The Art of Structuring

An argument can be made that the whole of modern computing, including information systems, depends on the discovery that knowledge, as in applied logic, can take on a machine form that guides action by the machine (see Hodges in Alan Turing: the enigma. Penguin Random House, London, 2012). Denning and Martell in Great principles of computing. MIT Press, Cambridge, MA (2015), in attempting to identify important principles that underpin computing as a whole, claim that we still have hardly come to grips with the implications of information (knowledge) becoming action in a machine. Thus, the aim of this speculative chapter is to explore knowledge-action structures in computing related disciplines. Approaches to knowledge-action structures reviewed include those from data and process modelling and from artificial intelligence. It can be seen that divergent ontological positions underlie different approaches. An open question remains. Can these different positions co-exist, as in Wittgenstein’s language games? Or is there a need for some unifying framework, as Russell and Norvig in Artificial intelligence: a modern approach. international edition (2002) argue is necessary in a demanding domain?

Humans structure the unknown in scientific endeavors and in design/development projects; they interact in social structures using the human ability to communicate meaningfully. These capabilities give humans the power to control our world. Recent technological advances in artificial intelligence (AI) prompt proponents to argue that they lead to utopias where intelligent machines exercise power over humans, control and restrict our freedom, and rule the world. This paper analyzes the human capability of structuring the unknown and argues that AI will never be able to develop sufficient capacity for the capability of structuring the unknown.

Digital technologies are deeply embedded in the social and material world as they are penetrating into products, services, and processes. The confluence of physical and digital materiality, their rapid development, and the emergence of combinatorial innovation pose new challenges for the Information Systems (IS) field. Inspired by Jörg Becker’s famous line “strukturieren, strukturieren, strukturieren” (“to structure, to structure, to structure”), which has influenced many generations of IS students in Münster, in this short essay I discuss how “structure” (the noun) and “to structure” (the verb) are reflected in our research on digital technologies and how they can help us identify some of the challenges involved. Specifically, I discuss research challenges related to (a) the structure of digital technologies, (b) the relationship between digital technologies and structure, and (c) the structures that emerge through the design of digital technologies.

The aim of this paper is to propose the structure of Business Informatics (BI) as an academic field. This target has been achieved by proposing that the BI knowledge structure (Fig. 1) is useful for the academic community of Management Information Systems (MIS) at large. This paradigm is considered and analysed in the wider environment of the BI ecosphere, where the interrelations between BI theory/knowledge, research, education and applications (Fig. 2) are included. Hopefully, this article will stimulate the academic interest of scholars and practitioners and enable discussions of the structure and content of the proposed original model.

Information systems are at the core of the digital transformation. To cope with the dynamics of new, emerging markets and ever changing requirements, it is often argued that agile approaches to software development are mandatory. Some even demand to develop information systems without conceptual models, because they were likely to be outdated even before the software is implemented. While such a proposal is not acceptable for serious reasons, conceptual modelling is indeed facing a remarkable challenge in times of change. On the one hand, economics demand for reuse and interoperability, hence, for stable references. On the other hand, freezing structures is likely to compromise a software system’s adaptability. Based on an analysis of this conflict and further challenges, it will be shown how languages for conceptual modelling can be designed to support both, the need for reference and the demand for change.

The successful implementation of projects in companies and other institutions is of existential importance. To measure the success of projects, project goals should be defined. This paper deals with the goal-oriented structuring of the elements of an evaluation model. To quantify the monetary goals, an instrument from investment theory is presented—the VOFI. First, it will be explained how a VOFI can be structured on a case-specific basis. Afterwards, it will be described how the results of a VOFI have to be integrated into a hierarchically higher evaluation model in which the non-monetary sub goals are also taken into account. The aim of this model is to confront the non-monetary benefits and the price for the competing alternatives in order to determine a satisfying price-performance ratio when deciding on a project.

