Hans Ulrich Buhl

The route to resource-efficient novel materials

Combining the efforts of physicists, materials scientists, economists and resource-strategy researchers opens up an interdisciplinary route enabling the substitution of rare elements by more abundant ones, serving as a guideline for the development of novel materials.

Big Data - A Fashionable Topic with(out) Sustainable Relevance for Research and Practice?

When looking at the words of Hal Varian, Google’s Chief Economist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley, thinking of Big Data seems natural. Big Data – a dictum which currently seems to be on everyone’s lips – has recently developed into one of the most discussed topics in research and practice. Looking at academic publications, we find that more than 70 % of all ranked papers which deal with Big Data were published within the last two years (Pospiech and Felden 2012) as well as nearly 12,000 hits for Big Data on GoogleScholar across various fields of research. In 2011, more than 530 academic Big Data related publications could be counted (Chen et al. 2012). We find more hits for “Big Data” than for “Development aid” in Google, and almost daily an IT-related business magazine publishes a Big Data special issue next to a myriad of Big Data business conferences. In Gartner’s current Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies (Gartner 2012), Big Data is right on the peak of its hype phase, and according to this source a broad adoption is to be expected within the next five years. Big Data provokes excitement across various fields such as science, governments, and industries like media and telecommunications, health care engineering, or finance where organizations are facing a massive quantity of data and new technologies to store, process, and analyze those data. Despite the cherished expectations and hopes, the question is why we face such excitement around Big Data which at first view rather seems to be a fashionable hype than a revolutionary concept. Is Big Data really something new or is it just new wine in old bottles seeing that, e.g., data analytics is doing the same type of analysis since decades? Do more data, increased or faster analytics always imply better decisions, products, or services, or is Big Data just another buzzword to stimulate the IT providers’ sales? Taking the traditional financial service industry, which currently cherishes huge expectations in Big Data, as an example, the collection of massive amounts of data via multiple channels for a long time was part of the business model to customize prices, product offers, or to calculate credit ratings. However, improving financial services by exploiting these huge amounts of data implied constant updating efforts, media disruptions and expensive acquisition and processing of data. Hence, more data resulted in expensive data management, in higher prices for products or services as well as in inconvenient processes regarding the customers’ data entry. Hence, instead of the traditional universal banks that focused on a data-intensive business model, direct banks with a higher grade of standardization and IT support as well as a focus on (very few) key customer data often enough have become more successful. Focusing solely on pure IT-based data acquisition, processing and analysis to save costs on the other side is virtually impossible in industries such as banking due to an intense personal contact. Besides, neither in the financial service industry nor in other industries do more data automatically lead to better data, better business success, better services, better decisions, or (more) satisfied customers. Above all, Big Data brings a lot of still unresolved challenges regarding the volume, velocity, variety, and veracity of data, which should not be underestimated. Often enough, more data even lead to a certain amount of “data garbage” which usually is more easily and better recognized and managed by employees rather than by analytics software (veracity). Additionally, the management of various sources of data such as from, e.g., mobile applications, online social networks, or CRM systems is far from trivial (variety). The high data traffic brings along the challenge of archiving, retrieving, and analyzing huge amounts of data in real-time (volume and velocity). Unsurprisingly, nearly every second Big Data project is canceled before completion (Infochimps 2013). And as if these challenges were not enough, we additionally see a myriad of different legal privacy restrictions in different countries turning into one of Big Data’s most serious challenges.

Value Orientation in Process Management

There is no doubt that at least since the 1990s process orientation has evolved into one of the central paradigms of organizational design. Since then, all process management subtasks have matured. Process management decisions, however, lack economic foundation. They are usually based on qualitative or technical criteria or on plausibility considerations that do not necessarily comply with typical objectives in a market economy. Consequently, design alternatives are hardly comparable and an integrated valuation of a company’s assets is impossible. The status quo is astonishing for several reasons: First, process management decisions usually imply investment projects with different risk/return positions and capital tie-up. Second, the need for designing processes according to their contribution to corporate objectives has been explicated repeatedly. Third, the paradigm of value-based management is an accepted theoretical framework from economic research that enables to consistently valuate the risk/return effects of decisions across functional areas, hierarchy levels, and asset classes. This suggests the hypothesis that process management in general as well as the goal orientation of process management decisions in particular have evolved almost independently of value-based management. In the paper at hand, this hypothesis is confirmed based on a sample of process management publications. We therefore explicate the research gap as regards value orientation in process management. In order to bridge the gap between value-based management and process-oriented organizational design, we transfer economically well-founded objective functions to process management decisions.

