Studien - Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik

Studien
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik
Technische Universität München
ISSN 1612-2593
Nr. 13
Helmut Krcmar, Tilo Böhmann, Jan Marco
Leimeister, Petra Wolf, Holger Wittges
2 nd Workshop on Information Systems
and Services Sciences 2008
(2 nd WISSS 08)
Herausgeber:
Prof. Dr. H. Krcmar, Technische Universität München
Institut für Informatik, Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3, 85748 Garching b. München
Tel. (089) 289-19532, Fax: (089) 289-19533
http://www.winfobase.de
Garching, Juli 2008

Table of Contents
Panel 1
IT Governance & IT Controlling: A synthesis on the activities of
ensuring and validating the value contribution of information systems
Sonja Hecht, Stefanie Leimeister, Michael Schermann, Jörg Schmidl,
Uta Schubert, Andreas Schwertsik, Armin Sharafi 1
Panel 2
Innovation Communities
Ulrich Bretschneider, Michael Huber, Christoph Riedl 27
Panel 3
Developing Hybrid Products: Integrating Products and Services
Sebastian Esch, Jens Fähling, Felix Köbler, Philipp Langer 41
Panel 4
Technology Acceptance Research – current development and concerns
Mark Bilandzic, Uta Knebel, Daniela Weckenmann 57
Panel 5
Requirements Engineering, Prototyping and Evaluation in Information Systems Research
Marina Berkovich, Holger Hoffmann, Maximilian Pühler 65
Panel 6
Performance of Information System
Bögelsack, A.; Jehle, H.; Gradl, S.; Kienegger, H. 81
Panel 7
Workflow Management in Healthcare
Mauro, C.; Mayer, M.; Rathmayer, M.; Sunyaev, A. 91

IT Governance & IT Controlling: A synthesis on the activities of
ensuring and validating the value contribution of information
systems
Sonja Hecht, Stefanie Leimeister, Michael Schermann, Jörg Schmidl, Uta Schubert, Andreas
Schwertsik, Armin Sharafi
Abstract
Literature Review
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching
The objective of a Chief Information Officer is to ensure an effective support of the organizations’
business processes. Not surprisingly, IS researchers have produced a large body of knowledge on
these objectives. The goal of this paper is to make this knowledge base accessible and show
worthwhile avenues for subsequent research. We derive our guiding framework from the foundational
discussion on the contribution of information systems to organizations’ performance. We focus on the
relationship between business processes and information systems. Governing and controlling the use
of information systems are two important pivotal managerial activities influencing this relationship.
Consequently, we analyze the relevant journal literature from Information Systems, Management
Studies, and Accounting. Our review shows that despite a large body of knowledge, several research
opportunities exist with the potential of significant contributions towards an effective use of IS.
Introduction
Although information systems seem to be an ubiquitous aspect of organizing modern business
processes, the role of information technology in today’s organizations is still subject to debate among
researchers and practitioners (Krcmar 2005). For instance, researchers have coined the term
productivity paradox to denote the still ongoing discussion about the impact of information systems to
the overall performance of the organization (Brynjolfsson 1996, 1998). Furthermore, the potential of
information technology for strategic impact has been questioned. The argument goes that with its
ubiquity information technology has become a commodity (Carr 2003, 2005a, 2005b). Despite of this,
the effective use of information systems has dramatically changed the way business processes are
being executed and innovative information technology has enabled completely new ways of doing
business. Overall, it seems what largely determines the contribution of information systems to the
overall performance of the organization is the effectiveness and efficiency of the way information
systems are being used in the organization – the information management (Weill/Ross 2004).
IS researchers have produced a large body of knowledge on the task of ensuring and validating the
value contribution of information systems. However, different research designs, subtly different
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esearch foci combined with a heterogeneous terminology result in a poor map to this knowledge base.
Consequently, the goal of this paper is to make this knowledge base accessible and show worthwhile
avenues for subsequent research. Therefore, we have conducted a literature review and discuss its
implications in this paper.
We have organized the literature review as follows:
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1. We selected the literature databases EBSCO, Science direct, and Palgrave to span the search
area for the literature review.
2. We searched in title, abstracts, and keywords of journals for keywords, e.g. “IT governance”,
“IT Controlling”.
3. Having the results, we focused on journals which are listed in the publications reference of
the WKWI.
4. Next, we read the abstracts of the resulting 145 articles. Articles which were clearly outside
the scope of our review were excluded from further consideration. 56 articles were analyzed
in-depth
5. We used Google scholar to validate our resulting set of article. Furthermore, some authors
already knew relevant articles that matched the scope of the review. We extended that
literature base with seminal books and book chapters.
Overall, a systematic and comprehensive approach was chosen to substantiate the following
discussion.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. In the next section, we develop a theoretical
framework to guide the analysis of the identified literature. The framework suggests considering three
main managerial activities. We first discuss related research on how to organize the support for
business processes as the core activity of information management. Second, we analyze the body of
knowledge on IT governance to systematize the results on how to ensure an effective organization of
activities in information management. Third, we review the literature on IT Controlling to discuss the
question of how to validate the contribution of information management. In the closing section, we
discuss the implications of our synthesis for further research activities.
