Business Administration and Economics

Business Information Systems

The Information Systems and Strategic IT Management Chair of Prof. Frederik Ahlemann focuses its research on the topics of:

  • Project Management (PM) and Project Portfolio Management (PPM)
  • Benefits Management and Value of IT
  • Enterprise Architecture Management (EAM)
  • IT Strategy and Strategic IT Benchmarking (SITBM)
  • IT Governance (ITG)

following an explanatory and design-oriented paradigm. The Chair regularly publishes in international peer-reviewed journals (e. g., Journal of Information Technology) and takes part in conferences (e. g., International/European Conference on Information Systems (ICIS/ECIS)). In recent years, members of the Chair have received several Best Paper Awards at prestigious conferences. They also regularly take part in international conferences as track chairs or programme committee members.

The Chair furthermore undertakes successful research projects financed by industry. This enables empirical theoretical research and evaluation of practice-oriented research results. Highlights of current research include the development of a DIN (German Standards Institute) standard for project data exchange and the ongoing cooperation with leading enterprises in the automotive, energy and auditing sectors. These efforts are also documented in corresponding book publications.

Prof. Stefan Eicker’s Research Group for Business Informatics and Software Engineering takes a socio-technical perspective on the design of information systems. The focus is therefore not only on the actual software development process but also on the effective design of information systems for later use. Here the requirements of the underlying domain-specific business processes as well as the needs and capabilities of users are taken into account.

One example of the group’s work is the “Personal Copilot” research project. It aims to provide context-dependent information proactively to users while they use an application system without them having to leave the application. The main research question is how to determine the information need of a specific user while he or she is using an application and utilise it to gather the relevant information. In this project, a domain and technology-independent framework for ­automated context-sensitive real-time information retrieval is being developed by adapting methods from the fields of context awareness, information retrieval, collective intelligence and semantic web. The “Personal Copilot” allows the user to use application systems more efficiently by reducing time-consuming, unproductive internet searches and allowing them to concentrate on their actual tasks.