Call for papers: Business Analytics: Defining the field and identifying a research agenda

Research into analytics should seek to both incorporate the unique aspects of the OR discipline, as well as the innovations, concerns and characteristics of the analytics movement. Specifically, this special issue aims to invite OR scholars and practitioners to look at:

• Ethics and governance issues in business analytics: How should data be obtained? What are the ethical implications of using applications of business analytics to influence behaviour?
• Big data and business analytics: What are the limitations and applications of optimisation and other OR techniques to large datasets? What are the challenges for applications of OR methods within distributed systems? What is the possibility that OR models could in fact be the producers of big data, e.g. large-scale simulation models? What new methods/models in response to big data e.g. sentiment mining, can be adopted by OR?
• Organizational issues in business analytics adoption: What are the issues facing organizations trying to adopt business analytics? What is the role of real-time applications of OR in organizations?
• Data quality and business analytics: what methods can be used for hypothesis testing and model validation in large datasets? How can unstructured data be used effectively in OR models? What is the role of multi-methodology in business analytics? What opportunities do open data present for the OR discipline?
• Business analytics and decision support: How can data visualisation techniques be used across the breadth of OR? What role do problem structuring and "soft" OR techniques play in analytics and big data projects?

Other topics that have relevance for value creation and organisational implications are also welcome.