Peter Loos

Memorandum on design-oriented information systems research

Information Systems Research (“Wirtschaftsinformatik”) basically follows two research approaches: the behavioristic approach and the design-oriented approach. In this memorandum, 10 authors propose principles of design-oriented information systems research. Moreover, the memorandum is supported by 111 full professors from the German-speaking scientific community, who with their signature advocate the principles specified therein.

Empirical research in business process management – analysis of an emerging field of research

Purpose – The paper aims at providing a survey of the development of empirical research in business process management (BPM). It seeks to study trends in empirical BPM research and applied methodologies by means of a developed framework in order to identify the status quo and to assess the probable future development of the research field.Design/methodology/approach – In order to analyse the development of the research field a systematic literature review of empirical journal articles in the BPM context is conducted. The retrieved literature is analyzed by means of scientometric methods and a developed reference framework.Findings – The steadily growing number of published articles in empirical BPM research shows an increase in interest in the research field. Research interests, applied methodologies, the underlying research paradigm and the level of maturity of empirical BPM research differ depending on regional aspects. BPM gains importance in the industry as well as in the public administration context...

Business process reference models: survey and classification

Within the Information Systems field, reference models are well-known for many years. The aim of this paper is to survey and to describe reference models for business processes. Our analysis of 30 process reference models is based on a framework consisting of criteria such as application domain, used process modeling languages, models size, known evaluations and applications of process reference models. Furthermore, we identify model domains, which have been dealt with, describe similarities and differences between the available process reference models, and point to open research questions.

Business Models: An Information Systems Research Agenda

The business model concept, although a relatively new topic for research, has garnered growing attention over the past decade. Whilst it has been robustly defined, the concept has so far attracted very little substantive research. In the context of the wide-spread digitization of businesses and society at large, the logic inherent in a business model has become critical for business success and, hence, a focus for academic inquiry. The business model concept is identified as the missing link between business strategy, processes, and Information Technology (IT). The authors argue that the BISE community offers distinct and unique competencies (e.g., translating business strategies into IT systems, managing business and IT processes, etc.) that can be harnessed for significant research contributions to this field. Within this research gap three distinct streams are delineated, namely, business models in IT industries, IT enabled or digital business models, and IT support for developing and managing business models. For these streams, the current state of the art, suggest critical research questions, and suitable research methodologies are outlined.

Green IT: A Matter of Business and Information Systems Engineering?

This panel discusses the impact of Green IT on information systems and how information systems can meet environmental challenges and ensure sustainability. We wish to highlight the role of green business processes, and specifically the contributions that the management of these processes can play in leveraging the transformative power of IS in order to create an environmentally sustainable society. The management of business processes has typically been thought of in terms of business improvement alongside the dimensions time, cost, quality, or flexibility – the so-called ‘devil’s quadrangle’. Contemporary organizations, however, increasingly become aware of the need to create more sustainable, IT-enabled business processes that are also successful in terms of their economic, ecological, as well as social impact. Exemplary ecological key performance indicators that increasingly find their way into the agenda of managers include carbon emissions, data center energy, or renewable energy consumption (SAP 2010). The key challenge, therefore, is to extend the devil’s quadrangle to a devil’s pentagon, including sustainability as an important fifth dimension in process change.

High-Frequency-Trading

High-frequency trading (HFT) has recently drawn massive public attention fuelled by the U.S. May 6, 2010 flash crash and the tremendous increases in trading volumes of HFT strategies. Indisputably, HFT is an important factor in markets that are driven by sophisticated technology on all layers of the trading value chain. However, discussions on this topic often lack sufficient and precise information. A remarkable gap between the results of academic research on HFT and its perceived impact on markets in the public, media and regulatory discussions can be observed.The research at hand aims to provide up-to-date background information on HFT. This includes definitions, drivers, strategies, academic research and current regulatory discussions. It analyzes HFT and thus contributes to the ongoing discussions by evaluating certain proposed regulatory measures, trying to offer new perspectives and deliver solution proposals.

Understanding understandability of conceptual models --- what are we actually talking about?

Investigating and improving the quality of conceptual models has gained tremendous importance in the past years. In general, model understandability is regarded one of the most important model quality goals and criteria. A considerable amount of empirical studies, especially experiments, have been conducted in order to investigate factors influencing the understandability of conceptual models. However, a thorough review and reconstruction of 42 experiments on conceptual model understandability conducted in this research shows that there is a variety of different understandings and conceptualizations of the term model understandability. As a consequence, this term remains ambiguous, research results on model understandability are hardly comparable and partly imprecise, which shows the necessity of clarification what the conceptual modeling community is actually talking about when the term model understandability is used. In order to overcome this shortcoming, our research classifies the different observed dimensions of model understandability in a reference framework. Moreover, implications of the findings are presented and discussed and some guidelines for future model understandability research are given.