Structuring reorganization, implementation, communication or education is a major challenge. Reference models can support all these tasks by providing a generic and customizable yet technology-independent and instantiable structure to organize and further texture future applications. Their benefit is undisputed. Yet, assessing reference models is difficult. We propose the GOAT criteria to assess the perfection of reference models from a more strategic perspective. To illustrate our criteria framework, we assess the reference models Retail-H and Common Data Model (CDM) side by side. The initial results indicate that our criteria can be used to make an initial high-level assessment of reference models for later detailed analyses. In our comparison, the Retail-H performed well in most categories, the CDM excelled in terms of transferability. This came at the price of genericity. While the Retail-H has proved to be durable over 20 years since its inception, the longevity of the Microsoft’s CDM remains to be seen.

Modern enterprises are under permanent pressure for change to cope with new competitors and integrate emerging technologies. These changes involve adaptation of processes, operations, architectures, value propositions, and the response to evolving market requirements—especially regarding the digitalization. Modelling methods are an established approach for the conceptual representation, design, analysis, and implementation of complex systems and have gained much attention in both, academia and industry. At the core of a modelling method is the metamodel as a formalized specification of the syntactic nature of the domain under consideration. The paper at hand amplifies the notion of metamodels toward “metamodels as a conceptual structure” and introduces semantic and syntactic operations applied to this structure. Based on recent advances in the field, this paper shows, how metamodels as a conceptual structure facilitate managing complexity in fast changing environments.

Successful innovation is the key to generate novel business model ideas. Current real-world challenges such as the deterioration of the natural environment require practitioners and academics alike to identify new ways of acting and behaving. Living the ‘virtues of German engineering’ in information systems research, we aim at supporting business model innovation and solving imminent challenges by developing purposeful IT artifacts. In this article, we report on three ongoing research projects and emerging software prototypes that assist business model innovation. First, to foster creativity during the development of new business model ideas and to increase rigorousness in Design Thinking, we implemented a prototype that enables a structured, traceable, and collaborative documentation of Design Thinking projects and recommends task-specific creativity techniques. Second, to support the construction and the analysis of business models, we present the GBM Editor that especially focuses on the reflection of sustainability. Third, to detail the business model, we illustrate the Cooperation Manager that allow planning service networks by focusing on inter-organizational tasks and information exchanges. For demonstrating the applicability and the dependencies of these tools, we draw on an illustrative scenario of electric vehicle battery second use.

Chatbots and virtual assistants, the Internet of Things and ‘always on’ mentality—these are just some of the trends keeping all of us busy. They also have a massive impact on customer services and thereby on companies like Arvato CRM Solutions (Arvato CRM), who delivers customer services for some of the best-known brands worldwide. To maintain and enhance its current position as market leader in the Customer Services BPO (Business Process Outsourcing) industry, Arvato CRM needs to further transform. Naturally, strategic direction has been defined, implementation follows and regular strategic reviews and adjustments take place. But the challenge is complex: the sheer size of the organization with more than 45.000 employees, providing global services in more than 25 countries at more than 100 locations to over 500 clients requires a highly structured approach to properly understand the current business and to plan for the future. This article describes how Arvato CRM utilizes Process Management methodologies and a reference model to face current and future challenges. It pays special attention to why a structured approach can go hand-in-hand with more speed and more agility, which are vital in today’s markets.

The recent progress of information and communication technology has led to a significant change in the business operations of many companies. More than ever before, operations are exposed to a continuous flow of incoming information such as online customer orders or price changes. As a consequence, the success of a company heavily depends on its capability to adapt its operations quickly and efficiently to newly arriving information. The capability to adapt is determined to a large extent by the ability to understand operations as dynamic decision problems and to manage them accordingly. Although dynamic decision problems occur in a large variety of different industries, they share one common structure. In this contribution we give examples of dynamic decision problems, unveil their common structure, and show that proper modeling is key to effective problem solution.

