2014 has been an exciting, busy year for Georgia Tech's Tennnenbaum Institute. And as the year comes to a close, the Institute's Associate Director and Associate Professor in the School of Interactive Computing, Rahul C. Basole, is reflecting on new initiatives and the recognition TI has received from industry, peers and the media.

The Tennenbaum Institute studies transformation of large, complex enterprises in a variety of industry domains, including healthcare. The Institute has embarked on a major initiative with Children's Healthcare of Atlanta to “develop computational tools to analyze, explore, and visualize digital healthcare data, gain insight into how pediatric care is delivered, and then determine opportunities for improvement," said Basole.

The results are promising and initial findings of the research were recently published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA), the Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) in New York, and Conference on Information Visualization (VIS2014) in Paris.

Also on the healthcare front, the Tennenbaum Institute is working on a joint initiative with UCLA to tackle some of the most complex health enterprise challenges. “Healthcare is undergoing major transformation. Decision makers must run today’s complex, messy organization, while at the same time prepare for an uncertain future. We aim to develop and apply novel computational and analytic tools like visualization, data mining, organizational simulation, and predictive modeling to help address these challenges,” said Basole. He believes the outcomes will not only improve care delivery, but also help create potentially novel business models and influence national policies on healthcare. Many of these ideas build on the outcomes of the first workshop on Transforming Healthcare through Analytics, hosted at Georgia Tech earlier this year. The workshop brought together national thought leaders in health informatics.

Another major initiative the Tennenbaum Institute is pursuing is how enterprises have to adapt on the global business front. Basole was one of only four academicians worldwide selected for the inaugural research program of the Center for Global Enterprise (CGE), a non-profit organization devoted to the study of the contemporary corporation, globalization, economic trends, and their impact on society, founded by former IBM chief executive Samuel Palmisano. CGE is pursuing four research areas including Computational Enterprise Analytics, which was conceived by Basole.

“The core idea is, how and what kind of computational enterprise analytic tools do we bring to the C-suite, where executives need to make very complex, strategic decisions, but often do that without true systemic insight," said Basole. “We aim to design and develop these novel tools and study how executives would use them to identify potential partners, make innovation decisions, and enter new markets.”

This major initiative for the Tennenbaum Institute brings together methods and approaches from systems engineering, computer science, and management to guide strategy in an increasingly complex global environment. Researchers are working directly with CEOs of leading global firms.

“The theme across all of [the industry domains] is, these are enterprises or markets that are undergoing fundamental change," said Basole. "So data-driven, evidence-based decision making is critical in order to survive and prosper."

Other developments for TI over the past year include mentions in the New York Times and major contributions to the Global Connectedness Report by DHL. New faculty members and students have also joined the group. In the spring, the Tennenbaum Institute will offer a short course for executives on leading and managing enterprise transformation.

“There will be a continuous need to adapt to and change in an increasingly dynamic business environment. So, organizations and decision makers will need to have a trusted academic partner that will help navigate them through that change,” said Basole. "What Tennenbaum and Georgia Tech uniquely bring to the table is that we offer a multi-disciplinary, systems perspective on enterprise transformation and provide actionable knowledge and skills."