Information For Efficient Decision Making: Big Data, Blockchain And Relevance

Book excerpt: Can there be reliable information that is also relevant to decision making? Information for Efficient Decision Making: Big Data, Blockchain and Relevance focuses on the consolidation of information to facilitate making decisions in firms, in order to make their operations efficient to reduce their costs and consequently, increase their profitability. The advent of blockchain has generated great interest as an alternative to centralized organizations, where the data is gathered through a centralized ledger keeping of activities of the firm. The decentralized ledger keeping is one of the main features of blockchain that has given rise to many issues of technology, development, implementation, privacy, acceptance, evaluation and so on. Blockchain concept is a follow-up to big data environment facilitated by enormous progress in computer hardware, storage capacities and technological prowess. This has resulted in the rapid acquiring of data not considered possible earlier. With shrewd modeling analytics and algorithms, the applications have grown to significant levels. This handbook discusses the progress in data collection, pros and cons of collecting information on decentralized publicly available ledgers and several applications.