Information models have been an important research topic in information systems for decades, and reference modelling has been an important subfield since the 1990s at the latest. Reference models are propagated in particular for the documentation, selection and implementation of standard application systems. There are few empirical studies in information systems on the actual usage of information models in general and reference models in particular. This article is dedicated to the empirical studies on the use of reference models and draws critical arguments from the perspective of the software manufacturers and the application company using the model as to why reference application system models are not used in corporate practice. In reality, the hopeful claims of researchers have not been proven, so their statements are more assertive than substantiating, which is scientifically disappointing. Information systems should be less concerned with myths and more with reality and consider how reference modelling research needs to be adapted to the practice-oriented nature of the discipline.

Business information systems engineering has more than half a century of tradition in research and practice. Throughout these years, the object of investigation has remained the same: information systems. But this object has changed a lot over time. With the enhancements of platforms and technologies for the design and implementation of large software systems, the manageable size of information systems and their automation and integration was increasing. Automation refers to the share of tasks performed by machines. Integration is the enabling of holistic tasks through appropriate coupling of application systems.The basic tools for managing these challenges are models and modeling methods. They bridge the gap between platforms and technology on the one hand and the real world on the other. As platforms and technologies mature, modeling methods continue to evolve.In order to understand this evolutionary process, a framework supported by organizational theory is used. It is based on the concept of task, which is described from an internal and external perspective. The evolution takes the path from the inside to outside. While the internal perspective is oriented towards the platforms and technology, the external perspective is closer to the real world. Evolution begins with functional decomposition and ends preliminary with event-driven modeling.

Over the last decades, maturity models have gained popularity in both research and practice. While the growing number of maturity models demonstrates their potential, there seems to be a lack of structure in the development of these models and an unclear sense of quality of the resulting maturity models. The purpose of this paper is to analyse the continuing popularity of maturity modelling in more depth. The paper concludes that there clearly is a need for such a maturity model for maturity modelling (MM4MM). It provides some initial ideas for the design of such a model.

Digitalization and data-driven exploration call for increasingly multi-modal management approaches. We outline what we perceive as a multi-decade conceptualization journey from a business perspective: Having started with modelling functions, data stores and dataflows, having moved towards business process modelling, having expanded to modelling of value creation and value appropriation, now also business conceptualizations for purpose-driven, informed decision-making are needed. We argue that conceptual data models inappropriately capture the essence of how business stakeholders analyze, design and manage data-driven exploration. To overcome this gap, we discuss the potential of various proposals from different fields to “black box” data exploration. In conclusion we outline a data blackboxing research agenda that includes ontology and taxonomy design, the derivation of appropriate analysis and modelling methods/techniques, case analysis and pattern discovery.

Quality Management (QM) is of great importance to enterprises nowadays. Especially with respect to reputation, a proper QM can yield enormous benefits. Therefore, achieving a QM certification, e.g. with the ISO 9001:2015 certificate, helps to communicate the own, high quality standards to the customers. Although the ISO 9001, a well-known standard for QM, is strictly process-oriented as of the 2015-version—in contrast to the 2008-version, which focussed on the existence of a quality handbook—Business Process Management (BPM) is rarely seen as a perfect fit for QM. Therefore, we propose using the well-established BPM approach icebricks to facilitate an effective and efficient QM including its documentation. With the help of the icebricks process modelling tool, a complete ISO 9001 certification process can be implemented. Moreover, we show that there is added value that entails the pure process repositories created for documentation purposes, thus, such a certification is not done to no end and out of reputational reasons only.

“The work of an information scientist includes three kinds of tasks: the first one is structuring, the second one is structuring, and the third one is structuring” (Becker, Jörg, often). This wise statement that we have learned from Jörg Becker tells us that we can solve nearly any problem related to information systems through transforming it into a structured form—be it a conceptual model, a formula or an algorithm. Another maxim that we share with Jörg Becker is that it is very important to go skiing—both for leisure and for academia. It is obvious that we should bring both maxims together. Structuring skiing? How does that work? Well, we can do this by discovering the structure of ski resorts (first structuring), learn about the structure of typical routes of skiers (second “structuring”) and by providing structured statements on the future movement behaviour of skiers (third “structuring”). But why should we do this? In this article, we show you why, how it works and how we can benefit from it.

