Business Intelligence Commons^™

Staffing Decisions At Gabriana Cup, Ana Jimenez, Edith Oblitas, Gabriela Pena Guzman, Adriana Valdivia, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

Labor costs are one of the largest operational costs in the service industry. Overstaffing increases expenses unnecessarily, and understaffing reduces service quality and customer satisfaction. You are a business operations analyst working for Gabriana Cup, a local coffee shop. The owner has observed that certain hours appear significantly busier than others, creating operational pressure during peak times. The owner would like to reduce unnecessary labor costs and optimize Gabriana Cup's staffing practices.

Staffing schedules are currently based on assumptions rather than historical sales patterns, costing the coffee shop owner through wasted inventory, overstaffing, understaffing, and unnecessary labor costs. The coffee …

Netflix Content Strategy, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

Netflix operates in a highly competitive streaming market where content strategy directly affects subscriber acquisition, retention, brand positioning, and international growth. A streaming platform cannot simply add more titles indefinitely. Content licensing, production budgets, regional demand, maturity ratings, and genre balance all shape which titles should be prioritized.

You are a content strategy analyst on Netflix's global catalog planning team. Senior management is preparing the next annual content review and wants a data-supported recommendation about how the catalog should be positioned. The team is especially interested in whether Netflix should continue emphasizing movies, expand TV shows more aggressively, prioritize specific …

Smartphone Usage, Charles Howard, Josiah Nkele, Berner Hernandez, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

A major smartphone company is studying how smartphone usage affects users' stress, productivity, and sleep habits. As part of the product development team, you have been assigned to analyze user behavior data to help create digital wellness features that improve the overall user experience.

The company has collected behavior data from over 50,000 users to better understand how smartphone habits may influence focus, stress, and performance. By exploring this data, the team hopes to discover patterns that can guide healthier digital usage and create a better balance between daily life and technology use.

Senior product managers are considering several possible …

Airbnb Studies, Fatoumata Diabate, Maria Estevez, Jaliah Fabre, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

In the high-stakes world of short-term rentals, Homeland Sellers serves as an advisory firm for property buyers navigating the global Airbnb market. Historically, investors in the sector have often been led by intuition and gut feeling. That is a dangerous strategy in an increasingly regulated environment. To protect capital, Homeland Sellers is transitioning to a more rigorous, data-driven investment model.

Aspiring hosts face a minefield of financial and legal hurdles. Ignoring local HOA restrictions, fluctuating property tax structures, or strict licensing requirements can create serious risk for net operating income. Beyond regulatory compliance, investors must also account for guest appeal …

Credit Card Analysis, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

A credit card business unit at a bank is facing a retention problem. More customers are leaving the bank's credit card services, and the retention manager wants to identify which customers are most likely to churn so the bank can intervene before the account is lost.

The bank has customer demographic, relationship, and transaction data for more than 10,000 credit card customers. The data includes age, gender, education, income category, card category, months on book, customer inactivity, contact frequency, credit limit, revolving balance, transaction amount, transaction count, and whether the customer attrited.

You are a business analyst on the bank's …

Investment Decision Making, Muhammad Yaseen, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

A newly established commercial bank, founded in 2021, has accumulated excess capital reserves. The bank is evaluating long-term investment options to deploy this capital in a way that balances growth and risk. The investment committee is considering two primary strategies: investing in a diversified technology-focused ETF, QQQ, or investing directly in selected individual technology stocks.

The bank's senior management wants capital growth, but it also needs to manage risk exposure. A bank cannot treat an investment decision only as a search for the highest return. It must also consider volatility, concentration risk, liquidity, downside periods, and whether the strategy fits …

German Energy Crisis, Liomar Jimenez, Malachy Mclaughlin, Muhdee Nawab, Mouhamed Sarr, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

For most of the twentieth century, nuclear energy was the quiet backbone of Germany's electricity system. At its peak in 1997, nuclear power supplied over 31 percent of all electricity generated in the country. It was a reliable, low-cost source that kept German industries competitive across Europe. The country's industrial base, including automakers, chemical producers, and heavy manufacturers, depended on affordable, stable power. Nuclear delivered exactly that.

