European Research Center for Information Systems

Information technology (IT) allows members of the growing elderly population to remain independent longer. However, while technology becomes more and more pervasive, an age-related underutilisation of IT remains observable. For instance, elderly people (65 years of age and older) are significantly less likely to use the Internet than the average population (see, for instance, European Commission, 2011). This age-related digital divide prevents many elderly people from using IT to enhance their quality of life through tools, such as Internet-based service delivery. Despite the significance of this phenomenon, the information systems (IS) literature lacks a comprehensive consideration and explanation of technology acceptance in general and more specifically, Internet adoption by the elderly. This paper thus studies the intentions of the elderly with regard to Internet use and identifies important influencing factors. Four alternative models based on technology acceptance theory are tested in the context of comprehensive survey data. As a result, a model that explains as much as 84% of the variance in technology adoption among the elderly is developed. We discuss the contribution of our analyses to the research on Internet adoption (and IT adoption in general) by the elderly, on the digital divide, and on technology acceptance and identify potentially effective paths for future research and theoretical development.

Abstract. Over the last three decades, a methodological pluralism has developed within information systems (IS) research. Various disciplines and many research communities as well, contribute to this discussion. However, working on the same research topic or studying the same phenomenon does not necessarily ensure mutual understanding. Especially within this multidisciplinary and international context, the epistemological assumptions made by different researchers may vary fundamentally. These assumptions exert a substantial impact on how concepts like validity, reliability, quality and rigour of research are understood. Thus, the extensive publication of epistemological assumptions is, in effect, almost mandatory. Hence, the aim of this paper is to develop an epistemological framework which can be used for systematically analysing the epistemological assumptions in IS research. Rather than attempting to identify and classify IS research paradigms, this research aims at a comprehensive discussion of epistemology within the context of IS. It seeks to contribute to building the basis for identifying similarities as well as differences between distinct IS approaches and methods. In order to demonstrate the epistemological framework, the consensus‐oriented interpretivist approach to conceptual modelling is used as an example.

Objectives: To systematically classify the clinical impact of computerized clinical decision support systems (CDSSs) in inpatient care. Materials and Methods: Medline, Cochrane Trials, and Cochrane Reviews were searched for CDSS studies that assessed patient outcomes in inpatient settings. For each study, 2 physicians independently mapped patient outcome effects to a predefined medical effect score to assess the clinical impact of reported outcome effects. Disagreements were measured by using weighted kappa and solved by consensus. An example set of promising disease entities was generated based on medical effect scores and risk of bias assessment. To summarize technical characteristics of the systems, reported input variables and algorithm types were extracted as well. Results: Seventy studies were included. Five (7%) reported reduced mortality, 16 (23%) reduced life-threatening events, and 28 (40%) reduced non-life-threatening events, 20 (29%) had no significant impact on patient outcomes, and 1 showed a negative effect (weighted κ: 0.72, P < .001). Six of 24 disease entity settings showed high effect scores with medium or low risk of bias: blood glucose management, blood transfusion management, physiologic deterioration prevention, pressure ulcer prevention, acute kidney injury prevention, and venous thromboembolism prophylaxis. Most of the implemented algorithms (72%) were rule-based. Reported input variables are shared as standardized models on a metadata repository. Discussion and Conclusion: Most of the included CDSS studies were associated with positive patient outcomes effects but with substantial differences regarding the clinical impact. A subset of 6 disease entities could be filtered in which CDSS should be given special consideration at sites where computer-assisted decision-making is deemed to be underutilized. Registration number on PROSPERO: CRD42016049946.