While, in the first machine age, physical power was automated, intellectual power is automated in the second machine age. This development has interesting implications for Jörg’s leitmotif “Strukturieren, Strukturieren, Strukturieren”. In this article, we add to this discussion in the context of structuring processes. Therefore, we first structure the discussion about robotic process automation. After that, we illustrate how robots can support the structuring of processes. Our article concludes with some general remarks on process automation.

This contribution discusses business process management. We explain what business process management is, why it is important and how it can be structured. We refer to our textbook Fundamentals of Business Process Management and present the lifecycle that it builds upon. Furthermore, we describe the six capability areas of business process management and a corresponding maturity model. We conclude with an outlook on how business process management might evolve in the future.

The paradigm change from the optimisation of individual operational functions to the optimisation of complete end-to-end processes has been driving the enormous success of business application software, especially ERP systems, since the 1990s. The topic has become the subject of increased interest recently as a result of the digital transformation of business models and processes in almost all industries. Process automation takes place in a number of organisational and technical waves. This article outlines more recent lines of development. After beginning with the traditional BPM approach, in which the priority is modelling business processes, I then proceed to discuss process mining, in which ongoing processes are tracked, analysed and improved. With operational performance support, the individual process instances are supported in real time through predictive analytics and online learning aids. The cutting-edge field of robotic process automation attempts to use robots and software to relieve the burden on process consultants. New infrastructure such as cloud computing and blockchain is having a significant effect on process management. The use of AI technology is becoming increasingly important in all applications. The lines of development of process automation are illustrated in Fig. 1, and this essay also follows the same structure.

Process models aim to structure behavior for a variety of reasons: discussion, analysis, improvement, implementation, and automation. Traditionally, process models were obtained through modeling and structure could be enforced, e.g., by streamlining or simplifying processes. However, process discovery techniques that start from the actual behavior shed new light on this. These techniques return process models that are either formal (precisely describing the possible behaviors) or informal (merely a “picture” not allowing for any form of formal reasoning). Both types of model aim to structure reality. However, reality is often very different and much more variable than expected by stakeholders. Process mining often reveals an “inconvenient truth” which provides the valuable insights needed to improve a wide variety of processes. This contribution, devoted to Jörg Becker’s 60th birthday, reflects on the notion of “structure” in a world where event data are omnipresent.

The authors look back on 20+ years of business process modelling (BPM) which is a core pillar of business operations today. The journey starts from a volume of collected papers which Jörg Becker and the first author jointly edited in 1996 and which was cited by Jens Lechtenbörger in his 1997 diploma thesis, and takes the reader to Nicolas Pflanzl’s dissertation in 2017, who studied the use of gamification to support BPM and which was co-supervised by one of Jörg Becker’s academic offsprings. The discussion sketches notations and methods which the 1996 volume already mentioned and which are still current today (e.g., EPCs and Petri nets), but also more recent developments (such as BPMN). In the context of Petri nets the authors elaborate on the Horus method, an approach for structuring and analysing the operations of an enterprise based on simple, yet formally precise computer science methods.

Even though judicial independence guaranteed by the German constitution is of great importance and judges emphasize that tight formal requirements for judicial decision-making collide with judicial independence, the efficiency principle also applies to Justice (principle of effective legal protection). The digitization of judicial communication requires structure: structuring in the sense of standardization of metadata in pleadings sent by lawyers to the courts, enabling the judges to read the data electronically and to work on the digital documents; structuring data concerning the time of delivery of documents simplifies the automatic implementation of data into the court files; structuring the content in certain kinds of litigation such as orders for payment or small claims procedures. In addition to the advantage of electronically reading and working on structured documents, structuring offers the opportunity in cross-border procedures to automatically translate documents into other official EU languages. Overcoming language barriers is a key advantage for enhancing the further development of the European area of freedom, security and justice.

Holography is known on the one hand as an optical technique to realize full three-dimensional images of objects, being as well versatile and beautiful. On the other hand, holography can also be employed for data storage, thereby allowing to implement novel and highly secure data encryption techniques. Combining three-dimensional storage and data encryption in a single hologram is especially suited for applications where delicate items need to be protected from forgery as luxury goods, counterfeit notes, or tax or customs declarations. It is this latter area of holographic document safety that attracts the interest and is a vital research field of physicists, information scientists and information systems scientists. In this contribution, I will describe pioneering work in this field of holographic security marking for international fraud protection.

