Roland M. Müller

A comparison of inter-organizational business models of mobile app stores: there is more than open vs. closed

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the competition among mobile app stores for smart mobile media devices. Therefore, the business models of seven mobile app stores are analyzed with a special focus on Apple and Google. We use e3-value modelling - a formal business modelling technique - for analyzing the critical elements of these mobile ecosystems. The analysis of the app store ecosystems allows a differentiated view on the different strategies of the app store owners. Additionally, we look at the impact of network effects, economies of scale, platform differentiation, quality assurance, and transaction costs on the design of mobile application markets. This theoretical model allows a deeper discussion about the design choices and success factors in the different app store cases. Based on our analysis, we expect that the open versus closed models discussion becomes less relevant - so-called open platforms have closed aspects as well as the other way around - and that competitive differentiation and segmentation strategies will become increasingly critical in order to strengthen the competitive positioning of the different app store platforms.

The Influence of Incentives and Culture on Knowledge Sharing

A major challenge in knowledge management involves motivating people to share their knowledge with others. In many modern knowledge-oriented companies, this challenge is addressed by incentive systems that are linked to the knowledge-sharing activities of employees. The design of appropriate incentive systems is becoming more difficult for companies distributed internationally which operate in a variety of countries and cultures. In this study, we will analyze the combined influence of incentives and culture on knowledge sharing in large organizations.

Business Intelligence and Service-oriented Architecture: A Delphi Study

Although service-oriented architecture (SOA) is becoming increasingly popular in enterprise application architectures, little is known about how SOA could support and influence the use and implementation of business intelligence (BI). We applied the Delphi method in order to identify opportunities and limitations of SOA concepts and technologies when applied to BI applications. This paper draws recommendations for BI vendors and for organizations that use or intend to use SOA to support BI.

Understanding the creative mechanisms of design thinking: an evolutionary approach

In this article, we analyse the concept of design thinking with its process, the team structure, the work environment, the specific culture, and certain brainstorming rules and techniques. The goal of this work is to understand how the creative mechanisms of design thinking work and how they might be improved. For this purpose, we refer to the idea of creativity as an evolutionary process, which is determined by generation (i.e., recombination and mutation), selection, and retention of ideas. We evaluate the design thinking process in terms of its capabilities to activate these mechanisms, and we propose possible improvements. This paper contributes to a better understanding of creative design processes in general and the design thinking process in particular, and will serve as a foundation for further research about creative mechanisms.

RELFIN – topic discovery for ontology enhancement and annotation

While classic information retrieval methods return whole documents as a result of a query, many information demands would be better satisfied by fine-grain access inside the documents. One way to support this goal is to make the semantics of small document regions explicit, e.g. as XML labels, so that query engines can exploit them. To this purpose, the topics of the small document regions must be discovered from the texts; differently from document labelling applications, fine-grain topics cannot be listed in advance for arbitrary collections. Text-understanding approaches can derive the topic of a document region but are less appropriate for the construction of a small set of topics that can be used in queries. To address this challenge we propose the coupling of text mining, prior knowledge explicated in ontologies and human expertise and present the system RELFIN, which is designed to assis the human expert in the discovery of topics appropriate for (i) ontology enhancement with additional concepts or relationships, (ii) semantic characterization and tagging of document regions. RELFIN performs data mining upon linguistically preprocessed corpora to group document regions on topics and constructing the topic labels for them, so that the labels are characteristic of the regions and thus helpful in ontology-based search. We show our first results of applying RELFIN on a case study of text analysis and retrieval.

On the Solution of Fuzzy Equation Systems

We consider a set of mixed linear and non-linear equations, which arise typically in operative controlling. The variables in the single equations are connected by arithmetic operations. In order to allow for imprecision, each variable is modelled as a fuzzy set with a given membership function. Given a vector of observed variables and an equation system with terms built up by fuzzy sets, a controlling decision is to be made, whether the data set is ‘consistent’ with the equation system or not.

Quality Assessment in the Blog Space.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is the presentation of a new method for blog quality assessment. The method uses the temporal sequence of link creation events between blogs as an implicit source for the collective tacit knowledge of blog authors about blog quality.Design/methodology/approach – The blog data are processed by the novel method for the assessment of blog quality. The results are compared to Google Page Rank with respect to the Gold Standard, the BlogRazzi Bookmark Rank.Findings – The method is similar or better than Google Page Rank with respect to the chosen Gold Standard.Originality/value – The major contribution of this paper is the introduction of a novel method for blog quality assessment. Even though its superiority to other and more established methods cannot be proven in the context of this limited study, it enriches the toolset available for blog quality assessment and may become important for a deeper understanding of organizational learning.

BI Tools und Anwendungsfelder

In diesem Kapitel wenden wir uns zunachst im Abschn. 6.1 marktgangiger Software zu, die geeignet ist, Business Intelligence sowohl bei der Datenbereitstellung als auch beim Einsatz von quantitativen Verfahren der Datenanalyse zu unterstutzen.

Datenbereitstellung: Data Warehousing

In diesem Kapitel betrachten wir eine Seite von Business Intelligence: die Datenbereitstellung. Die Verwendungseite, der Teil von BI also, der die Managementaufgaben unterstutzt, wird in den folgenden Kap. 3 bis 5 behandelt.

Methoden der Unternehmenssteuerung

In den vorigen Kapiteln hatten wir uns mit der Bereitstellung von Daten und mit dem Data Mining befasst. In diesem Kapitel gehen wir auf die Methoden der Unternehmenssteuerung mithilfe von Business Intelligence ein, speziell auf quantitative Methoden. Die einzelnen Problembereiche, die vorgestellt werden, sind in der Abb. 4.1 veranschaulicht. Die Aktionsphasen decken entsprechend den Managementbereich von Prognose bis Fehlerruckverfolgung ab.