Paul Drews

Digitalization: Opportunity and Challenge for the Business and Information Systems Engineering Community

The convergence of the so-called SMAC technologies – social, mobile, analytics, and cloud computing – has led to an unprecedented wave of digitalization that is currently fueling innovation in business and society. As digitalization is embracing all aspects of our private and professional lives, it is becoming a priority for managers and policymakers, and has made it into the headlines of newspapers, magazines, and practitioner conferences. This wave of digitalization is creating opportunities for the BISE community to engage in innovative research activities and to increase the discipline’s visibility. However, since BISE researchers have investigated the increasing exploitation and integration of digital technologies over several decades, they also naturally react with ambivalence when others claim that going digital is a new phenomenon.

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.

DialogueMaps: Supporting Interactive Transdisciplinary Dialogues with a Web-Based Tool for Multi-layer Knowledge Maps

In environmental engineering, experts from different disciplines and with diverse backgrounds and responsibilities need to cooperate. As they tackle problems important to society and practice, this type of cooperation can be characterized as transdisciplinary. In transdisciplinary settings, the actors involved bring together theory, models and knowledge from different disciplines. In order to integrate this knowledge and to create a better understanding of the complex issues under consideration, experts can use methods like knowledge mapping. Compared to other methods used in environmental engineering, knowledge maps are based on a lower degree of formalization. In this article, we derive requirements for a method and a tool for supporting the interactive creation of knowledge maps in groups from theory and from existing methods related to environmental engineering. Based on these requirements, we describe the concept of a new method and a supporting tool called DialogueMaps. This tool is web-based and aims at supporting transdisciplinary interactive dialogues for developing multi-layer knowledge maps.

DialogueMaps: A web-based tool for supporting interactive dialogues in education, research, and consulting

This paper outlines the theoretical backgrounds, the requirements for and the technical realization of DialogueMaps, a web-based tool for supporting interactive dialogues in education, research, and consulting. A first evaluation has already been conducted. An outlook is given on future directions of development.

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.