INTRODUCTION: Information systems are a key success factor for medical research and healthcare. Currently, most of these systems apply heterogeneous and proprietary data models, which impede data exchange and integrated data analysis for scientific purposes. Due to the complexity of medical terminology, the overall number of medical data models is very high. At present, the vast majority of these models are not available to the scientific community. The objective of the Portal of Medical Data Models (MDM, https://medical-data-models.org) is to foster sharing of medical data models. METHODS: MDM is a registered European information infrastructure. It provides a multilingual platform for exchange and discussion of data models in medicine, both for medical research and healthcare. The system is developed in collaboration with the University Library of Münster to ensure sustainability. A web front-end enables users to search, view, download and discuss data models. Eleven different export formats are available (ODM, PDF, CDA, CSV, MACRO-XML, REDCap, SQL, SPSS, ADL, R, XLSX). MDM contents were analysed with descriptive statistics. RESULTS: MDM contains 4387 current versions of data models (in total 10,963 versions). 2475 of these models belong to oncology trials. The most common keyword (n = 3826) is 'Clinical Trial'; most frequent diseases are breast cancer, leukemia, lung and colorectal neoplasms. Most common languages of data elements are English (n = 328,557) and German (n = 68,738). Semantic annotations (UMLS codes) are available for 108,412 data items, 2453 item groups and 35,361 code list items. Overall 335,087 UMLS codes are assigned with 21,847 unique codes. Few UMLS codes are used several thousand times, but there is a long tail of rarely used codes in the frequency distribution. DISCUSSION: Expected benefits of the MDM portal are improved and accelerated design of medical data models by sharing best practice, more standardised data models with semantic annotation and better information exchange between information systems, in particular Electronic Data Capture (EDC) and Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems. Contents of the MDM portal need to be further expanded to reach broad coverage of all relevant medical domains. Database URL: https://medical-data-models.org.

The management of risk in business processes has been the subject of active research in the past few years. Potentially, many benefits can be obtained by integrating the two traditionally separated fields of risk management and business process management, including the ability to minimize risks in business processes by design and to mitigate such risks at run time. While there has been an increasing amount of research aimed at delivering such an integrated system, these research efforts vary in terms of scope, goals, and functionality. Through the systematic collection and evaluation of relevant literature, this article compares and classifies current approaches in the area of risk-aware business process management in order to expose and explain current research gaps. The process through which relevant literature was collected, filtered, and evaluated is also detailed. Finally, a research agenda is proposed.

Purpose The paper seeks to investigate into the shared services phenomenon in the context of government reforms. It especially aims to address the emergence and shaping of shared services. The paper seeks to develop the notion of shared service centres (SSCs) and shared service networks (SSNs). Design/methodology/approach An interview‐ and document analysis‐based multiple case study was conducted in Germany. The qualitative analysis covered two shared service projects on the local government level. Findings Important preconditions for shared service emergence are identified, including cost pressure as motive, the existence of key actors as well as the existence of prior cooperation. Moreover, the paper provides evidence that the structure of previous cooperation exerts influence on if shared services are organized in a centralised (SSC) or decentralised format (SSN). Research limitations/implications The case selection is a possible limitation of the presented study. The selected cases give an insight into the topic of shared service configuration. The findings derived constitute indicators of possible patterns, which have to be approved by further research in order to identify reliable causal relationships and improve generalisablity of the results presented here. Originality/value An insight into conditions of adaptation and shaping of shared services is given, suggesting causal relationships for further theory testing and development.

Abstract Purpose – Open process innovation – drawing from the literature on open innovation and business process management (BPM) – promotes the study of how to systematically make use of knowledge that lies outside of an organization's boundaries for process‐innovation initiatives. Open innovation has been heavily studied for product innovation; however, process innovation has not yet been researched from such perspective. This paper aims to address these issues. Design/methodology/approach – Against this background, the paper seeks to investigate into variables that impact on the qualities of open process innovation taking the example of the public sector domain. This paper examines how personnel‐resource scarcity exerts influence on the involvement of: customers (here citizens and local companies); and consultants (here management and software consultants) in public sector BPM. Based on the findings, implications for theory and practice are discussed, including implications for studies on BPM maturity or on business process design. Findings – The multi‐method analysis shows that personnel resource scarcity has consequences for BPM‐related collaboration schema as it restricts the involvement of customers. Research limitations/implications – The paper calls for a governance‐theory perspective on process innovation as a fundamental basis for understanding and designing the institutions that shape collaboration in open process innovation. Practical implications – BPM managers find information about potential pitfalls in BPM maturization. Originality/value – The paper provides a conceptualization of open process innovation and integrates the body of literature on open innovation and BPM.