The political climate changed in the late 1990s. After years of advocacy based on concerns about nuclear waste and reactor safety, the Green Party joined the Social Democrats to form the Red-Green Coalition …

When Metal Theft Becomes A Life Safety Crisis, Alan Saquella

Publications

By any traditional measure, scrap and metal theft has long been categorized as a property crime, costly, disruptive, and frustrating, but rarely viewed as an immediate threat to human life. That framing, however, no longer reflects reality. What was once considered a nuisance crime has evolved into something far more consequential, particularly when it intersects with critical infrastructure.

Building on the risks outlined in “Scrap Disposal: When the End of the Supply Chain Becomes a Brand and Public Safety Risk,” by Marcos Fontes, a more serious dimension comes into focus when essential systems are targeted. In these cases, the impact …

Deploying Root-Cause Analysis (Rca) Agents: An Implementation Blueprint For Ai-Augmented Marketing Analytics, Seojoon Oh

AMTP Proceedings 2026

Artificial intelligence is widely adopted in marketing, yet many organizations struggle to translate analytical outputs into timely action. This paper presents a practitioner-oriented blueprint for deploying root-cause analysis (RCA) agents within AI-augmented marketing analytics systems. We propose a three-layer reference architecture—semantic data layer, autonomous RCA agent, and action layer—that enables continuous anomaly detection, causal diagnosis, explanation generation, and recommendation delivery. Through simulated e-commerce use cases, we demonstrate how RCA agents identify performance disruptions such as email engagement declines and checkout failures, and translate diagnostic findings into actionable guidance. Beyond system design, we outline organizational workflows, trust-building validation loops, scalability pathways …

Analyzing Big Data-Ai's Impact On Product Innovation And Customer Engagement, Omar Itani, Samer Elhajjar, Ashish Kalra Dr, Manal Yunis Dr.

AMTP Proceedings 2026

In contemporary business landscapes, an organization's capacity to deliver groundbreaking innovative products and foster deep, meaningful engagement with its customers stands as the paramount objective of modern strategic practices. This dual focus not only drives sustainable growth but also fortifies competitive positioning in hyper-competitive markets. Yet, despite the extensive empirical evidence highlighting the transformative benefits of innovation—such as enhanced market share and profitability—and customer engagement—evidenced by loyalty, advocacy, and repeat business—the pivotal role of big data-artificial intelligence (BD-AI) technologies remains strikingly underexplored. In particular, scant attention has been paid to how BD-AI training equips firms to harness these tools effectively …

Bba405-Management Decision Making Syllabus, Di Wu

Open Educational Resources

Syllabus for BBA405 Management Decision Making course.

The Writing On The Wall: The Rise Of Applied Ai And The Life-Or-Death Choice Every Ceo Must Make Now, Gary Sheng, Ron Roberts

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

Applied AI is putting AI to its highest and best use: running your organization as autonomously as possible so you can deliver value for humanity while maximizing the scale of the value. The economy is splitting. Organizations that adopt applied AI are expanding their capacity, accelerating their impact, and pulling ahead. Those that don't are quietly becoming irrelevant, not because they're doing bad work, but because the gap between what they can do and what the moment requires is widening every day. This is not a technology question. It is a leadership question. This paper is written for organizational leaders, …

Elevating The Performance Of Software Development Teams By Leveraging Emotional Intelligence Through Improved Knowledge Sharing, Rajiv Sabherwal, Mary M. Dunaway

Information Systems Faculty Publications and Presentations

Emotional intelligence (EI) plays a crucial role in managing emotions within software development (SD) teams, which often face challenges such as stress and anxiety. EI can enhance knowledge sharing (KS) and team performance, contributing to the success of SD projects. This paper examines EI in terms of four aspects - awareness and management of own and others' emotions - and investigates how they affect KS and team performance. The study is based on survey data from 357 individuals in 86 teams at seven large companies in the United States. Multilevel modeling, specifically using Generalized Structural Equation Modeling in Stata 19, …

Sociocultural Outsidership In Entrepreneurship: Rethinking The Double-Edged Role In Marginalisation, Robert J. Pidduck, Susana C. Santos, Eric W. Liguori, Reginald Tucker, Alexander Newman

Management Faculty Publications

This editorial introduces the special issue on marginalisation and entrepreneurship. While entrepreneurship research has long examined the impact of economic deprivation and structural barriers, far less attention has been given to sociocultural elements of outsidership – such as status incongruence, class-based identity conflict or cultural misalignment, among other related facets. We bring these dynamics to the fore, offering a conceptually rich yet ideologically neutral lens through which to understand how outsider dynamics can shape entrepreneurial cognition, legitimacy and venture development. Further, by synthesising emerging work across fragmented literatures, we propose a research agenda that explores sociocultural outsidership not only as …

Comparison Of Communication Interfaces In Ai-Driven Styling Services, Yanbo Zhang, Chuanlan Liu

LSU Fashion and AI x Policy Symposium

No abstract provided.