Identifikation und Gestaltung von Services

KernpunkteAn einen Service, der in einer Serviceorientierten Architektur eines Unternehmens zur Verfügung gestellt werden soll, werden oftmals die folgenden fachlichen Anforderungen gestellt:Er soll übergreifend über mehrere Ausprägungen einer Problemstellung einsetzbar sein.Er soll die redundante Implementierung von Funktionalitäten weitgehend vermeiden.Er soll möglichst schnell und unkompliziert genutzt werden können. Diesen Anforderungen kann bei der Entwicklung eines Service wie folgt entsprochen werden:Einen wichtigen Beitrag leistet die Identifikation der Services, d. h. die Beantwortung der Frage, welche Aktionen der Geschäftprozesse eines Unternehmens durch einen Service realisiert werden sollten.Des Weiteren trägt dazu die geeignete fachliche Gestaltung der identifizierten Services bei.AbstractThe article describes an approach to develop services for a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA). Contrary to the majority of the current publications concerning SOA, it is focused on the design and not the implementation of the services. The article starts with an overview of SOA and the definition of the requirements which a service to be used in a SOA should meet. In the next step is considered how can be proceeded to correspond to these requirements during the identification, the design and the implementation of services. The article ends with a summary and a critical appreciation of the results.

Integrated Enterprise Balancing mit integrierten Ertrags- und Risikodatenbanken

To support a value-based management and to satisfy regulatory transparency requirements and legal reporting obligations, corporations require a corporate-wide consistent database with return and risk information. Despite existing technical integration approaches, such as data warehouse or OLAP solutions, the development of corporate-wide consistent return and risk databases is so far impossible, as adequate financial methods and performance measurement systems are lacking.Integrated Enterprise Balancing enables corporations of all industries to control their business activities with corporate-wide consistent return and risk measures. The presented performance measurement system enables corporations to additively connect return and risk measures on arbitrary aggregation levels and to perform such an aggregation also within multiple dimensions. Hence, it is a conceptual solution for the development of integrated return and risk databases.

Where's the competitive advantage in strategic information systems research? Making the case for boundary-spanning research based on the German business and information systems engineering tradition

During the last decades, strategic information systems (SIS) research has become an influential stream within the information systems discipline. The success story of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems provides strong evidence. Yet, we believe that there is still a lot of untapped potential in the interaction of SIS research and industry. Put bluntly, it is impossible that results of SIS research are publicly available, reconstructable by subject matter experts, and valid beyond the single or very few cases and at the same time constitute the foundation of competitive advantage. We argue that SIS researchers need to become boundary spanners who actively engage in industry collaboration to help create competitive advantage and who disseminate their insights later on to advance the scientific knowledge base. We outline challenges of boundary-spanning SIS research and provide some ideas and recommendations. Wherever sensible, we draw on our experiences from the traditionally strong industry collaboration of the business and information systems engineering community from the German-speaking countries.

The Contribution of Business and Information Systems Engineering to the Early Recognition and Avoidance of “Black Swans” in IT Projects