The term “big data” will always be remembered as the big buzzword of 2013. According to the Wikipedia, big data “is a collection of data sets so large and complex that it becomes difficult to process using on-hand database management tools”. In other perceptions, the “3 Vs” that characterize it (i.e., volume, velocity, and variety) or the “4 Vs” (adding veracity to the previous three) are responsible for the fact that it exceeds an organization’s own data as well as its storage or compute capacity for accurate and timely decision-making. In essence, big data refers to the situation that more and more aspects and artifacts of everyday life, be it personal or professional, are available in digital form, e.g., personal or company profiles, social network and blog postings, buying histories, health records, to name just a few, that increasingly more data gets dynamically produced especially on the Internet and on the Web, and that nowadays the tools and techniques are available for evaluating and analyzing all that data in various combinations. Numerous companies already foresee the enormous business effects that analytical scenarios based on big data can have, and the impacts that it will hence have on advertising, commerce, and business intelligence (BI). This paper reviews the issues, techniques, and applications of big data, with an emphasis on future BI architectures.

This paper presents Real-Time Collaboration (RTC), a new and emerging type of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) system that has its roots in both the telecommunications and groupware market. The aim of the paper is twofold. First, it outlines the evolution of RTC systems and offers a conceptualization of RTC consisting of usage scenarios and four main building blocks - integration of communication channels, presence information, context integration, and further collaboration features. Second, in order to understand the organizational implications of this complex and socially embedded information system, the paper intends to offer a starting point for future research on RTC by touching upon and systematizing different directions and typical questions for researching RTC and its organizational implications.

In procedural content generation, one is often interested in generating a large number of artifacts that are not only of high quality but also diverse, in terms of gameplay, visual impression or some other criterion. We investigate several search-based approaches to creating good and diverse game content, in particular approaches based on evolution strategies with or without diversity preservation mechanisms, novelty search and random search. The content domain is game levels, more precisely map sketches for strategy games, which are meant to be used as suggestions in the Sentient Sketchbook design tool. Several diversity metrics are possible for this type of content: we investigate tile-based, objective-based and visual impression distance. We find that evolution with diversity preservation mechanisms can produce both good and diverse content, but only when using appropriate distance measures. Reversely, we can draw conclusions about the suitability of these distance measures for the domain from the comparison of diversity preserving versus blind restart evolutionary algorithms.

Being confronted with decreasing margins and a rising customer demand for integrated solutions, manufacturing companies integrate complementary services into their portfolio. Offering product-service packages (consisting of products and services) demands for setting up integrated product-service systems, which incorporate the coordinated design and provision of products and services. Conceptual Modeling is an established approach to support such efforts. This paper evaluates the current support of reference models and modeling languages for setting up conceptual models in the area of product-service systems. Consecutively, some perspectives are presented to induce further research in this field.

Information systems development has to deal with evolving technologies and changing environments. Therefore, the engineering of methods as the problem of creating suitable instruments for new situations is critical to information systems development. The failure of IS development projects shows that method engineering is an open field. The question is if and how research on ontology can contribute to overcome the current situation. We show, based on linguistic and philosophical findings, how ontology can be used as linchpin in method engineering. We found that the language critique approach of Kamlah and Lorenzen (1984) provides the means to create ontologies by linguistic actions and that ontologies are always related to language communities sharing the knowledge of using a common language in communication processes. We present an ontology-driven engineering method for information systems development. Our method helps to create required language constructs to handle new situations. The ontology-driven engineering method is demonstrated using an elaborate example case.

Topical developments in software-engineering facilitate the establishment of new design patterns for information systems. In Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), processes of an information system can be extracted and "out-tasked" to service providers. KEEN/MCDONALD highlight the changes that are brought about by such an architecture with their statement ,,Out- tasking [...] breaks a company into a portfolio of process-centered operations rather than interlocking departments or functions." [30]. Examples of technologies that have been developed for this purpose are COM+, CORBA und RMI [55]. With the initiative of Enterprise Application Integration (EAI), web-services turn out in practice to enable a widely spread realization of SOA.

