Abstract
Business organizations must pay attention to interesting changes in customer behavior in order to anticipate their needs and act accordingly with appropriated business actions. Tracking customer's commercial paths through the products they are interested in is an essential technique to improve business and increase customer satisfaction. Data warehousing (DW) allows us to do so, giving the basic means to record every customer transaction based on the different business strategies established. Although managing such huge amounts of records may imply business advantage, its exploration, especially in a multi-dimensional space (MDS), is a nontrivial task. The more dimensions we want to explore, the more are the computational costs involved in multi-dimensional data analysis (MDA). To make MDA practical in real world business problems, DW researchers have been working on combining data cubing and mining techniques to detect interesting changes in MDS. Such changes can also be detected through gradient queries. While those studies have provided the basis for future research in MDA, just few of them points to preference query selection in MDS. Thus, not only the exploration of changes in MDS is an essential task, but also even more important is ranking most interesting gradients. In this chapter, the authors investigate how to mine and rank the most interesting changes in a MDS applying a TOP-K gradient strategy. Additionally, the authors also propose a gradient-based cubing method to evaluate interesting gradient regions in MDS. So, the challenge is to find maximum gradient regions (MGRs) that maximize the task of raking gradients in a MDS. The authors' evaluation study demonstrates that the proposed method presents a promising strategy for ranking gradients in MDS. © 2010, IGI Global.

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There is an increasing recognition that the competitive advantage of firms depends on their ability to create, transfer, utilize, develop and protect the Organisational knowledge assets, so it is logical to expect that more effective management of the creation and use of knowledge would accelerate a company's natural rate of learning, allow it to outpace competitors and create value for both customers and shareholders. The organisational learning can be seen as a combination of two phases, extraction and dissemination of management lessons, as we go from one project to another. The managers, executives and researchers in project management have to "learn how to learn", and maintain a consistent rate of improvement in learning processes. In a second phase of the organisational learning, it is necessary to learn how to code and disseminate knowledge for additional improvement of the organisation management. The research here reported is the first phase of a twofold objective it intends to identify the key elements that contribute to a learning environment and methodologies, processes and technologies that enhance the Organisational knowledge; and it intends to develop a corporative IT-tool, based on the conclusions and remarks obtained. It is our belief that the opinions gathered from people sensible to this topic, will allow us, among other things, to conclude some important aspects that will defiantly contribute for increasing the awareness given to knowledge acquisition and learning by the different team members.

Abstract
Today, organisations suffer a tremendous pressure to become more agile, efficient, profitable and dynamic. The market presents itself as an area of severe competition, where the margin between success and failure is becoming tenuous. Some authors have noticed the importance of meaningful and reliable information as a prerequisite of successful management and high-quality decision-making. Multiple factors, in the business environment were shown to cause impact in the organisational performance, such as the market attractiveness, the resources availability, clockspeed-industry, the environmental predictability, decision velocity and market opportunity discovery. The purpose of developing this research work was essentially to respond the following questions: Can the organisation improve performance by monitoring the market dynamics, by compiling information for the strategic positioning identification and market opportunities discovery? Can the information gathered agile the decision-making and the strategic alignment with the market? The market attractiveness index calculation phase intends to quantify the data collected from the multiple indicators, and then determine an index, for each market in the evaluation process. This technique is divided in three main steps, which consist of: (1) Calculating the mass density by category (Macro-Environment, Micro-Environment and Organisation), followed by (2) the product calculation of each category by the main market and, finally, (3) the prioritization of the different markets in study. The development of a methodology for assessing the market attractiveness is considered to be very relevant in the global market scenario. It can help organisations to gain a greater awareness of market dynamics, speed up the decision process and increase its consistency, thus enabling the strategic alignment and the improvement of the organisational performance.

Abstract
Several e-business frameworks are currently available, which are aimed at modelling e-business. The aim of this article is to analyse and compare relevant industry-neutral and industry-specific e-business frameworks currently in use, emphasising their strengths and weaknesses towards seamless interoperability in a collaborative networked environment. Their main differences and similarities are underlined based on an analytical model for e-business frameworks comparison. The applicability of the Analytic Hierarchy Process multi-criteria method in e-business frameworks selection is discussed. These analytical approaches are then illustrated with two real cases from industry.