Ai Agent-Powered Fashion Shopping Services: A Future-Oriented Consumer Adoption Perspective, Yanbo Zhang, Chuanlan Liu

LSU Fashion and AI x Policy Symposium

No abstract provided.

Fashion After The Interface: Artificial Intelligence, Synthetic Culture, And The Reorganization Of Human Expression, Jason Jamerson

LSU Fashion and AI x Policy Symposium

No abstract provided.

Steady As She Goes: Remote Work Benefits Daily Goal Progress Through Reduced Energy Variability, Andrew A. Bennett, Kathleen R. Keeler, Emily D. Campion, Sheila K. Keener

Management Faculty Publications

As the prevalence and allowance of remote and hybrid work evolves, research has shown consistently mixed findings about how work location is related to worker energy and perceptions of daily performance. We aim to resolve this ambiguity by integrating affective events theory with ideas about emotion dynamics to develop new theorizing explaining why energy variability, rather than mean energy level, is an important predictor of daily goal progress. We test our hypotheses using a sample of 219 employees from one organization allowing remote and hybrid work, capturing individual hourly energy levels for five consecutive workdays (4,812 hourly observations). Our …

Neuroattnfusenet Dual Branch Attention Fusion For Brain Tumor Mri Classification, Md Sanowar Hossain Sabuj, Farzana Sultana, Md Hasan Or Rashid, Rahul Mudhiraj Mullela

Student Publications

Brain tumor MRI classification remains challenging because tumor appearance varies across cases, class boundaries can be visually subtle, and public 2D MRI datasets may contain redundancy or source-specific biases that inflate reported performance. This study proposes NeuroAttnFuseNet, a dual-path attention-guided fusion network for four-class MRI image classification into glioma, meningioma, pituitary, and no tumor. The model combines a Swin-T branch for hierarchical local morphological representation with a frozen DINOv2 ViT-B/14 branch that provides a 768-dimensional global descriptor from the [CLS] token. The Swin and DINOv2 features are concatenated and passed through a channel-attention gate and fusion MLP before final softmax …

Fasttree-Guided Genetic Algorithm For Credit Scoring Feature Selection, Rashed Bahlool, Nabil Hewahi Prof., Youssef Harrath Dr.

Research & Publications

Feature selection is pivotal in enhancing the efficiency of credit scoring predictions, where misclassifications are critical because they can result in financial losses for lenders and exclusion of eligible borrowers. While traditional feature selection methods can improve accuracy and class separation, they often struggle to maintain consistent performance aligned with institutional preferences across datasets of varying size and imbalance. This study introduces a FastTree-Guided Genetic Algorithm (FT-GA) that combines gradient-boosted learning with evolutionary optimization to prioritize class separability and minimize falserisk exposure. In contrast to traditional approaches, FT-GA provides fine-grained search guidance by acknowledging that false positives and false negatives …

Utilizing A Virtual Firewall Appliance For Introducing And Reinforcing The Concepts And Implementation Of Devices To Improve Security In A Computing Environment, Stanley Mierzwa, Christopher Eng

Center for Cybersecurity

The educational realm of higher education cybersecurity curriculum continues to evolve to provide more opportunities for experiential hands-on and work role-related practical applications of technology solutions. Gaining greater competencies is quickly becoming a normal requirement for such programs that are designated by the National Security Agency Center of Academic Excellence programs. The work roles of cybersecurity include a variety of knowledge, skills, and abilities, depending on the category of the activity or task. Firewalls have been a staple cybersecurity, network security, and information security device and strategy to protect organization networks and computing environments. This paper will provide details and …

Apple Inc.: Strategic Audit, Huy Le

Honors Program: Senior Projects (Public)

An audit and analysis of Apple Inc.'s strategy and positioning within its industry. Recommendations were made based on Porter's Five Forces Analysis for Apple to maintain and grow its market share.

