Integrating the Personal IT Ecosystem in an Organizational Environment - A Design Science Project

The work force within companies is subject to constant changes. More dynamic working time models go along with greater social trends, such as the demographic change. While the generation of baby boomers has finally reached retirement age, the number of members of newer generations has been constantly increasing. Members of these new generations have grown up with modern technology and have made it an important part of their private, as well as professional life. Their technological requirements are significantly different from those of the generations before (Burke and Hiltbrand, 2011). Younger generations apply an extensive personal IT ecosystem, comprising a variety of personal systems (e.g., social networks, messaging services and apps) and devices (e.g., tablets, laptops and smart phones), to conduct their private as well as professional activities. Current research refers to this phenomenon as “the individuation of IT” (Baskerville, 2011). Many organizations however struggle to integrate these personal IT ecosystems into their enterprise system landscapes. The effects are manifold, but often negative. A poorly integrated personal IT ecosystem, for example, may lead to a decreased individual performance since the maintenance of several systems and devices is error-prone and leads to time consuming redundancies. In addition, also organizational performance suffers when important information is forgotten on personal devices and therefore never made available to other members of the organization. One negative example is organizational knowledge management (compare Alavi, 2011): on the one hand, knowledge-management is widely perceived as a possible solution to ease the effects of the demographic change by preventing the leak of expertise companies experience when older employees leave. On the other hand, current solutions seem ill prepared to integrate the personal IT ecosystem of especially younger employees into organizational knowledge-management, hindering a seamless flow of information back and forth (Hansen and von Oetinger, 2001). One obvious cause is the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the individual needs and preferences, e.g., tendency to hide information regarding the integration of the personal IT ecosystem into the enterprise system landscape. Furthermore, these individual needs and preferences must be aligned with organizational requirements, such as legal regulations or existing security policies. Further issues arise from the employed technology itself. The increasing diversity of available end-user devices and software services, but also increasing complex enterprise systems, asks for new approaches to establish an integrated IT landscape. The proposed research addresse

Assessing cloud development platforms - What Platform as a Service offers and what not

Cloud computing has rapidly become a computing paradigm of great interest to the research and practitioner community. In addition to the provisioning of cloud-based software services, a plethora of solutions for the development of these services in the cloud have emerged. Cloud-based development platforms, also known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) include a broad spectrum of elaborated application-level services. Architects and developers willing to exploit the advantages of this new technology for the software development process are confronted with a complex decision problem. Which PaaS characteristics are of specific importance for cloud-based development? What are major limitations negatively influencing the development process? In order to address these questions, we carried out a comprehensive case study. Nineteen developer groups comprising three master student developers each were asked to develop a cloud-based talent management software service. Each group was presented the same set of requirements, and randomly assigned one out of three pre-selected PaaS products. The groups were asked to record every development step during the four month project in a developer diary and also write a comprehensive project report. Within the developer diary as well as the final report particular topics had to be addressed, e.g. the time needed for the development of each requirement, helpful characteristics of the platform which supported efficient development of particular features, but also hindering characteristics or missing functionalities. The collected data was analyzed and a set of key characteristics for PaaS solutions was identified. Twelve functional and non-functional characteristics of PaaS solutions which were perceived as either helpful or hindering during the development project were extracted. For example, reusable platform objects were perceived as an important functional characteristic positively influencing the development process in the cloud. In contrast, limited DBMS functionalities were identified as a hindering characteristic by the developers. Our research is of specific relevance for practitioners dealing with development in the cloud; we provide guidelines for PaaS vendors and help architects and developers in the selection process for an appropriate PaaS solution

Design Science Research in Action - Anatomy of Success Critical Activities for Rigor and Relevance

Design Science Research (DSR) has reached a significant impact on scholar’s research work around the globe in the information systems domain. DSR is an important IS research paradigm for creating descriptive and prescriptive knowledge concerning the artificial construction of today’s reality in the interrelation between the social and the technological sub-system. Various prior research has decisively defined and structured DSR in order to derive rigorously relevant contributions in terms of frameworks and methodologies. This paper contributes to this discourse from a research in action point of view by investigating critical activities within the design science phases and when passing from one to the next DSR cycle. For that purpose we elaborate critical DSR activities and demonstrate their effective execution along four DSR in action examples to provide guidance and best practices for design science projects seeking for rigor and relevance

Generalized integrals of Macdonald and Gegenbauer functions

We compute bilinear integrals involving Macdonald and Gegenbauer functions. These integrals are convergent only for a limited range of parameters. However, when one uses generalized integrals they can be computed essentially without restricting the parameters. The generalized integral is a linear functional extending the standard integral to a certain class of functions involving finitely many homogeneous non-integrable terms at the edpoints of the interval. For generic values of parameters, generalized bilinear integrals of Macdonald and Gegenbauer functions can be obtained by analytic continuation from the region in which the integrals are convergent. In the case of integer parameters we obtain expressions with explicit additional terms related to an anomaly, namely the failure of the generalized integral to be scaling invariant.Comment: 38 page

Synthese und Evaluierung von Calixarenderivaten als Scavenger für V-Stoffe

Im Rahmen dieser Arbeit wurden verschiedene Calixarenderivate dargestellt und hinsichtlich ihrer Entgiftungseigenschaften für V-Stoffe getestet. Ziel war es, durch strukturelle Veränderungen eines bekannten Calix[4]arenderivats, dessen Scavengeraktivität zu verbessern. Dafür wurden nacheinander verschiedene Bereiche dieses Derivats verändert und untersucht wie sich diese einzelnen Modifiktationen auf die Entgiftungseigenschaften auswirken