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Dr. Kenneth Strang speaks with IGI Global.

Why You Should Care About Data Analytics

By Abdoul Amadou on May 22, 2018

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In this era of technology and information sharing, every organization needs to think strategically and prepare a contingency plan. They cannot afford to be caught off-guard by unexpected events that can negatively impact their bottom line. As an interdisciplinary publication, the International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management (IJRCM) is a platform that tackles topics across various fields, including education, business, technology, and government. The Editor-in-Chief of this highly-indexed journal, Dr. Kenneth Strang, recently spoke with IGI Global about what got him into this area of research and what emerging concepts and theories he identified in the field.

What inspired you to pursue research activities in your field?

After working in health insurance at Blue Cross, and then systems engineering/project management at IBM, I career-shifted two more times: into global management consulting and finally into a rewarding position of research with teaching in higher education. As a project manager, I learned to apply operations research, then in higher education, I learned how to advance new theories, because students inspired me to make a difference in our world.

Why are your respective areas of research important to the field at large?

I'm considered multi-disciplinary -- just looking at my degrees and scholarship illustrates that -- and like all scholars, we think we are working on important topics. The three core research areas I focus on are: operations research (risk/contingency quantification, project management, supply chain, decision making models), strategic management (planning, leadership, human resource management, marketing analytics), and higher education (adult learning andragogy, learning styles, and learning analytics).

In your opinion, what are some of the benefits of your research to its community of users?

My earlier publications on leadership, project management, multi-cultural learning styles, and research methods received a great deal of citations and downloads. As a result, I feel that those have had the largest impact on the community of practice. Besides that, several of my recent studies are also drawing a lot of scholarly attention including: clean energy/hydroelectricity decision making models, global terrorism analysis, risk avoidance behaviors, learning analytic, strategic planning, and consumer behavior.

What are the future directions of your research areas?

In my opinion, we have four major paradigm changes that will dramatically increase research production over the next two years:

Anthropogenic disaster risks (e.g, man-made global terrorism, global uncertainty, and somewhat natural disasters driven by climate change);
Internet of Things (smart digital wireless devices connected to the Internet, human behavior with Internet software, SAAS, big data analytics);
Online higher education (pedagogy or andragogy research will examine if learning is being commoditized into online knowledge sharing?);
Healthcare improvements with open data sharing (discovery rate is exponential and driven by publishing open data with clinical studies)

What are some other evolving research trends you have observed in your industry/field over the past several months and what would you say are some of the innovative research directions you foresee in the future? How do you feel your publication sets the pace for these innovations?

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If I had to pick one keyword that I feel will likely dominate many fields (including my own) over the next year, it would be data analytics. Data analytics is a rapidly growing employment occupation across many disciplines within developed nations, and it has stimulated the higher education industry to generate new degrees along with motivating organizations to develop new research approaches. For example, the traditional marketing research field has transformed into marketing analytics, business intelligence is now a topic along with strategic planning in business analytics, and clinical research is a practicum within health care analytics degrees. Employer practices drive the education industry; therefore, whatever big companies and small businesses need, it is likely that higher education universities and research organizations will develop products for those needs. Big data and knowledge sharing has given rise to new methods for solving scientific problems which are interdisciplinary, much like how statistical inferences was developed by integrating the Central Limit Theorem, a normal distribution, calculus, and trigonometry principles so that we can now make predictions that would likely be true 95 times out of 100 tries. In the future, though, we are more likely to see a different paradigm of cross-disciplinary and interdisciplinary theory integration, such as a model of climate change driven by human behavior and artificial intelligence concepts.

What has your experience publishing with IGI Global been like?

Rewarding and trustworthy. I feel IGI Global staff are what makes their company successful and they have a positive attitude. I think their sub-culture of helping developing authors is what stood out to me because I can remember several instances when Sean Eckman (Managing Editor) recommended that I give new authors a helping hand, like extending deadlines with reminders and pointing out resources rather than rejecting studies. I have a positivist ideology, so I prefer facts and evidence. This is why my co-authors and I did research on the reputation of publishers (in English and Spanish) when we were making the decision of which organization to approach for publishing our book -- our findings were that IGI Global came out moderately high on the list despite being relatively new as compared to Springer/Palgrave, Sage/Routledge, Oxford, MIT Press, Edward Elgar, Nova Science, and others. IGI Global created the tools and methods that their larger competitors already had but IGI Global seems more agile and inclusive of all cultures including developing nations which could become an industry competitive advantage for them.

IGI Global is grateful for the opportunity to work with Dr. Strang and we look forward to seeing the continued growth and success of his journal, the International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management (IJRCM). We would like to thank Dr. Strang for ensuring that IJRCM continue to cultivate quality knowledge innovation in Risk and Contingency Management. To potentially publish an article in this highly indexed journal, please submit a manuscript here.

IGI Global has a new InfoSci-Journal database campaign and Open Access initiative. . For any library that invests in an IGI Global journal database, IGI Global will match the library’s investment with a fund of equal value to go toward subsidizing the open access article processing charge (APC) for their students, faculty, and staff at that institution when their work is submitted and accepted under open access into an IGI Global journal housed within that collection. This initiative is to alleviate all needs to seek funding/grants for open access publishing endeavors, allowing for more freely accessible research to be disseminated worldwide

For more information be sure to check out the following related publications, and recommend them to your library.