Carsten Felden

Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence

The body of knowledge generated by Business Intelligence (BI) research is constantly extended by a stream of heterogeneous technological and organizational innovations. This paper shows how these can be bundled to a new vision for BI that is aligned with new requirements coming from socio-technical macro trends. The building blocks of the vision come from five research strings that have been extracted from an extensive literature review: BI and Business Process Management, BI across enterprise borders, new approaches of dealing with unstructured data, agile and user-driven BI, and new concepts for BI governance. The macro trend of the diffusion of cyber-physical systems is used to illustrate the argumentation.The realization of this vision comes with an array of open research questions and requires the coordination of research initiatives from a variety of disciplines. Due to the embedded nature of the addressed topics within general research areas of the Information Systems (IS) discipline and the linking pins that come with the underlying Dynamic Capabilities Approach such research provides a contribution to IS.

Status Quo and Potential of XBRL for Business and Information Systems Engineering

The paper examines the current state of research as regards the eXtensible Business Reporting Language (XBRL) by using the literature review methodology. The results show that an empirical-quantitative research design is used most of the time. The contributions vary in substance in terms of research on XBRL and research with XBRL. Research with XBRL focuses on the development of conceptual XBRL extensions. Work on XBRL considers, for example, the changes in reporting as a result of XBRL as well as the acceptance and enforcement of financial reporting standards. The results point to open issues and are relevant for research and practice.

Dimensions of Business Process Intelligence

Some approaches to support decision making in the context of business process management exist since a couple of years. Most of them are not systemized. This fact leads to the necessity of a classification of this broad area. The paper´s objective is to evaluate and differentiate approaches of Business Process Intelligence (BPI) within the last decade. The results of this analysis are a morphological box and a definition to clarify potentials of Business Process Intelligence. The definition integrates the most frequently used characteristics as well as different understandings of BPI and it indicates a holistic view on the dimensions of this area. Additionally, the literature-based propositions regarding current shifts provide the author´s perspective to the field of BPI and point out a guideline for further research.

From Process Execution towards a Business Process Intelligence

There exist some approaches to support decision making in the context of business processes. Most of them are not systemized. The aim of this paper is to evaluate and differentiate existing approaches of Business Process Intelligence and to detect further research activities in this field to propose a holistic concept. This is done by a literature review to identify related concepts and to be able to constitute further research by doing an empirical study and a case study. The results are a morphological box and a definition to clarify potentials of a Business Process Intelligence. Additionally, propositions based on selected theories are formulated which provide a basis for further research.

Ontology-based user profiling

Profiles are the basis for individual communication, because they provide information about website users. Ontologies represent a possibility for modeling user profiles. The ontology development within the paper is based on a concept which shows firstly criteria of segmentation and secondly product programs of a retailer. A meta-ontology is built to enforce a mapping between the ontologies. Due to ontology-based recommendations it is obvious that they imply an additive character regarding conventional recommender systems. Therefore, the possibility arises to increase the turnover and to achieve customer satisfaction. But, the usage of ontology-based profiles is currently disputable relating to economic efficiency.

Two Cases on How to Improve the Visibility of Business Process Performance

Performance measurement of business processes is necessary to ensure adequate information supply to the management. Though, the assessment of rather qualitative or non-deterministic processes is hard, because common analyzing and controlling approaches are restricted to the use of numeric indicators. Important qualitative performance aspects remain invisible. To bridge this gap, we introduce the concept of visibility which defines appropriate information supply in the domain of process performance. Derived from these requirements, we also present a multi-dimensional performance assessment system that combines numeric and verbal indicators. In two cases, we prove its applicability and positive contribution to performance visibility.

Optimizing Process Performance Visibility through Additional Descriptive Features in Performance Measurement

Measuring performance of business processes is necessary to access information on their efficacy. This enables successful optimization, reengineering and alignment on strategies. In general, measurement is done via numeric KPIs. Though, especially processes of a quantitative, nondeterministic or supportive nature are hard to describe via figures which leads to a reduced perception of performance problems. In this paper, the concept of visibility is presented. It fosters the development of a suitable Performance Assessment System (PAS) that broadens the range of indicators to e.g. goals, complexity, maturity, relations or dependencies in addition to KPIs to finally improve visibility of process performance.

Model Concept to Determine the Optimal Maturity of IT Service Management Processes

Mature processes allow the provision of high quality services at competitive cost. However, the highest level is not generally desirable for each process, because the development and continuation of mature processes requires expenditures. Thus, the level of maturity has to be determined in a case dependent manner. This with regard to minimize the total cost of running IT Service Management (ITSM) processes. This paper presents a model-based concept that offers support in determining the optimal maturity for ITSM processes. It is intended for application in an IT operations field wherein the ISO 20000 standard is relevant. The validation process is supported by a prototype created in Mat lab-Simulink. In order to allow further validation, the model concept was implemented as java desktop application that successfully passed a conducted use case validation.

A Descriptive Big Data Model Using Grounded Theory

Big Data is an emerging research topic. The term remains fuzzy and jeopardizes to become an umbrella term. Straight forward investigations are inhibited since the research field is not well defined, yet. This paper executes expert interviews to identify a common understanding. Hereby, the findings are coded and conceptualized until a descriptive Big Data model is developed by using Grounded Theory. It becomes evident that Big Data is use case driven and forms an interdisciplinary research field. By classifying several Big Data papers it gets obvious that not all of them belong to this research field. The paper contributes to the intensive discussion about the term Big Data in illustrating the underlying area of discourse. A classification to set the research area apart from others can be achieved to support a goal oriented research in future.

On the Restriction to Numeric Indicators in Performance Measurement Systems

Many business processes cannot be easily measured due to their non-deterministic or qualitative nature. So, to fit in common performance measurement systems (PMS), artificial and simplifying measures are used that are complicated and costly to create and evaluate. Using a literature review, this paper documents the dominance of PMS that rely on KPIs and a lack of those that also incorporate non-numeric, generic indicators that better address qualitative problems. Considering the need for better transparency and comparability of business processes as well as visibility of process performance, the final necessity of deployment for are fined PMS using additional indirect indicators is derived. It would be able to assess hidden performance problems and to reveal additional improvement possibilities.