Information systems are a key success factor for medical research and healthcare. Heterogeneous data models impede data exchange and integrated data analysis. In the domain of medicine, data structures are complex due to high number of diseases and related medical terminology. The objective of the Portal of Medical Data Models (MDM, https://medical-data-models.org ) is to foster sharing and standardization. As of 2018, MDM constitutes Europe’s largest collection of medical data models (n = 17697). Key principles are transparency, semantic annotation and multi-linguality. 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. ERCIS can play an important role in the further dissemination of the system on the European level.

In the past decade, many IS researchers focused on researching the phenomenon of Big Data. At the same time, the relevance of data protection gets more attention than ever before. In particular, since the enactment of the European General Data Protection Regulation in May 2018 Information Systems research should provide answers for protecting personal data. The article at hand presents a structuring framework for Big Data research outcome and the consideration of data protection. IS Researchers might use the framework in order to structure Big Data literature and to identify research gaps that should be addressed in the future.

Emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) show the potential to contribute significantly to the digitalization of supply chains. Nonetheless, the question which approaches from the field of AI are applied within supply chains as well as which supply chain problems or tasks are addressed with AI approaches has not been answered by scientific literature yet. Based on a structured literature review this paper aims at providing an answer to these questions. A special focus is given to the application areas for recognition approaches in supply chain execution, for which this paper provides an overview of those areas research is currently focusing upon.

Data itself is referred to as the driving force behind an advancing digital economy. Thus, a broad discussion on the “ownership” of data is in progress. Structuring the corresponding rights to data requires a legal approach to the relationship between data as such, information that can be contained in data, and data carriers. Since data is traded like tangible objects under the law of obligations, a corresponding assignment of data in rem may also be required in German civil law. Therefore, the creation of a property-like right de lege lata was considered with regard to the handling of data in criminal law. However, data law does not require a comprehensive restructuring in terms of general data ownership de lege ferenda as it is partly considered.

Textual data, for example in the form of e-mails, instant messages, or social media posts, is ubiquitous today. As textual data typically comes in unstructured formats and is often ambiguous in meaning, it is difficult to analyze it using computational tools. However, advances in machine learning and the increasing availability of training data make it now possible to extract useful knowledge from large amounts of unstructured textual data. In this chapter, we showcase the use of unsupervised machine learning algorithms and visualization techniques to bring structure to—and thereby learn from—more than 100,000 professional wine reviews. Something that could be useful, for example, when choosing suitable wines for the celebration of your 60th birthday.

The paper deals with the removal of unwanted comments from social networks and on-line portals. It is purely conceptual and discusses the following subproblems from a data-analytic point of view: What targets should be aimed at—and which not? How to extract the relevant information out of a comment, how to make it to the framework of supervised classification? Which ternary classifiers are suitable, how to measure their merits? First, it stresses the need to deal with the problem in sober linguistical constructs and advocates the juridical aspect as the peg on which to hang analysis. Secondly, the approach is in the spirit of sentiment analysis. As for the classification inherent in that approach, a multi-layer filter is suggested to overcome complexity, each layer specialised for detecting one special kind of evil. Thirdly, it discusses classification risks and suggests stability and transparency as subordinate selection criteria. Many authors in the field relate the questions raised here to the information retrieval problem. That idea is discussed as well. The paper’s structure corresponds to the above subproblems.

