences of unchecked growth on a finite planet—Donella Meadows remained a pioneer of environmental and social analysis until her untimely death in 2001. Thinking in Systems is a concise and crucial book offering insight for problem solving on scales ranging from the personal to the global. Edited by the Sustainability Institute’s Diana Wright, this essential primer brings systems thinking out of the realm of computers and equations and into the tangible world, showing readers how to develop the systems-thinking skills that thought leaders across the globe consider critical for 21st-century life. Some of the biggest problems facing the world—war, hunger, poverty, and environmental degradation—are essentially system failures. They cannot be solved by fixing one piece in isolation from the others, because even seemingly minor details have enormous power to undermine the best efforts of too-narrow thinking. While readers will learn the conceptual tools and methods of systems thinking, the heart of the book is grander than methodology. Donella Meadows was known as much for nurturing positive outcomes as she was for delving into the science behind global dilemmas. She reminds readers to pay attention to what is important, not just what is quantifiable, to stay humble, and to stay a learner. In a world growing ever more complicated, crowded, and interdependent, Thinking in Systems helps readers avoid confusion and helplessness, the first step toward finding proactive and effective solutions.

Practical Guidance on the Efficient Development of High-Quality Software Introduction to Software Engineering, Second Edition equips students with the fundamentals to prepare them for satisfying careers as software engineers regardless of future changes in the field, even if the changes are unpredictable or disruptive in nature. Retaining the same organization as its predecessor, this second edition adds considerable material on open source and agile development models. The text helps students understand software development techniques and processes at a reasonably sophisticated level. Students acquire practical experience through team software projects. Throughout much of the book, a relatively large project is used to teach about the requirements, design, and coding of software. In addition, a continuing case study of an agile software development project offers a complete picture of how a successful agile project can work. The book covers each major phase of the software development life cycle, from developing software requirements to software maintenance. It also discusses project management and explains how to read software engineering literature. Three appendices describe software patents, command-line arguments, and flowcharts.

The main function of the sensory systems is the transducing of external stimuli into bioelectrical signals, which are conducted through afferent pathways from sensory epithelia to the brain. However, it is known that descending projections are ubiquitous in the different sensory modalities, and in the case of auditory efferents connect the cerebral cortex with sensory receptor cells. Several functions have been attributed to the efferent system, including protection to acoustic trauma, unmasking of auditory stimuli in background noise, balance of interaural sensitivity and some cognitive functions like modulation of cochlear sensitivity during selective attention to auditory or visual stimuli. In addition there is evidence of a possible involvement of the efferent system in the etiology or treatment of some clinical pathologies like tinnitus. In this e-book, entitled “Auditory Efferent System: New Insights from Cortex to Cochlea”, we aimed to give an overview of the advances concerning the descending projections from the auditory cortex to subcortical nuclei and the olivocochlear system. In addition, different theoretical proposals of efferent functions are presented. We think that this e-book is an important contribution to the understanding of the efferent system in mammals, merging auditory-cortex literature with studies performed in the olivocochlear system.

The global water and sanitation community is currently wrestling with the policy implications of two important realizations. The first is that it is quite possible for cities to actually run out of water–for the piped network to run dry. The second is that in many locations, basic water and sanitation interventions do not result in the large public health improvements that many water and sanitation professionals had hoped. As water and sanitation professionals work out the implications of these two realizations on policy and planning for water and sanitation improvements in the Global South, they will require an in-depth knowledge of local housing, water, and sanitation conditions, as well as a nuanced understanding of how households prioritize improvements in housing, water, and sanitation. The chapters in this book about Kathmandu illustrate the types of analyses of local conditions that are needed. Kathmandu holds many lessons for the global community about households’ responses to water scarcity and the management of water and sanitation services in periods of rapid urbanization and climate change. In Focus – a book series that showcases the latest accomplishments in water research. Each book focuses on a specialist area with papers from top experts in the field. It aims to be a vehicle for in-depth understanding and inspire further conversations in the secto