The phenomenon of so-called “black swans” is gaining more and more attention within the context of IT projects. This increase in popularity was amongst others fueled by a study published by the University of Oxford, which revealed that IT projects often fail because of extremely rare, but definitely harmful events (Flyvbjerg and Budzier 2011). The former investment banker Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “black swans” and described these as highly improbable events, which are characterized by the following three attributes: unpredictability, high impact, and rare occurrence (Taleb 2008). The term “black swan” itself goes back to the presumption that all swans must be white, because only white swans had been observed in Europe up to that point in time. The first discovery of a black swan in Australia was a shock, because it contradicted all existing observations and apparently prevailing laws. This realization coined the metaphoric use of the term “black swan” for an event erroneously assumed to be impossible. “Black swans” can have devastating impact within the context of IT projects. For example, they cause one of six IT projects to outrun the budget by about 200% (Flyvbjerg and Budzier 2011). A more precise analysis of “black swans” in IT projects revealed that a major reason for their occurrence can be found in project planning (Kendrick 2008). In this field, especially risks regarding the valuation of IT projects as well as regarding the consideration of interdependencies should be mentioned: Valuation of IT projects: One of the major reasons for the occurrence of “black swans” lies in the fact that risk and return of IT projects are estimated primarily on the basis of employees’ experience. Several studies reveal that project managers frequently evaluate their projects too optimistically or overestimate their operating efficiency. Here, the adequate identification as well as the correct valuation of essential influencing factors is a huge challenge, additionally amplified by the uniqueness of IT projects. Furthermore, false valuations can lead to significant losses especially considering the increasing number of IT projects, which inevitably results in growing complexity. In spite of these challenges, as of today – if at all – only ex-ante valuations are made, i.e., one-time-only valuations before the start of the project, in order to reach an (open loop) decision about the investment without considering (closed loop) later possibilities to react. This initial valuation is frequently followed by a “blind flight” phase until major problems can no longer be ignored and therefore restructuring decisions become unavoidable. This approach neglects the fact that IT projects are continuously subject to change, e.g., because of new requirements they have to fulfill. Especially long-term IT projects, which are significantly affected by dynamic circumstances, cannot be adequately assessed by one-time-only ex-ante valuations. Thus we conclude that one-time-only ex-ante valuations of IT projects are not sufficient to evaluate and control complex and dynamic IT projects. Interdependencies of IT projects: The complexity mentioned above primarily derives from interdependencies between IT projects or other IT assets. Thus delays of IT projects, for example, are often caused by delays of interconnected IT projects. At the same time, dependencies on existing IT assets, e.g., specific hardware or software, can also be considered as risk factors if their availability is crucial for the success of the IT project. Therefore, interdependencies bear the risk that the success of a single IT project is affected not only by the success of the project itself, but rather by the success of dependent IT projects or by the availability of IT assets. At the same time this means that “black swans” might also affect all dependent IT projects. Thus, the identification and consideration of interdependencies within project planning is a crucial success factor.

Sophistication Banking als erfolgreiche Strategie im Informationszeitalter

Traditionelle Produkt- bzw. Anbietergetriebene Marktbearbeitungsstrategien im Finanzdienstleistungsbereich werden durch die steigende Transparenz, die Veranderung der (Lebens-)Arbeitssituation der interessanten Zielgruppe und die abnehmende und einheitlichere Regulierung nachhaltig nicht mehr profitabel sein. Sophistication Banking als eine Potenzial- und Bedurfnisorientierte Strategie fuhrt zu einer signifikanten Steigerung der Kundenbindung und -loyalitat und letztendlich zu einem steigendem Unternehmenswert. IT-basierte, innovative Multi-Channel/Customer Relationship Ansatze sind dabei fur eine ganzheitliche und kosteneffiziente Betreuung der Kunden unerlasslich.

Economic aspects of electronic commerce in financial services and advantageous steps to extended offers in Internet banking

In this paper we report on the results of two projects our research group is presently conducting. We start our with sketching preliminary results of a long-term government project geared to reveal efficiency conditions for successful electronic commerce particularly in the financial services field. We address questions relating to the innovative use of new channels for distributing financial services focusing on Internet banking. Our government research funds are devoted to help German financial services firms on their way into the digital economy and particularly to advise German banks in applying Internet technology in novel ways to new and promising applications. Thus, along with the research sketched above, we are engaged in a joint project with an innovative German bank, the Munich-based Advance Bank. This direct banking firm is currently extending its telephone banking technology simultaneously employing Internet communication for consultation-intensive customer processes such as mortgage loans (intelligently combined with other financial products). Based on our joint project, we present a brief case study of the banks market and technology strategy and identify some problems encountered when employing Internet technology to open new markets successfully.

On Dinosaurs, Measurement Ideologists, Separatists, and Happy Souls

This article constitutes an “editorialized”, partly shortened, and partly extended version of the paper “Business and information systems engineering: a complementary approach to information systems – what we can learn from the past and may conclude from present reflection on the future” by Hans Ulrich Buhl, Gunter Muller, Gilbert Fridgen, and Maximilian Roglinger that appeared in the Journal of the Association for Information Systems 13(4):236–253, April 2012. The editorial has been presented as a keynote on the BIS conference in Vilnius, Lithuania, in May 2012 and the BISE workshop in Hannover, Germany, in October 2012. An earlier version has been published in the BIS proceedings. Published online: 2012-11-03