Theoretical framework
In the following, we synthesize the theoretical discussion on the contribution of information systems
to the overall performance of an organization. The result is a theoretical framework that guides our
review and analysis of the relevant literature (see Figure 1).
Determining the contribution of information systems requires first to analyze the potential effects of
information systems on the process of value creation. Davenport (1992) shows that information
technology has the potential to enhance the productivity of the organization, e.g., by automating
certain activities. However, Brynjolfsson (1998) shows that no direct effect of the use of information
systems on the overall productivity of the organization could be substantiated (see the dashed line in
between information management and value creation in Figure 1). Critical appraisal of this so-called
productivity paradox (Brynjolfsson 1998) put the focus on the transformational effects of information
systems. For instance, automating activities does not have any direct value contributions, but the
affected and changed business process has (Picot et al. 2003). Not surprisingly, this transformational
effect between information systems and value creation is in the focus of a large research stream in IS

esearch. Ward and Elvin (1999) show that linking the strategic objectives with the enabling
functionalities of the information systems is vital for realizing the transformational potentials of
information systems. These strategic objectives are determined from the organizational strategy
(Mintzberg 1991; Porter 1991; Quinn/Mintzberg 1991). In sum, an alignment between the
organizational strategy and the business processes is necessary to create economic value (Porter
1991).
Figure 1: Theoretical framework (adapted from Junginger (2004)
Clearly, a similar alignment is necessary between the organizational strategy and the information
management (Henderson/Venkatraman 1999). However, the transformational role of information
technology also enables new strategic initiatives, e.g. electronic commerce (Piccoli/Ives 2004).
Figure 1 shows that the contribution of information systems depends on a threefold fit. First, the
information manager has to align his resources with the objectives of the organizational strategy.
However, organizations’ information systems may serve a source for strategic initiatives. Second, the
information management contributes to the efficiency and effectiveness of the business processes by
providing adequate information services. Third, the internal organization of the information
management determines the realization of the technological potentials (Brown/Grant 2005;
Raghupathi 2007).
The objective of information management is to realize this fit and manage the transformation of the IT
organization towards this fit, respectively. As Figure 1 shows, the tasks of managing the relationship
between the organizational strategy and the information management are subsumed under the term IT
governance. IT governance is generally concerned with “specifying the decision rights and
accountability framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT“ (Weill 2002). On the other
hand, activities in the realm of IT Controlling are concerned with gathering and analyzing data on the
contributions of the information management to inform decision makers in information management
and the organization. The third vital foundation is the relation between the capabilities and services of
information management and business processes of the organization. According to Krcmar (2005)
three main activities determine the structure of information management. First, the information
management strategy sets the objectives. Based on these objectives, the structure of service delivery
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has to be determined. Here, an important aspect is the sourcing of IT resources (Dibbern et al. 2004).
Third, the processes of service delivery need to be set up (Great Britain Office of Government
Commerce 2002).
In the following sections we review and synthesize the relevant literature with regard to these aspects
of ensuring and validating the economic value contribution of information systems.
Organizing the value contribution: A process-oriented view
Definition of business process
In order to reach a company’s strategic and operative goals, its actions need to be organized in what is
generally called business processes. To get a better understanding of this often very broadly used term
we first review different definitions of business processes. A fundamental basis for the understanding
of business processes is given by the more general definition of a process according to the ISO
organization which defines a process as a set of interrelated activities that transform input into results.
Interpreting the results of a process as the benefit of the customer, Hammer and Champy (1994)
define a business process as a set of activities, which require one or more inputs to create some value
for the customer. In a similar way, Jacobson et. al (1994) focus on the property of creating value for a
customer to define the term business process by stating ”[...] a business process is the set of internal
activities performed to serve a customer. The purpose of each business process is to offer each
customer the right product or service, with a high degree of performance measured against cost,
longevity, service and quality”. Therefore the value creation for a customer is central to their
definitions. On the other hand, a business process according to Scheer can be interpreted as a chain of
events and functions, where events trigger functions (Scheer 1994). He emphasizes the temporal or
logical order of actions that is intrinsic to business processes, which is also evident when considering
the modeling notation he and his fellow researchers developed - the event-driven process-chains
(Keller et al. 1992). Although his focus is on the operational character of a business process, he also
acknowledges the need to take into account “receiver” of the business process execution’s outcome,
i.e. the customer (Scheer 1998). Talwar (1993) also focuses on the sequence of activities and the
specified outcome by stating that a business process is a “sequence of pre-defined activities executed
to achieve a pre-specified type or range of outcomes” Finally, Davenport also emphasises the order of
events by stating “a process is thus a specific ordering of work activities across time and place, with a
beginning, an end, and clearly identified inputs and outputs: a structure for action” (Davenport 1992).
