Ingrid Schirmer

Increasing the Agility of IT Delivery: Five Types of Bimodal IT Organization

In the age of digital business transformation, enterprises seek to increase their agility and speed of IT delivery. To accomplish this, they change their existing control-driven IT organizational structures and processes and establish separate modes for business-oriented and traditional IT delivery (“bimodal IT”). Though the concept of bimodal IT has been discussed in practice, empirical research regarding the approaches employed to implement bimodal IT is scarce. This paper presents findings from a qualitative-empirical study on the bimodal IT implementation approaches of nine companies. It identifies five different types of bimodal IT in these enterprises and shows that specific mechanisms are applied to enhance the (business) IT alignment in the respective organizational settings of each type. On the basis of similarities and differences among the types, we develop propositions for future research on bimodal IT and derive implications for practice.

Integrating Business Models and Enterprise Architecture

Companies today interact in an increasingly competitive environment and seek to leverage the potentials of IT for generating new business models and for changing existing ones. For these business models, companies have to align the respective business and IT architectures. This task can be supported by using enterprise architecture management. In this paper, we first analyze the potentials for integrating enterprise architecture (management) and business model (management). Second, the components of different approaches for describing business models are compared to each other. Third, we present a concept for integrating business models into enterprise architectures. Fourth, we outline an integration of business model management and enterprise architecture management processes.

Extending Enterprise Architectures for Adopting the Internet of Things – Lessons Learned from the smartPORT Projects in Hamburg

In many industries, companies are currently testing and adopting internet of things (IoT) technology. By adopting IoT, they seek to improve efficiency or to develop and offer new services. In current projects, a variety of IoT systems is used and gets interconnected with existing or newly developed application systems. Due to the integration of IoT and the related cloud systems, existing enterprise architecture (EA) models have to be extended. By drawing on the example of the Hamburg smartPORT initiative, we analyze the consequences of IoT projects on the enterprise architecture. As a result, we present an EA meta-model extension, which includes (1) sensor, physical object, smart brick, and fog system types, (2) a smart brick management database and (3) data streams, cloud systems and service applications. Furthermore, we discuss implications regarding a to-be architecture.

The failed implementation of the electronic prescription in Germany – A case study

Many countries worldwide are striving for improving the quality of care and for reducing costs in the health care sector by establishing large IT infrastructures. In Germany, the introduction of the electronic health card and the national telematics infrastructure is lagging years behind the original schedule. In this paper, we describe and analyze a case study of one selected part of this ultra-large intervention. The selected part is the failed implementation of the electronic prescription. The related activities started in 2003 and ended in 2010 when a decision was made to abandon this part of the intervention. We present a detailed analysis of the project and identify 14 reasons in five categories for the project’s failure. Furthermore, we provide a multi-layered overview of the episodes and subprojects.