Conceptual Modeling in Law: An Interdisciplinary Research Agenda

The article describes how different approaches from the IS field of conceptual modeling should be transferred to the legal domain to enhance comprehensibility of legal regulations and contracts. It is further described how this in turn would benefit the IS discipline. The findings emphasize the importance of further interdisciplinary research on that topic. A research agenda that synthesizes the presented ideas is proposed based on a framework that structures the research field. Researchers from both disciplines, IS and Law, that are interested in this field should use the research agenda to position their research and to derive new and innovative research questions

In Search of Information Systems (Grand) Challenges - A Community of Inquirers Perspective

The paper reports on the results of a Delphi study with 143 information systems (IS) academics that was designed to explore what IS academics perceive to be the grand challenges of the IS discipline. The results provide evidence that the scholarly IS discipline is still much concerned with itself, for instance, in terms of its identity, relevance, foundational theory, or methodological pluralism – suggesting that the old debate on IS identity is not yet overcome. It thus cannot be claimed that the study identifies the grand challenges of the discipline – still it becomes noticeable that the academic community sees potentials for the IS discipline to have societal impact. A total of 21 challenges are identified, of which six challenges are categorized as “meta challenges for further developing the IS discipline” and the remaining 15 challenges are categorized as “IS research challenges” pertaining to socio-technical systems, IS infrastructures, society and ecology, as well as social well-being and affectivity. We provide a ranking of all challenges according to their relevance, potential impact, and possible time frame of realization. The results have some important implications for IS as a discipline as well as its prospective future societal role. It is hoped that through our study we can contribute to the important debate on the challenges of the academic IS discipline

THE RELATIONSHIP OF IS AND LAW - INSIGHTS INTO THE GERMAN ONLINE CAR REGISTRATION CASE

The mutual influence of Information Systems (IS) and law can be observed in projects of various industry sectors, but it seems to be prevalent in e-Government projects. Existing IS research in the field of e-Government suggests that the relationship between these two worlds has high potential for conflict and can be crucial for a project?s success. But an in-depth analysis of this specific relationship is still missing. We observed the German e-Government project ?online car registration? with a case study research approach. During the case analysis we developed a framework for the description and classification of the relationship of IS and law. The frameworks dimensions are the perceived influence direction (IS -\u3e Law, Law -\u3e IS, IS \u3c--\u3e Law), the perceived influence character (Positive, Negative, Ambivalent) and the perceived influence impact (Restrictive, Demanding, Enabling). We use this framework to structure the case and to derive project management recommendations on how to manage the relationship of IS and law in e-Government projects. The framework can further be used as a basis for a more in-depth systematic literature analysis or empirical case analyses

A METHOD FOR MANAGING IT-BASED BOUNDARY OBJECTS: DESIGN AND APPLICATION IN THE PUBLIC SECTOR

To achieve high-quality services offerings, public administrations need to cooperate with other institutions across organizational boundaries. The required cooperation may lead to a complex network including several of the thousands public administrations, enterprises and citizens on the different federal layers of a single country. Key challenge for achieving smooth end-to-end processes in such setting is a proper management of information exchanges at the interfaces between networked actors, as it is the exchange of information that glus together separated chunks of a process. This article conceptualizes the digital information assets residing at the interfaces between the different actors as IT-based boundaries objects. It further reports on a design research process that was initiated by the German Federal Ministry of Interior, which felt the need for a nationwide management method for those IT-based boundary objects. The achieved method extends the BOMOS framework as developed by the Dutch government and adopted by the European Commission. Notably, the method assists in designing and maintaining IT-based boundary objects while it takes horizontal and vertical division of competences in fed-eral legislative and administrative structures into account. The main contributions of this article are the description of the method, the demonstration of its application, and an evaluation of its utility

Data warehouse design and legal visualization – the applicability of H2 for reporting

The steady increase of regulations and its acceleration due to the financial crisis heavily affect the management of regulatory compliance. Regulations, such as Basel III and Solvency II particularly impact data warehouses and lead to many organizational and technical changes. From an IS perspective modeling techniques for data warehouse requirement elicitation help to manage conceptual requirements. From a legal perspective attempts to visualize regulatory requirements &ndash; so called legal visualization approaches &ndash; have been developed. This paper investigates whether a conceptual modeling technique for regulatory-driven data warehouse requirements is applicable for representing data warehouse requirements in a legal environment. Applying the modeling technique H2 for Reporting in three extensive modeling projects provides three contributions. First, evidence for the applicability of a modeling technique for regulatory-driven data warehouse requirements is given. Second, lessons learned for further modeling projects are provided. Third, a discussion towards a combined perspective of information modeling and legal visualization is presented.<br /

Integrating Regulatory Requirements into Information Systems Design and Implementation

Information systems for supporting collaborative activities (e.g., business process modeling tools, workflow management tools, or project management tools) should explicitly address regulatory requirements. Integrating a legal perspective into such information systems would contribute to a better legal compliance and a more effective collaboration. This paper introduces a meta-design for integrating regulations into the design and implementation of information systems. A prototypical implementation of the meta-design shows its general applicability