Social media became a mass media that is used by organizations, private persons, journalists, and US presidents. This opens up great potentials to share and disseminate information on different platforms and in various formats. At the beginning of this development some researchers expressed hope (and still do) that this could be a chance for useful public multi-directional communication between citizens and politicians as well as between consumers and companies. Higher transparency, consensus building, sharing of personal experiences are examples for positive expectations towards social media. At the same time, it is becoming obvious that negative effects such as the spreading of fake news and rumours or manipulation of people by social bots and echo chambers are serious challenges for organizations, people, and society. What can researchers do to contribute to this problem? We need to be able to collect and analyse communication in order to understand the underlying principles and to derive solutions that lower the dark sides of social media. Structuring social media data is one of the most important steps in this context in order to increase transparency and prevent misuse. This article explains what it actually is what we need to structure, why it is relevant to structure and how we can do it.

Customer behaviour has been regularly analysed on the background of different theories. However, when systemizing the various approaches it becomes apparent that the distribution of customer knowledge is consistently presumed to be in favour of the customer side. Yet, ongoing technological advancements—e.g. with the Internet of Things—enable the companies to track customer journeys in a direct and automated manner by collecting data at various touchpoints and thus, shifting the distribution of knowledge in favour of the supplying companies. On this basis suppliers construct dynamic buying profiles, which can ultimately detect latent preferences of which even the customer himself may not be aware. This approach, where the customer is tracked by the supplier on the basis of his digital footprint we may call “Homo Digitalis”, does not need a theoretical explanation. Instead, marketing tools are increasingly enrichened with Artificial Intelligence based applications, ultimately allowing marketing campaigns to be personalized and automated to an unprecedented manner. Consequently, this moves IT-people to a highly prominent position. We will discuss, if e.g. marketing questions lose their impact in the new world of the Homo Digitalis. Perhaps, Marketing and IT have to cooperate to accelerate new solutions. Answering these questions will depend on the people that have to work together following the motto: “Systems make it possible, people make it happen.”

This paper uses the organizational genetics metaphor as a vehicle to understand the essential role of information systems in organizations. As with biological organisms, we can think of organizational information as being encoded in genetic material. Organizationally this material contains information about the essential organizational structures. Information systems are increasingly the embodiment of an organization’s genetic material because of the widespread effects of digitalization in today’s society. This organizational genetic material not only has a role in encoding structural information, but also affects the inheritance of structure when organizations reproduce. We illustrate the principles of genetic material as structure information using the works of Jörg Becker.

Since their Ph.D. studies with Jörg Becker at the WWU Muenster, the authors of this article have been involved in designing and managing smart service systems. Smart service systems are value configurations of service providers and service customers that build upon utilizing smart products as boundary objects. They are socio-technical structures that are constituted by two main mechanisms: On the one hand, they can be designed and implemented in processes of (smart) service systems engineering. On the other hand, they emerge as social structures based on the actions performed by people involved in the co-creation of value. As we shall see in this article, both mechanisms are aligned with management principles that Jörg Becker has held dear for many years.

The literature has extensively debated the potential organizational benefits of IT resources. Researchers agree that IT resources generate value under the moderating actions of contextual factors related to organizational structures. Several studies on organizational benefits of IT resources addressed the value generation process. Fewer targeted the role of organizational structures in such process. By building over the empirical evidences of four cases of digital transformation processes occurred in four different organisations, this paper highlights some neglected organisational aspects that negatively affected the actual capability of exploiting organisational benefits of digital technologies

The current level of maintaining and developing the effectiveness of process stakeholders has become a technologically demanding task involving ever-increasing costs. The belief that the upcoming digital transformation (DT) will represent a panacea is misguided since DT requires fundamental re-education and a restructuring of all process environments and human factors. Regardless of the business sector, DT is expected to accelerate as technology advances; new entrants and new forms of business partnerships change all the rules of the current stream.

Existing IoT reference architectures specify system structures, but provide little guidance for the semantic foundations required to create and verify system functionality and quality (e.g. security, performance) attributes. Three types of semantics are investigated: (1) Flow Semantics, (2) Quality Semantics, and (3) Evolution Semantics. We propose that IoT architectures include prescriptive models and processes to support the analysis and design of flows, qualities, and evolutions in IoT applications. The goal is to develop engineering principles and practices for maintaining intellectual control in the development of IoT systems.