This special issue demonstrates many avenues of process research to further develop. Specifically, we show some selected drifts that will become prevalent for the next generation of process research and BPM as a field. Next, we turn to the limits of the first generation Business Process Management.

Abstract Process science is the interdisciplinary study of socio-technical processes. Socio-technical processes involve coherent series of changes over time, entailing actions and events that include humans and digital technologies. The ubiquitous availability of digital trace data, combined with advanced data analytics capabilities, offer new and unprecedented opportunities to study such processes through multiple data sources. Process science is concerned with describing, explaining, and intervening in socio-technical change. It is based on four key principles; it (1) puts socio-technical processes at the center of attention, (2) investigates socio-technical processes scientifically, (3) embraces perspectives of multiple disciplines, and (4) aims to create impact by actively shaping the unfolding of socio-technical processes.

Conventional e-assessment systems often are not suited for examining mathematical calculations or proofs, and the few existing ones have very limited functionality. On this account we have developed the e-assessment system EASy which focuses on mathematical proofs. As we are not aware of any documented experiences concerning the applicability, usability and acceptance of a corresponding system for students and tutors, we have evaluated EASy in a lecture on data structures and algorithms with more than 200 students.

Abstract Researching the field of business intelligence and analytics (BI &amp; A) has a long tradition within information systems research. Thereby, in each decade the rapid development of technologies opened new room for investigation. Since the early 1950s, the collection and analysis of structured data were the focus of interest, followed by unstructured data since the early 1990s. The third wave of BI &amp; A comprises unstructured and sensor data of mobile devices. The article at hand aims at drawing a comprehensive overview of the status quo in relevant BI &amp; A research of the current decade, focusing on the third wave of BI &amp; A. By this means, the paper’s contribution is fourfold. First, a systematically developed taxonomy for BI &amp; A 3.0 research, containing seven dimensions and 40 characteristics, is presented. Second, the results of a structured literature review containing 75 full research papers are analyzed by applying the developed taxonomy. The analysis provides an overview on the status quo of BI &amp; A 3.0. Third, the results foster discussions on the predicted and observed developments in BI &amp; A research of the past decade. Fourth, research gaps of the third wave of BI &amp; A research are disclosed and concluded in a research agenda.

Purpose Requirements for business improvement professionals depend on different job characteristics. By focussing on lean management, the purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to provide a comprehensive conceptualisation of competencies relevant for lean professionals by comparing them to an existing project management competency framework; and second, to identify their similarities and differences in three different analysed countries. Design/methodology/approach This paper investigates 2,701 online published job advertisements in the USA, UK and Germany by means of a content analysis to compare and contrast the respective job profiles. Findings Main findings are similarities and differences in the specification and perception of lean professional’s roles among the three countries. Strikingly, four out of eight considered competency categories comprise 74 per cent of the profiles’ most relevant keywords. Additionally, with the help of a latent semantic analysis, 16 specific competencies can be summarised in a lean professional’s competency taxonomy. Research limitations/implications The collected data only represent a snapshot of lean professionals’ advertisements. Also, text mining results from job profiles could largely differ from other techniques like recruiter interviews or company surveys. Further research could use different methods or combine them to construct a more complete model. Practical implications Lean education and training as well as the respective candidate selection processes can benefit from these studies’ results. Originality/value Requirements and job contents for lean professionals have not been empirically researched on a comparable in-depth level before, even though their expertise is in high demand in any kind of business sector.

Customer solutions comprise services and physical goods as integrated value propositions. Understanding the customers' point of view on value creation and integrating customers as co-creators of value into service processes are important research fields in Service Science Management and Engineering. At the same time, a lack of investigation of the providers' points of view on offering and fulfilling integrated value propositions can be ascertained. To compensate for this deficit, our paper investigates four different integrated value propositions in the B2B-market to study how an integration of service and manufacturing processes can be accomplished by sharing information in service systems. Based on in- depth business process analyses, information needsarising from the integration of service processes and manufacturing processes are identified and systematized in a conceptual framework. From a service research point of view, this framework provides a fundament to build on in consecutive qualitative and empirical investigations as well as for designing IT artifacts.

International audience