Synthesizing the different authors’ views of business processes, the qualities of a business process are
(1) focus on value creation for an internal or external customer, (2) ordering or sequence of activities,
(3) processing of inputs to reach a defined output.
As the ability of a company to contribute to the market and therefore to increase its value, depends on
the way business is being done, especially in comparison to its competitors, the management and
alignment of its processes is of uttermost importance.
Related research on business processes
After having defined what constitutes a business process, we now want to shed light on the
importance of the enactment of business processes in a company’s environment. In today’s
competitive environment, a company needs to draw its attention to manage its processes in every stage
of the processes’ lifecycle. To focus on each phase of the lifecycle we chose to structure the identified
articles according to the PDCA model– plan, do, check, act – by Deming (1982), that can be used to
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illustrate the lifecycle of a business process. Additionally we shortly illustrate general thoughts that
influence business processes, but do not correspond to exactly one phase.
Figure 1: The plan – do – check – act cycle according to Deming (Source: own creation)
The “plan” phase
Act
Check
In its initial phase the PDCA cycle addresses the need to model and design a process. Accordingly we
now review some of the recent articles in renowned journals that deal with the aspect of how to model
and design a business process.
Having in mind the complexity of enacting a business process with the means of information
technology it makes sense to rely on best practices early on. This especially applies when putting
thought into the maintainability of the processes and its supporting infrastructure i.e. when designing a
process that heavily relies on IT. ITIL is a collection of best practices for IT service support and
delivery that facilitates the application of IT as a service for business processes (ITIL 2008). Its ability
to align the business and the IT part of a company is therefore an interesting topic to study in an early
phase of a process lifecycle. Kashanchi and Toland specifically research the ability of ITIL to align
the business and IT parts of a company using the Strategic Alignment Model
(Henderson/Venkatraman 1999) as a basis (Kashanchi/Toland 2006, S. 341). By conducting three case
studies they derive the conclusion, that the adoption of ITIL can have significant positive influence on
how the business part of a company interacts with IT to archive strategic and competitive advantage.
Another dimension in modeling processes is taking into account the social perspective, i.e. the attitude
of persons that are involved in the decisions for and the use of information systems in a business
process. This is especially true in the information systems discipline that focuses on the interaction
between computer systems and social behaviour. To this end, Wu investigated the determinates of
senior management’s quite frequent reluctance to use information technology as an enabler and source
of innovation for business process reengineering and not only as a means for automation (Wu 2003).
To reach an understanding he utilizes the theory of reasoned action and conducted a three step
approach. Wu could show that the treatment had significant effect and the behavioural determinates
changed to a much more favourable outcome, showing that remedial actions have a relatively
effective influence on behaviour. Thus when designing processes it seems to be imperative to
sufficiently provide senior management with the necessary information.
Finally when planning IT supported business processes, nowadays the collaboration with other entities
in a company’s value creation chain needs to be considered. Therefore a central conclusion of
Schubert (2007, 188) is that in the business environment of today “where customers expect fast and
just-in-time delivery, business processes need to be electronically supported”. Furthermore she points
out that for so called networked or virtual organizations, connections between information systems are
Plan
Do
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crucial. “For these companies which are jointly producing and offering products or services, a
common electronic infrastructure where business processes are smoothly supported among the
partners, is imperative to the generation of business value. Whereas virtual organizations show how
far an electronic integration among companies can go, traditional companies are also confronted with
the same requirements: faster and cheaper processes combined with higher data quality.” (Schubert
2007). To achieve the aim of electronic integration business interoperability plays a major role.
Legner and Wende define this interoperability as “the organizational and operational ability of an
enterprise to cooperate with its business partners and to efficiently establish, conduct and develop ITsupported
business relationships with the objective to create value.” (Legner/Wende 2006)
The “do”-phase
After having put some thought into how the processes should look like and how to implement them,
enabling their enactment is the consequent next step in the PDCA model. Since a company’s
processes ought to be aligned with and supported by its available IT resources, we first focus our
attention on the support of IT on the execution of business processes. After that we address typical
issues that arise in collaborations. The determination which kind of supportive IT infrastructure to use,
in order to best support the current but also the anticipated future needs, is a challenge that today’s
companies need to address. The adaptation of WebServices as enablers of a new generation of
collaborative service provision has been the topic of choice for many researchers recently. This is why
we now review a selection of articles that deal with this topic in the following.
The strong link between the WebServices technology and the process management discipline is
pointed out by Zhao and Cheng (2005). They stressed that according to the number of publications,
WebServices are increasingly being researched, yet process management research is inclining as well.
Considering the potentials of process-driven application integration and its implementation
opportunities offered by WebServices, they deem the two research streams as highly correlated.
Consequently they state three areas of research that are on the natural intersection of both approaches
namely the extension of the technical foundation e.g. research giving rise to new protocols for QoS,
security, etc., secondly architecture and application development, e.g. how to combine services and
how to orchestrate them and finally strategic analysis, e.g. how to decide which services should be
combined and which should not.