With the advent of social media, not only individuals and companies but also government institutions have started using these new ways of communication. Social media have raised hopes in serving as the Holy Grail to boosting the relationship between government and citizens. This has been attended by numerous recommendations from both practice and research regarding how governments should successfully leverage their social media activities. However, results show that success stories of governments using social media are still scarce. Therefore, it is crucial to critically evaluate success factors and to provide structured guidelines for governments’ behaviour on social media. In this paper, I use the categories ‘strategic embedding of social media’ and ‘effective interaction with citizens’ in order to structure these recommendations. This work is based on my Ph.D. thesis that Jörg has supervised.

In this contribution we structure the use of new voting technologies in elections in the Northern hemisphere in three areas—first which and how technology can be used, and second which motivational factors can be accounted for their use.

Today, the public sector needs to be able to quickly adapt to future developments in order to both obtain the ability to act and increase their competitiveness over labour and residents. In order to benefit from technological developments, municipalities should start to set their direction in time. One way of doing so can be to develop a digital strategy. Thus, our paper asks, “how can a digital strategy be structured in the public sector, especially for municipalities?” To answer our research question, we applied a multi-method approach. First, we use case studies, consisting of qualitative and quantitative content analysis, qualitative process analysis, expert interviews and an expert workshop, to conceptualise a structural framework for digital strategies for municipalities. Second, we take into account a survey of 145 municipalities in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW), Germany, to learn about the status quo regarding digital strategies in municipalities. We found that digital strategies can be structured by their Strategic Alignment, Strategic Formulation, Core Themes and Fields of Action. This insight allows us to recommend actions for municipalities on how to structure their future digital strategies.

This paper presents the current structure of banking regulation and banking supervision in Europe. We discuss three main challenges resulting from the specific structure of the European system. Firstly, with the integration of the European banking market, main supervisory tasks were conferred on the European Central Bank (ECB). In consequence, new conflicts of interest arise, because the functions of monetary policy and prudential supervision are no longer separated. Secondly, the prudential supervision by European authorities and national authorities might differ to a certain extent. Although this is reasonable with respect to the proportionality principle, it may affect the domestic competitive environment. Thirdly, the European level playing field is harmed by differences in the supervisory stringency among European countries. We conclude that there is still need for action, and a structural solution is not generally apparent. Instead, incentives need to be corrected to eliminate conflicts of interest and agency problems, in particular regarding implicit bail-out guarantees. The recent introduction of a bank recovery and resolution regime might be a first step in the right direction.

In response to the invitation to participate in the honorary publication to Jörg Becker, I am very pleased to share my perspective on the role that information systems play in structuring organizational attention. My contribution goes with great gratitude for the warm reception of the University of Minho in the ERCIS network; I am particularly grateful for the support I have always received from Jörg Becker and that has inspired me to dare more in my international endeavours. It is indeed true what Isaac Newton once said … we can only see further when we have the privilege of standing on the shoulders of giants!

Project management is a lot about structuring. Challenges in introducing new software especially in the field of digitalization are to address the needs of planning, budget and schedule adherence as well as involving the users in the development process. Classic project management is usually focused on following the plan and keeping the project in schedule and budget. Agile project management puts the user in the center and aims at fulfilling his needs. The University of Applied Sciences Münster has aligned its project management with the PRINCE2 standard. The introduction of an enterprise content management system started in 2017 as a new project. To fulfill the user’s needs and keep the project management standard it has been tailored to achieve the project goals by integrating agile stages. This adaptation is presented in this paper as an example of structured hybrid project management.

The act of structuring organizations for different purposes, perspectives and stakeholders in the form of conceptual modelling has a long tradition. Depending on the economic context, the type and focus, i.e. the what, why and how of these models has changed significantly over the past decades. From an initial focus on sound models capturing system structure and behaviour for experts, conceptual models have been used to comprehend, analyse and improve corporate performance, to capture and investigate the experiences of external stakeholders, in particular customers, and more recently to describe how to better deliver according to societal expectations. The requirements for conceptual modelling have been in particular accelerated due to new digital opportunities, but also increased digital literacy in the society. This article differentiates four essential stages in terms of requirements for conceptual modelling. The requirements of each stage remain relevant in today’s and tomorrow’s world and each stage still requires the attention of academic and professional model experts to ensure an ongoing ability to articulate what is needed.