Behavioral Assessment Software: Enhancing Polygraph And Investigative Interviewing, Alan Saquella

Publications

In the rapidly evolving world of security, law enforcement, and investigative sciences, professionals are increasingly turning to advanced technologies to supplement tried-and-true methodologies. One emerging innovation is behavioral assessment software, designed to enhance both pre-employment screening and investigative interviewing. Acting as a form of modern human intelligence collection, these tools enable examiners and investigators to gather deeper insights directly from candidates and subjects, revealing behavioral cues and risk indicators that might otherwise remain hidden (Vrij, 2008).

Importantly, behavioral assessment software is not intended to replace polygraph or other traditional investigative methods. Instead, it functions as a complementary resource—one that provides …

Preventing Workplace Violence: A Strategic Imperative For Today’S Organizations, Alan Saquella

Publications

Workplace violence is a critical and growing concern for organizations across all industries. It encompasses a wide spectrum from bullying and verbal threats to physical assaults and, in the most tragic cases, homicide. While acts of extreme violence often dominate news headlines, they are typically preceded by missed warning signs and failed interventions.

Safeguarding Intellectual Property: A Strategic Imperative For Organizations, Alan Saquella

Publications

Intellectual property (IP) is more than a legal concept — it is the foundation of innovation and the engine that drives growth, differentiation, and long-term success. From proprietary algorithms to product designs, trade secrets, and customer data, IP represents the most valuable asset many organizations possess. When compromised, the damage can be severe — manifesting in lost revenue, competitive disadvantage, reputational harm, and in some cases, the collapse of entire business lines.

A Survey Of Retail Trade Patterns In South Dakota: 2015-2024, Rand E. Wergin

Faculty Publications

This paper provides an analysis of retail sales and retail trade in the state of South Dakota for the ten years 2015 to 2024. This paper provides a detailed analysis of the fifteen largest communities in the state, with further analysis of each community reporting retail sales to the state Department of Revenue.

This analysis will provide information to community leaders in the cities and towns of South Dakota. Retail pull is an economic indicator that provides a measure of community’s economic health and its ability to attract shoppers, both shoppers from its own community and from other communities. A …

Conducting Background Checks In The Corporate Security Environment, Alan Saquella

Publications

In the current threat landscape, the background check has become a critical frontline defense in protecting corporate assets, brand integrity and personnel safety. But as any security leader will tell you, the traditional background check — focused on criminal history, employment verification and references — has limitations, especially in today’s regulatory environment.

Federal and state restrictions continue to erode the depth and scope of what can be legally reviewed, and meanwhile, insider threats and deceptive candidates are becoming more sophisticated. In this context, it's no longer about whether to conduct background checks — it's about how to conduct them effectively, …

Case Study & Lessons Learned: Creation And Pilot Of A Regional Small Business Accelerator And Cybersecurity Assessment Program, Stanley Mierzwa, Randall D. Pinkett, Willie Mae Veasey, Debra Price

Center for Cybersecurity

Startup companies and originated small businesses are an essential aspect of our nation’s economy, contributing to many organizations that aim, in some cases, to become larger enterprises. As a small business is in the mode of sustaining and growth, minimizing cybersecurity and business resilience threats may not be front and center on the minds of these entities. This paper will provide a case study background about a project and effort – the New Jersey Cybersecurity Regional Cluster (NJCRC) - that has contributed significant outreach to New Jersey small businesses to provide free cybersecurity risk assessments to help small businesses prepare …

Balancing The Workload In Executive Protection: Is It Time To Outsource The Advance?, Alan Saquella, Tim Sharpe

Publications

In the evolving world of executive protection (EP), the days of focusing solely on physical security are over. Today’s EP professionals are responsible for an ever-expanding array of duties, from travel logistics and site assessments to digital threat monitoring and cyber hygiene education. This growing workload is pushing teams to rethink traditional approaches, and one question now stands at the forefront of that discussion: Should executive protection teams begin outsourcing advance operations to specialized agencies or companies?

Ai And The Metaverse In Business Strategy, Emma M. Han, Emma Nguyen

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

The Metaverse has quickly become an important part of the future of the business world. Mainstream companies like Walmart, Toyota, Nike, and many others have established a presence with virtual goods (NFTs), virtual spaces for consumers to interact, and employees to collaborate and train. Yet there is little research into Metaverse strategies that are efficient and sustainable over time. With the rise of AI, businesses now have the opportunity to integrate AI and the Metaverse as complementary technologies, reshaping their strategies for innovation and competitive advantage. We researched the top 500 global brands to uncover lessons from entry approaches taken. …