In accordance to the close relationship stated by Zhao and Cheng, Moitra and Ganesh investigate one
special aspect of this relationship – the ability of the WebServices technology (WS) to contribute to a
flexible, business process (BP) oriented IT infrastructure and its impact on organizational adaptation
(Moitra/Ganesh 2005). They derive some propositions that indicate that firm adaptation, flexible
business processes and WebServices are each related to one another and that dynamic environments
catalyse the relation of flexible business processes and WebServices. Also their results give rise to the
relation of flexible BP / WS and ability to integrate new IT systems and BP respectively. They
interpret their work as an augmentation of the resource based view of the firm (RBV) and the dynamic
capabilities approach.
Yet a more specific aspect of the interaction between business processes – dealing with the problem of
semantic differences in business processes - is addressed in (Brockmans et al. 2006). The authors
illustrate that whenever two or more partners of a value chain need to collaborate, it is essential that
the understanding of terms that are used in the context of the business processes are aligned, e.g. that
synonyms and homonyms are dealt with accordingly. To reach this goal, the authors suggest using a
background ontology which is modelled in the web ontology language OWL and business processes
that have been transformed to Petri nets. These artefacts are then used to compute the similarity
between the two or more relevant Petri nets and entities that are above a defined threshold value are
deemed to represent the same elements, e.g. to be synonyms. This way the authors hope to improve
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the alignment of different business processes and to facilitate the interoperability of cross-company
business processes.
The “check” phase
Information systems not only support a company by facilitating the enactment of business processes
and by this means increasing productivity, but they also offer a way for analyzing the daily actions of
a company by allowing for a monitoring that enables the evaluation of the processes and their results.
One aspect of the check phase is to determine the conformance of daily processes with their expected
executions. To this end, the technique of process mining can be used. Linking back to the “plan”
phase of the PDCA model that we build upon for structuring our literature review, the article by
Rozinat and van der Aalst addresses the conformance testing of a business processes model and its
enactment in real life (Rozinat/Aalst 2008; Rozinat/van der Aalst 2006). They build upon previous
work in the area of process mining as described in e.g. (van der Aalst et al. 2004). The principal idea
is to find process models by investigating logs of process aware information systems – any system
that supports some notion of process like workflow management systems, web servers or even
groupware systems. By analyzing the execution paths of different enactments they reconstruct a
process model, which then can be compared to the modelled process thus checking the conformance
of the real life enactment to the intended enactment patterns.
The “act” phase
Companies often face steadily changing challenges in dealing with their daily operations to satisfy
their stakeholders. Consequently it is often necessary to change the way business is done, i.e. it is
necessary to adopt a company’s business processes. Business Process Reengineering (BPR) has
become a quite popular tool for coping with changing business processes, that deals with the analysis
and design of processes and the corresponding workflows between and within organizations
(Davenport 1992; Davenport/Short 1990). Attaran notes that the term reengineering has “first
appeared in the information technology (IT) field and [having] evolved into a broader change process.
The aim of this radical improvement approach is quick and substantial gains in organizational
performance by redesigning the core business process.” (Attaran 2004). This is in accordance to
Hammer and Champy, who first considered IT as the key enabler of BPR.
Nevertheless many existing IT infrastructures are not very well suited for changing demands from the
business processes they support. According to Aier and Schönherr (2006) mainly large enterprises
have established complex and heterogeneous IT infrastructures that evolved over time
(Aier/Schönherr 2006). Considering the background of new requirements replacing or reconstructing
these complex systems cannot be considered as being realistic. Therefore the integration and
interoperability of these infrastructures is an ongoing important topic. They describe the enterprise
architecture as being composed of two columns: the organization architecture which covers all non
technical elements and the IT architecture that contains all technical components (Aier/Schönherr
2006) . Having this in mind, it comes out clear that there is a strong relation between BPR and IT.
Attaran sees them as “natural partners”, whose “relationships have not been fully explored” yet.
“Working together, BPR and IT have the potential to create more flexible, team-oriented,
coordinative, and communication-based work capability. IT capabilities should support business
processes, and business processes should be in terms of the capabilities IT can provide.” (Attaran
2004). Also Henkel et al.agree that “Adding technical constraints to the design process means that the
designed executable process needs to be aligned with existing software services.” (Henkel et al. 2004).
They identified a major difference in the process design from a business perspective and from a
technical perspective. The focus of the first is to solve problems that are expressed and in the second the
aim is to leverage business support (Henkel et al. 2004). Wu considers IT as “both a strategic catalyst
and enabler of process reengineering.” He summarizes that “unlike automation, reengineering is about
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innovation and it also requires recognition of the new, unfamiliar capabilities of IT for rethinking
business process instead of its familiar ones. Many organizations are beginning to recognize the
importance of IT strategy integration in process reengineering.” (Wu 2003).
A practical example of the application of BPR is illustrated by Kobayashi, Tamaki and Komoda.
