Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence

The body of knowledge generated by Business Intelligence (BI) research is constantly extended by a stream of heterogeneous technological and organizational innovations. This paper shows how these can be bundled to a new vision for BI that is aligned with new requirements coming from socio-technical macro trends. The building blocks of the vision come from five research strings that have been extracted from an extensive literature review: BI and Business Process Management, BI across enterprise borders, new approaches of dealing with unstructured data, agile and user-driven BI, and new concepts for BI governance. The macro trend of the diffusion of cyber-physical systems is used to illustrate the argumentation. The realization of this vision comes with an array of open research questions and requires the coordination of research initiatives from a variety of disciplines. Due to the embedded nature of the addressed topics within general research areas of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and the linking pins that come with the underlying Dynamic Capabilities Approach such research provides a contribution to IS.     

‘I click,therefore I am (not)’: is cognition ‘distributed’ or is it ‘contained’ in borderless e‐learning programmes?

This paper will problematise the notion of distributed cognition in courses across cultural learning borders, by presenting a narrative case study of six learners’ journeys to online learning. I will argue that although distributed cognition is a widely acceptable theory in e‐learning, it is based on an assumption that the ‘distribution’ of cognition is reciprocal between toolmakers, texts and users, when perhaps, in certain instances, it excludes the life (and learning) world of local learners in the global, borderless environment. In these instances the cognition that is assumed to be distributed is, in contrast, ‘contained’ in the narrative‐in‐action that is familiar to the learners, whose situated knowledge is embedded and embodied in a non‐global discourse ( Henning et al., 2000 ).     

The Amount and Timing of Goodwill Write-Offs and Revaluations: Evidence from U.S. and U.K. Firms

This paper investigates criticisms that U.S. GAAP had given firms too much discretion in determining the amount and timing of goodwill write-offs. Using 1,576 U.S. and 563 U.K. acquisitions, we find little evidence that U.S. firms managed the amount of goodwill write-off or that U.K. firms managed the amount of revaluations (write-ups of intangible assets). However, our results are consistent with U.S. firms delaying goodwill write-offs and U.K. firms timing revaluations strategically to avoid shareholder approval linked to certain financial ratios.