Structures are meant to be rather long lasting and permanent; they should be simple and easy to manage. Networks—on the contrary—are usually, by definition, dynamic and complex. How can networks be given structure, and how can the best characteristics of structures be implemented in networks while, at the same time, not losing the best characteristics of networks? For a long time, the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) has been a testing ground and a platform for building a dynamic, novel network for innovation and new knowledge, which balances on the edge between over- and under-structuring. This article discusses the concepts of networks, structure and complexity and gives examples on how these interplay in the case of ERCIS.

The boundaries of the firm have been part of economic analysis since Ronald Coase’s seminal paper on the nature of the firm. Subsequently numerous theories and explanations of the boundaries have evolved. New information and communication technology are now changing these boundaries which become increasingly blurred. Boundaries have turned to be “bounding areas” and companies interact in multiple ways. Knowledge about where these bounding areas are and how to design them has become highly relevant for companies’ success. The article shows what determines the boundary areas and how they can be organized by applying existing theories of the firm like to this problem. These theories provide guidelines for the design and the management of the boundaries of the firm.

One of the key fields of digitalization at universities is the management of an ever increasing amount of digital research data. Based on several surveys amongst researchers, demands and knowledgeability on the subject are varying widely. Services for research data management and underlying infrastructures are called for and are a currently very actively discussed subject. To create demand oriented, future proof, scalable and financially and operationally sustainable infrastructures and services, a structured approach to demand assessment and infrastructure architecture is key. Based on user surveys and conceptual (technical) design workshops of university IT infrastructure providers starting in 2016, a consortium of five universities in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) has formed to pursue together an open source and joint operations approach for creating a multisite integrated storage and compute platform (primarily using open source/freeware community standards Ceph and OpenStack) as a research data infrastructure, providing the operational basis for the actual research data services and software (envisioned to be containerized or virtualized appliances). A joint funding proposal, set in the context of the German National Research Data Infrastructure Initiative (NFDI) has been submitted, aiming at the creation of this 33 Petabyte storage and 4,500 CPU core compute environment, with the joint operations team already having been formed. Additionally, tools for data management and curation shall be made available on this infrastructure. The development of these tools is progressing under the project title sciebo. RDS (Research Data Services), which aims at adding research data management workflows to the well-established sciebo sync and share cloud storage platform, which is already widely used for collaboration on research data and will, in the future, also be operated in an OpenStack/Ceph setting. With DFG providing funding for this development, the aim is for a wider adoption of these tools in the German research community. Workpackages within this project for empiric analysis of user demands have been designed to ensure that these research data services will find users beyond the project partners’ institutions.

During the software crisis of the 1960s, Dijkstra’s famous thesis “goto considered harmful’’ paved the way for structured programming of sequential computers. This short communication suggests that many current difficulties and challenges of parallel programming based on message passing are caused by poorly structured, pair-wise communication, which is a consequence of using low-level send-receive primitives. We argue that, like goto in sequential programs, send-receive should be avoided as far as possible. A viable alternative in the setting of message passing are collective operations, already present in MPI (Message Passing Interface). We dispute some widely held opinions about the apparent superiority of unstructured pair-wise communication over well-structured collective operations, and we present substantial theoretical and empirical evidence to the contrary in the context of the MPI framework.

Today, parallel programming is typically based on low-level frameworks such as MPI, OpenMP, and CUDA. Developing software on this level of abstraction is tedious, error-prone, and restricted to a specific hardware platform. Parallel programming can be considerably simplified but introducing more structure. Thus, we suggest providing predefined typical parallel-programming patterns. The user has to structure a parallel program clearly by composing these patterns in an easy way without having to know, how these patterns have been efficiently implemented in parallel on top of low-level frameworks. In this paper, we present the Muenster skeleton library (Muesli), which provides such a system of parallel programming patterns and hence enables structured parallel programming.