Building upon the use case of fast adaptation of a supply-chain-management (SCM) process they
argue that adaptation and thus process redesign in the SCM context consists of two steps – (re-
)designing a business process itself and (re-)design of its supporting information system (Kobayashi et
al. 2003). Therefore their proposed approach consists of two major steps: modelling the infrastructure
and implementing it in a second step. Modelling is done hierarchically according to importance for the
main goal (SCM improvement in their case), utilizing templates for the more important and also
generic processes. Having defined the business process, now the data interfaces are modelled. In the
implementation part, they propose to use a workflow that triggers as-is-processes and legacy systems
by making use of adapters and thereby effectively promoting an EAI approach. Summing up their
approach they propose a development process, that incorporates design phase (split into business and
system design) and the implementation and that focuses on reuse where feasible. According to their
case study in one company, their approach reduces the necessary time and effort for a change in the
SCM context to one third.
General considerations for business processes
In an effort to categorize processes, Schubert builds upon the Porter taxonomy to define two types of
business processes: primary processes which are “activities connected to value creation (e.g.
procurement, production, sales)” and supporting (or secondary) processes that are “activities which
support the operation of a company (e.g. accounting, finance, knowledge management).” (Schubert
2007). Beyond that she emphasises that “[…] a company which wishes to offer excellent performance
must draw appropriate business processes from its core competences. These business processes should
be organised in such a way that the desired differentiating factors, when measured against the
competitor’s performance, can be achieved.”(Schubert 2007). Henkel, Zdravkovic and Johannesson
claim that organizations should design executable processes which “enable individual services to be
composed to support new, complex business interactions. When designing executable processes,
consideration must be paid to both business requirements, and the technical context that the process
should be executed in”(Henkel et al. 2004).
Explicitly considering the interdependencies between IT and business strategy, Kashanchi and Toland
(2006, S. 340) deem it obvious that “organizations are investing in IT to achieve competitive
advantage as well as profit. They have realized that by only investing in IT applications they cannot
attain sustainable competitive advantage. However, to obtain that advantage they need to utilize IT
functionality on a continuous basis” which means aligning IT and business strategy. The alignment
gap between IT and business strategy is a critical issue as it can result in investing heavily in IT
systems that do not meet business needs. “IT needs to be designed so that it has the flexibility to
develop in new directions alongside business strategy” (Kashanchi/Toland 2006). Schubert (2007)
claims “business processes and interoperability can be optimized through the use of business
software” to reach process excellence (Schubert 2007). Nevertheless ERP systems are primarily used
for supporting activities. She identified two different perceptions of IT. One faction believes, “[…]
that IT has a particular potential in achieving competitive advantage. The other faction takes the view
that the diffusion process of IT is now so advanced that it has already become a so-called
‘Commodity’ or ‘Utility’” (Schubert 2007). Taking a look on software services Henkel, Zdravkovic
and Johannesson point out, that technical constraint can influence the realization of business
processes. However properly designed, “executable processes can be used to closely support business
processes by the integration of existing software services” (Henkel et al. 2004).
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Ensuring the value contribution: IT Governance
Overview
For decades, every now and then spectacular failures of large information technology investments
have been reported such as e.g. major enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems initiatives that were
never completed or successfully implemented (Weill 2002). On the other hand, some companies
constantly achieve above industry returns and success with regard to their IT investments. These
contradictory reports lead researchers as well as IT practitioners to the conclusion that the IT
performance of firms must be somehow related to good IT governance, i.e. an effective and efficient
management of IT-related decisions (Brown/Grant 2005; IT Governance Institute 2005; Weill/Ross
2004). As IT has become more important and pervasive, companies face the challenge to manage and
control IT to ensure that value is created (Weill 2002; Weill/Ross 2004). IT governance has thus
gained increased attention in the general IT strategy and management research stream (Meyer et al.
2003) and is another essential element in IT and business alignment (Brown/Grant 2005; Luftman et
al. 2006, S. 31). According to Weill and Ross who are among the most prominent researchers in this
research stream, IT governance is defined as “specifying the decision rights and accountability
framework to encourage desirable behavior in the use of IT” (Weill/Ross 2004). In contrast, the IT
Governance Institute expands the definition to include underpinning mechanisms: “… the leadership
and organisational structures and processes that ensure that the organisation’s IT sustains and
extends the organisation’s strategies and objectives” (o.V. 2003). To some extent, IT governance is
similar to the governance of other management areas, such as the financial management. In general,
firms encourage particular desirable behavior that exploit and reinforce human, systems, and
intangible assets that comprise their core competency in order to achieve their goals (Raghupathi
2007; Rau 2004; Weill 2002).
In general, four critical domains with key decisions for IT can be identified in the IT governance
domain (Weill 2002):
1. IT principles: they are high-level statements about how IT is used in a company. These
principles capture the essence of a firm’s future direction and which role IT plays in this
context (Broadbent/Weill 1997; Davenport et al. 1989)
2. IT infrastructure strategies: they relate to shared and standard IT services including the
network, help desk, customer data, and applications (Weill 2002)
3. IT architecture: the architecture is a set of policies and rules that govern the use of IT and
includes standards and guidelines for technology, use of data, design of application as well as
IT-related processes (Weill 2002)
4. IT investment and prioritization: these issues cover the whole decision process of where IT
investments should be focused.
