The business intelligence (BI) market has grown at a tremendous rate in the past decade due to technological advancements, big data and the availability of open source content. Despite this growth, the use of open government data (OGD) as a source of information is very limited among the private sector due to a lack of knowledge as to its benefits. Scant evidence on the use of OGD by private organizations suggests that it can lead to the creation of innovative ideas as well as assist in making better informed decisions. Given the benefits but lack of use of OGD to generate business intelligence, we extend research in this area by exploring how OGD can be used to generate business intelligence for the identification of market opportunities and strategy formulation; an area of research that is still in its infancy. Using a two-industry case study approach (footwear and lumber), we use latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic modeling to extract emerging topics in these two industries from OGD, and a data visualization tool (pyLDAVis) to visualize the topics in order to interpret and transform the data into business intelligence. Additionally, we perform an environmental scanning of the environment for the two industries to validate the usability of the information obtained. The results provide evidence that OGD can be a valuable source of information for generating business intelligence and demonstrate how topic modeling and visualization tools can assist organizations in extracting and analyzing information for the identification of market opportunities.

The continued risk of cyberattacks has led regulatory and governance bodies to call on boards to take a more active role in overseeing and preventing future cyber risks. Boards have responded by delegating cyber risk responsibilities to board technology committees and increasingly the audit committee (AC). This study examines whether information technology expertise at the AC level impacts the likelihood of a data breach occurrence. Using a sample of firms who experienced a data breach from 2005-2018 we find that AC IT expertise is negatively associated with the likelihood of a data breach occurrence and is associated with a reduction in external and internal data breaches. Our findings highlight the importance of ACs being actively involved in strategic decisions related to IT security, and provide empirical evidence that IT expertise enhances the AC’s monitoring ability and oversight of cybersecurity risks.