Bichler, Martin

Hess, Thomas

Krishnan, Ramayya

Loos, Peter

English

AIS Electronic Library (AISeL)

BISE – EDITORIALEmerging Research Areasin Business and InformationSystems EngineeringThe AuthorsProf. Dr. Martin Bichler ()Decision Sciences & SystemsDepartment of InformaticsTU MünchenBoltzmannstraße 385748 MunichGermanybichler@in.tum.deProf. Dr. Thomas HessInstitute for Information Systemsand New MediaLMU MunichLudwigstraße 2880539 MunichGermanythess@bwl.lmu.deProf. Ramayya Krishnan, Ph.D.Management Scienceand Information SystemsThe Heinz CollegeCarnegie Mellon University5000 Forbes AvenuePittsburgh, PA 15213-3890USArk2x@cmu.eduProf. Dr. Peter LoosIWi at DFKISaarland UniversityStuhlsatzenhausweg 366123 SaarbrückenGermanyloos@iwi.uni-sb.dePublished online: 2014-01-04This article is also available in Ger-man in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Bichler M,Hess T, Krishnan R, Loos P (2013)Aktuelle Forschungsfelder der Wirt-schaftsinformatik. WIRTSCHAFTSIN-FORMATIK. doi: 10.1007/s11576-013-0401-3.© Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden2014DOI 10.1007/s12599-013-0309-x“What is Business and Information Systems Engineering all about?”. “What are keyresearch questions BISE scholars are working on now and in the near future?”. Thesetypes of questions are being asked increasingly by younger colleagues and students.The BISE journal publishes research that examines problems in the design, imple-mentation, and management of information systems, as well as their impact on indi-viduals, organizations, industries or society. It provides a platform for established, butalso for evolving and new research streams at the intersection of management studies,economics, computer science, and information technology. Within this broad profile,there is a fairly established set of BISE sub-communities each of which has its own re-search topics and accepted methods and quality standards. Not many colleagues havean overview of ongoing research topics which are at the core of all the sub-communities.The objective of this special focus issue is to focus attention on new research topicsthat have emerged which are likely to become very influential in our research commu-nity and in business. Since BISE is technology driven, the context and source of theseresearch questions is the rapidly changing technological context enabled by the nearubiquitous adoption of the Internet in Society and by Business. Last year the BISE jour-nal, the Section “Information Systems” (Wirtschaftsinformatik, WKWI) of the GermanAcademic Association for Business Research, and the Special Interest Group “BusinessInformatics” (GI-FB Wirtschaftsinformatik) of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e. V. or-ganized this special focus issue to initiate a discussion in the BISE community on cur-rent and emerging research areas in BISE. The goal of this special focus issue was topublish forward-looking research notes on important topics and phenomena that arelikely to frame or expand an important research agenda in the next few years. Apartfrom this general goal, the special focus issue has dual purpose. First, it should pro-vide an overview of ongoing research streams in our community. These streams shouldalready have shown some initial results, but at the same time bear promise for futurehigh-impact results. Second, it should provide incentives for researchers to work to-gether and discuss topics of joint interest. Actually, most submissions were co-authoredby a larger number of authors working in a field.We were fortunate to receive 39 abstracts on our initial call for papers. The reviewsthroughout were provided by an outstanding set of national and international seniorscholars. A subset of the authors was invited for full paper submissions, where we be-lieved they meet the right level of abstraction and satisfy the requirements specified inthe call for papers. In two rounds of reviews, the selection was narrowed down to eightresearch notes which are published in this special focus issue. A small number of addi-tional research notes from this call for papers will appear in later issues of our journal.The papers published in this special focus issue span a variety of topics:“Information Systems for ‘Wicked Problems’ – Research at the Intersection of SocialMedia and Collective Intelligence” by Schoder et al. focus on Collective Intelligence.This stream of research analyzes how people and computers can be connected so thatcollectively they act more intelligently than individually. This is area has received sub-stantial attention in the recent years due to the wide-spread use of Wikipedia, YouTube,Twitter, or GitHub.“Shaping the Next Incarnation of Business Intelligence – Towards a Flexibly Gov-erned Network of Information Integration and Analysis Capabilities” by Felden et al.lay out a vision of business intelligence in which distributed data integration and analy-sis resources from heterogeneous sources can be brought together to provide organiza-tions with new sensing capabilities. The paper is based on a review of more than 1,000recent publications in this field.“Model-Based Decision Support in Manufacturing and Service Networks” by Mönchet al. describes new research topics in an established field of BISE: decision support sys-tems. These topics include integration issues taking into account the autonomy of theBusiness & Information Systems Engineering 1|2014 1BISE – EDITORIALdecision making entities in face of information asymmetry, the modeling of preferencesof the decision makers, efficiently determining robust solutions, and a reduction of thetime needed for model building and usage.“Energy Informatics – Current and Future Research Directions” by Goebel et al. dis-cusses research on (i) the increase of energy efficiency and (ii) on the efficient integra-tion of renewable sources of energy by making power systems smarter. Energy securityis arguably one of the key challenges for society and the article describes a frameworkhow BISE and related disciplines can help addressing this problem.“Evolutionary Business Information Systems – Perspectives and Challenges of anEmerging Class of Information Systems” by Neumann et al. describes challenges in ISengineering regarding the evolution of large business information systems. Many newtrends in software engineering concepts and information technology allow designingand developing systems which allow for an evolution based on changing needs of thevarious stakeholders.“The Research Field “Modeling Business Information Systems” – Current Challengesand Basic Points of a Future Research Agenda” by Strecker et al. provides an overview ofnew challenges in another established field of BISE research which had significant im-pact on practice: information systems modeling. The authors discuss new phenomenato be modeled, as well as new modeling languages and tools.“Business Models – An Information Systems Research Agenda” by Veit et al. in con-trast is again a rather new topic trying to understand underlying concepts of successfulbusiness models as a link between business strategy and processes. The authors discussbusiness models in IT industries, IT enabled or digital business models, and IT supportfor developing and managing business models.“User, Use & Utility Research – The Digital User as New Design Perspective in Busi-ness and Information Systems Engineering” by Uebernickel et al. discusses trends inBISE on a more strategic level. They emphasize the impact information systems nowa-days on all our lives every day and the role that the users can play in developing andinfluencing the shape of these information systems.Of course, a special focus issue like this cannot cover all relevant research streams inBISE. For a few established fields in BISE we did not get submissions. Some authorsmight just not have found time to submit an article, some proposals were rejected be-cause the reviewers felt that they are either to narrow or out of scope of this specialfocus issue. Nevertheless, the special focus issue covers a great variety of research topicsalso emphasizing the interdisciplinary nature of our field.In a broad community such as BISE, everybody will have favorites, like some propos-als and dislike others. Overall, however, we believe that the reviewing process led to afine set of research notes providing an up-to-date view of important research areas inour community. We hope that the articles will provide a basis for fruitful discussionsand that they provide ideas for others in selecting their next research projects. We wouldlike to thank the reviewers as well as all the contributors for their hard work. In addi-tion, we would like to thank Deutsche Bank, McKinsey&Company and SAP for theircontinued support for the journal and hope you will enjoy reading the special focusissue.2 Business & Information Systems Engineering 1|2014

Emerging Research Areas in Business and Information Systems Engineering

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Emerging Research Areas in Business and Information Systems Engineering

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