According to the IT governance institute, there are five areas that IT governance should focus on with
regard to key domains introduced above (o.V. 2003):
1. Strategic alignment: linking business and IT so they work harmoniously together
(Brown/Grant 2005; o.V. 2003)
2. Value delivery: concentrating on optimizing expenses and proving the value of IT
(Raghupathi 2007)
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3. Risk management: Instituting a formal risk framework that gives some rigor how IT
measures, accepts and manages risk, as well as reporting on what IT is managing in terms of
risk (March/Shapira 1987; Raghupathi 2007; Smallman 1999)
4. Resource management: optimizing knowledge and infrastructure (IT personnel, capabilities,
and infrastructure assets)
5. Performance measures: tracking project delivery and monitoring IT services
With regard to the key areas mentioned above, one prevailing issue has dominated research for
decades, long before more recent topics such as enterprise architecture management have come up as
key drivers of IT governance: This issue is concerned with the general decision of a firm on how to
provide IT for the organization and who should provide it. The term for these decision and
management issues has been coined IT/IS (out-)sourcing. Since IT governance is a very widespread
area of information management, for the purpose of this paper, only one aspect of IT governance is
chosen to be investigated in greater detail. This aspect is IS outsourcing which will be described in the
next chapter.
IS Outsourcing
The generic notion of outsourcing refers to a very general decision of an organization whether to make
or buy certain products, services or parts thereof (Loh/Venkatraman 1992a, S. 9, 1992b, S. 336). The
business practice of making arrangements with an external entity for the provision of goods or
services to supplement or replace internal efforts has been around for centuries (Dibbern et al. 2004).
The growth of the worldwide IS outsourcing market can be attributed to two primary phenomena
(Lacity/Willcocks 2001). First, the increased interest in IS outsourcing is mainly a consequence of a
shift in business strategy. Many companies have abandoned their diversification strategies to focus on
core competencies that the organization does better than its competitors. As a result of this focus
strategy, information systems came under scrutiny. Company executives often consider the IS
function as a non-core activity with the underlying belief that IT providers have economies of scale
and technical expertise to provide IS services more efficiently than internal IS departments. Second,
the increase in outsourcing is a consequence of the unclear value delivered by IS. In many companies,
IS is regarded as an overhead and (essential) cost factor. Thus, the refocus to core competencies and
the perception of IS as a cost burden prompt many companies to engage in a variety of outsourcing
arrangements (Dibbern et al. 2004).
Multidimensionality of outsourcing
Definitions of information systems outsourcing abound with little consistency or agreement in sight
(Willcocks et al. 2007). Precise definitions of IS outsourcing differ in the IS literature (Glass 1996).
The label outsourcing has been applied to “everything from use of contract programmers to third party
facilities management” (Dibbern et al. 2004). The simplest definition of outsourcing is the purchase of
goods or services that were previously provided internally (Lacity/Hirschheim 1993a). Information
systems outsourcing thus could be viewed as the purchase of information technology services
previously provided internally (Sargent 2006, S. 280). A more sophisticated and wide-spread
definition of IS outsourcing is provided by Kern and Willcocks (Kern/Willcocks 2001) who
understand information technology outsourcing as “the handing over to a third party of the
management and operation of an organization’s IT assets and activities” (p. 1). For the purpose of this
paper, we will use this definition as the working definition of IT outsourcing.

Areas or objects of outsourcing include the whole range of IT activities and have also changed over
the decades. Outsourcing originated from the professional services and facilities management in the
financial and operation support (Lee et al. 2003). To date, outsourcing areas are generally
differentiated in hardware, software, and processes (Lee/Kim 1999).
As the definition of IS outsourcing appears to be somewhat blurry, so are the various forms and
arrangements of outsourcing that have evolved in the last decades. The multidimensionality of
outsourcing has been tried to be captured by various authors, such as e.g. (Lacity/Hirschheim 1993b),
(Millar 1994), (Wibbelsman/Maiero 1994), (Lacity et al. 1995), (Willcocks/Kern 1998),
(Lacity/Willcocks 2001), (Lee/Kim 1999), and (de Looff 1998). They tried to build up classifications
of sourcing options and characteristics. Their approaches to classify different outsourcing
arrangements demonstrate on the one hand the manifoldness of the outsourcing field and the varieties
to carry out an outsourcing venture. On the other hand, it clearly shows the difficulties to
systematically depict different options along standardized categories or criteria. Most authors only
focus on one or two specific aspects, if at all. While Lacity and Hirschheim (1993a) differentiate
outsourcing arrangements by the vendor involvement and scope of outsourcing, Millar (1994) focused
on the outsourcing degree as well as strategic aspects. Wibbelsman and Maiero (1994) instead point
out the multidimensionality and describe a continuum of outsourcing options with regard to the
involvement of external supply. Lacity and Hirschheim (1995) offer in a later approach sourcing
decision options distinguished by the degree of external supply. Willcocks and Lacity
(Lacity/Willcocks 2001; Willcocks/Lacity 1998) do not introduce categories, but rather describe
current “trends of sourcing practices”. Another quite practice-oriented distinction is put forward by
Lee (1999) addressing the ownership of the resources or the transfer of assets. At last, de Looff
(1998) attempts to systematically depict IS functions along their functional, analytical, and temporal
character.