Business Process Management in the Large

In recent years Business Process Management (BPM) has attracted considerable attention, both in academia and practice. A growing research community is designing and investigating BPM approaches and techniques which are meanwhile widely used in private and public organizations. The quantity and quality of literature concerning BPM, the existence of specialized conferences (e.g., the International BPM Conference) as well as dedicated journals (e.g., the Business Process Management Journal) illustrate that BPM has become an established discipline. Despite the growing maturity of the BPM discipline, many approaches have problems dealing with the challenges posed by real-life BPM applications. Corporate reality is often more challenging than assumed by contemporary BPM approaches. This situation is similar to the situation of modeling enterprise data (Scheer and Hars 1992). Common enterprise-wide data models tend to be complex, difficult to maintain, and mostly lack in supporting flexible and decentralized organizational structures. In order to be able to maintain the different subareas of an enterprise-wide data model and to reduce the maintenance complexity, adequate abstraction concepts are needed. The same applies to BPM which also requires adequate abstraction concepts to handle real-life complexity. Large organizations have hundreds of different processes in place. Well-established reference process models, such as Scheer’s Reference Model for Industrial Enterprises (Scheer 1994) as well as the SAP reference model, are often disconnected from reality; real-life companies’ actual business processes are often poorly documented and relationships between different process types are not clearly denoted (Mendling et al. 2008). While conventional BPM research often seems to concentrate on single processes or scenarios comprising a few isolated processes, the upcoming challenge for BPM is to cope with large sets of interdependent interorganizational processes in our globalized and interconnected world. This situation mainly originates from the possibilities created by technical innovations enabling ubiquitous computing, such as smart mobile devices, sensor technologies, or RFID. However, these possibilities also result in increasing complexity and dynamicity of business processes. Since existing BPM techniques and tools cannot handle this well, current research activities focus on new approaches for Business Process Management in the Large (BPM-in-the-Large).

NeuroIS: Neuroscientific Approaches in the Investigation and Development of Information Systems

For several years, there has been an increased application of neuroscientific approaches in the North American Information Systems (IS) discipline. Theories and methods from neuroscience contribute to a better understanding of human behavior. Since IS tries to explain human behavior in the use of information systems, neuroscientific approaches can also contribute to a growth of knowledge. In this regard, Dimoka et al. (2007, p. 13) stated in one of the first publications on this matter: “It is just hard to believe that a better understanding of brain functioning will not lead to better IS theories.” Against the background of the increasing internationalization of business and information systems engineering (BISE), the following discussion deals with the issue of “NeuroIS”. The need for a discussion on NeuroIS is reinforced by the fact that neuroscientific approaches also gain in importance in other business and social sciences (e.g., neuroeconomics, Camerer et al. 2005). In the years 2009 and 2010, there have already been two relevant scientific symposia in Austria which explicitly focused on NeuroIS. At this year’s conference “Gmunden Retreat on Advances in NeuroIS” (see http:// www.NeuroIS.org), which was attended by a number of experts from the German-speaking BISE, opportunities and challenges of NeuroIS were discussed. Here, both methodical and theory-related issues were on the agenda. A central conclusion of the conference was that neuroscientific approaches can help not only to explain human behavior in dealing with information, but are also relevant for design-oriented BISE scientists. This circumstance is of particular interest for BISE researchers in the German-speaking area as one of their strengths is the design and concept of new innovative technologies. In order to achieve a broad perspective on the issue in the course of this discussion, both North American scientists as well as representatives of the Germanspeaking BISE were invited to comment on the topic. The following authors accepted my invitation to this discussion (in alphabetical order): Prof. Rajiv D. Banker, Merves Chair in Accounting and Information Technology, Fox School of Business and Management, Temple University, USA; Prof. Jan vom Brocke, Hilti Chair in Business Process Management, University of Liechtenstein; Prof. Fred D. Davis, David D. Glass Chair in Information Systems, Sam M. Walton College of Business, University of Arkansas, USA; Prof. Pierre-Majorique Leger, Associate Professor am Department of Information Technologies, HEC Montreal, Canada; Prof. Gernot R. Muller-Putz, Associate Professor at Institute of Knowledge Discovery, Laboratory of BrainComputer Interfaces, Graz University of Technology, Austria; Prof. Rene Riedl, Associate Professor at Department of Business Informatics – Information Engineering, University of Linz, Austria. The six authors comment on various facets of NeuroIS that appear relevant and important for BISE in four contributions. Rene Riedl and Gernot R. Muller-Putz illustrate that neuroscientific approaches may be used to explain BISE-related phenomena as well as for the design of innovative information systems, based on three specific examples. For instance, the authors report on a laboratory experiment based on eBay websites. In addition, the authors refer to research and development projects in the IT industry which were presented to the public as prototypes in recent years. Jan vom Brocke comments on the role of neuroscience in design-oriented BISE research, arguing that neuroscientific approaches can not only be used in behavioral research. Building on the potentials of design-oriented research, vom Brocke distinguishes two major research streams: research by design and research on design. As to the former, he discusses the role of neuroscientific methods and theories in the development and evaluation of artifacts. As to the latter, he argues that neuroscientific approaches can also be used for generating and refining design theories. Fred D. Davis and Rajiv D. Banker focus on the integration of neuroscientific approaches to technology acceptance research. Since the 1980s, works on the technology acceptance model (TAM) have been published in large numbers. The authors find, however, that in recent years only incremental advances in

Der Referenzmodellkatalog als Instrument des Wissensmanagements: Methodik und Anwendung

Referenzmodelle konnen als Speicher fur explizites Domanen wissen interpretiert werden. Obgleich in der Literatur inzwischen zahlreiche Referenzmodelle dokumentiert sind, ist der Zugang zu diesen Wissensspeichern uneinheitlich und nicht systematisch moglich. Referenzmodellkataloge ermoglichen Referenzmodelle nach einheitlichen Gesichtspunkten zu ordnen und nach spezifischen Gesichtspunkten zugreifbar zu machen. Damit bilden sie ein zentrales Instrument zur Erschliesung der Wissensquelle Referenzmodell und bilden die Schnittstelle zwischen den Prozessen der Entwicklung von Referenzmodellen einerseits und der Anwendung von Referenzmodellen andererseits. Es werden zwei Referenzmodellkataloge vorgestellt: Der erste Katalog beschreibt Moglichkeiten der Arbeitsplanmodellierung. Der zweite Katalog ist ein nach Wirtschaftszweigen systematisierender Uberblicks-Katalog uber vorhandene Referenzmodelle. Kunftige Arbeiten werden die Entwicklung weiterer Referenzmodellkataloge thematisieren.