What adds to the jumble of categorization efforts is the fact that the use of certain outsourcing options
is not clearly specified and outsourcing researchers have not standardized on definition of outsourcing
arrangements. Willcocks and Lacity (Lacity/Willcocks 2001; Willcocks/Kern 1998), for example,
define the option “value-added outsourcing” as combining the strengths of both outsourcing parties in
order to market new products and services. In contrast, Klepper and Jones (1998) regard this type of
outsourcing as an “intermediate” relationship characterized by complex work and substantial benefits.
Under the same term “value-added outsourcing” Millar (1994) understands “some IS activity that is
turned over to a third party vendor who is sought to provide a service which adds value to the activity
that could not be cost-effectively provided by the internal IS of the client”. Instead, Millar (1994)
defines “cooperative outsourcing” (i.e. “some IS activity is jointly performed by a third party provider
and the internal IS department of the client”) in Willcock’s and Lacity’s understanding of value-added
outsourcing.
To systematize the different outsourcing options mentioned in the literature, we build upon and extend
the work of von Jouanne-Diedrich et al. (2004; 2007; 2005) by integrating the different notions of
outsourcing arrangements found in the literature. Figure 2 summarizes the categorization attempts
mentioned above and characterizes outsourcing arrangements along nine dimensions.
11

12
Location
Ownership
Number of
Vendors
Offshore/Farshore
Outsourcing
NearshoreOutsourcing
Asset
Outsourcing
Onshore/Domestic
Outsourcing
Multi
Sourcing
IS Activity
Planning
Onsite Outsourcing
Service
Outsourcing
Single
Sourcing
Application Outsourcing
Business Process Outsourcing
Sourcing Object
Development
Infrastructure
Outsourcing
Knowledge Process Outsourcing
Evolution of outsourcing research
Implementation
Operation
Maintenance
IS Sourcing
Chronology
Financial
Dependency
Internal/Captive
Outsourcing , Spin‐Offs
(Shared Service Center)
Joint Venture
External
Outsourcing
Total Insourcing
Selective Outsourcing
/ Outtasking
Body Shop
Co‐sourcing / Performance‐based
Business‐benefit contracting
Insourcing
Outsourcing
Backsourcing
Total Outsourcing
Transitional Outsourcing
Transformational Outsourcing
Value‐added /
Cooperative Outsourcing
Degree of
External Supply
Strategic
Aspects
Figure 2: Dimensions of Outsourcing Options
(Source: extended from von Jouanne-Diedrich 2004; 2007; 2005)
Early outsourcing research had centered on acquisition with a focus on the make-or-buy decision
between in-house and external acquisition of information technology (Buchowicz 1991). But with
Kodak’s 1989 outsourcing decision, outsourcing emerged as a key method of managing information
systems (Loh/Venkatraman 1992b) and a pivotal issue concerned the motivation why to outsource.
Debates then shifted from whether or not to outsource to how much to outsource (scope) with various
options such as e.g. selective or total outsourcing (Lacity/Hirschheim 1993a). A difficult research
issue pertained to determining the effective outsourcing performance (Loh/Venkatraman 1995). Due
to the largely unsolved performance issue, research experienced a backlash of the outsourcing
euphoria resulting in a discussion about insourcing and backsourcing options of information
technology. But despite its critics, outsourcing was by then already entangled into most organizations’
strategic plans and the contract specifying the relation between outsourcing providers and their clients
emerged as a centerpiece issue (Saunders et al. 1997). The primary focus thus was on outsourcing
determinants, benefits, vendor selection, and contracting with very little research investigating the
outsourcing relationship and the processes required to support it (Sargent 2006, S. 280). Although
outsourcing contracts were often designed in a complex fashion to cover unexpected contingencies or
opportunistic service provider behavior, it was impossible to account for every possible scenario in a
contract, and client-vendor interactions often went beyond rules and contractual agreements. Instead
they additionally relied on soft factors such as trust, commitment, and mutual interest. A closer
relationship between clients and their service providers emerged, recognized as partner-based or
relationship outsourcing (Goles 2001; Kern 1997; Lee/Kim 1999; Willcocks/Lacity 1998). Many
organizations engaged in this sort of partnership with their outsourcing vendors after experiencing the
limitations of legal contracts (Kern/Willcocks 2000; Koh et al. 2004). As a result, an effective
relationship rather than the actual service or outsourcing function itself became known as a key
predictor of outsourcing success (Goles 2001; Lee/Kim 1999).
Lee et al. (2003) graphically illustrate the evolution of outsourcing research issues from the plain
“make-or-buy” decision towards the role of relationship issues and the emergence of a partnershipbased
view in IS outsourcing (see Figure 3). The authors distinguished between two stages of IS

outsourcing evolution, the first being characterized as “driven by client’s self interest, shaped by a
hierarchical relationship and dictated by a win-lose strategy” (Lee et al. 2003, S. 87). The second stage
of IT outsourcing in contrast marked the beginning of a mutual exchange relationship orientation
where the outsourcing vendor is regarded as a partner.
Partnership
Performance
The choice between internally
developed technology and
its external acquisition
Make
or
Buy
Kodak‘s
Effects
Kodak Outsourcing
Decision in 1989
Diverse,
integrated
Limited, single‐focused
solutions
services and solutions
(e.g. BPO, ASP, KPO)
Partnership
Scope
Partnership
or Not
The impact of outsourcing;
the benefit and risk of
outsourcing; the Expectations
towards outsourcing
Degree of outsourcing;
Period of outsourcing;
Motivation Number of vendor;
Outsourcing Types
User and business satisfaction;
Scope
Service quality: Cost Reduction
Performance
Self interest of each party
Client‐centered view
Hierarchical relationship
Win‐lose strategy
Mutual interest; Partnership
view; Equal relationship
Win‐win strategy
Insource
or
Outsource
Trade‐off between
contingent factors
in outsourcing;
1st stage
Outsourcing
backsourcing Well‐designed contract to
reduce unexpected con‐
tingencies; Service level
agreements
Contract
(formal)
as governance
Partnership
Key factors for outsourcing (Informal)
partnership: Intangible elements
of outsourcing relationship;
Effective way for building client
vendor relationship
Partnership
Motivation
Partnership
Contracts
2nd stage
Outsourcing
Figure 3: Evolution of outsourcing research issues (Source: Lee et al. 2003)
Validating the value contribution: IT Controlling
The field of research concerning the controlling of IT/IS plays an enormous role in showing the value
contribution of information systems. Some important aspects of IT Controlling are to coordinate,
arrange and guide the division and to inform the management concerning efficiency and effectiveness
of their IT-activities. IT Controlling is the planning and monitoring of projects in information- and
communication technology as well as cost accounting and results accounting of projects, installed
systems and applications. The implementation of IT Controlling should take an economical look at the
resource information. Many different points of view on IT Controlling do exist in both research and
practice (Vöhringer, 2002). Whilst in German scientific literature the term IT Controlling is unitary
used for all of these points of view, Anglo-American literature differentiates a set of varying terms
concerning the evaluation of IT value contribution (Schauer, 2006). Widely spread terms are: IT/IS
(investment) evaluation, IT/IS (performance) measurement or measurement of IT/IS costs and
benefits. Therefore, we consider the following passage from three different perspectives: the business
view, the lifecycle view and the performance view.
A business-oriented view
Regardless of industry or management levels, IT/Business Alignment is an area of high priority. This
was confirmed by a survey of 182 companies in the U.S. from 2003 to 2004 (Luftman, 2005). This
high degree of prioritization may be the response to the lack of clearly identifiable and noticeable
13

positive productivity trends that can be directly correlated to increased IT investment. This
productivity paradox of IT was already described in 1987 by the economist Robert Solow and then
discussed by a number of other authors with contradictory opinions (Mukhopadhyay et al., 1995;
Brynjolfsson, 1996, Bharadwaj et al. 1999; Devaraj/Kohli, 2000). The ensuing discussions about
increasing IT efficiency resulted in a call for an IT/Business Alignment. IT/Business Alignment is
described as a long-term mutual coordination of business and information technology. One of the
emerging problems is the time lag of IT behind changes in operational structuring. This is the result of
the necessity for large effort to achieve the adjusted IT solutions, combined with fundamental
unpredictability of consequences to changes in the existing architecture.
The phase of business system planning (BSP) already began in the seventies. Particular attention was
paid from the company's strategy derived to IT strategy. The partial model was developed by
Henderson/Venkatraman (1993) to the Strategic Alignment Model (SAM). SAM acts with internal
and external viewing objects. These are in a reciprocal relationship and are matched in the best way to
each other.
Beimborn et al. (2006) take a look at the IT/Business Alignment in respect to the Resource-based
view (RBV). In the RBV view, the heterogeneity of resources account for the competitiveness of
different companies. The controlled uses of resources create a competitive advantage. Beimborn et al.
(2006) create up to the SAM building a research model that is described by Henderson/Venkatraman
(1993) as the usage of IT, the division and their overlapping density (Henderson/Venkatraman, 1993).
In this way they build an assortment of hypothetical effect relationships on IT usage (ITU), business
capability (BUS), IT/Business Alignment (ITBA) and process performance (PP). They confirm with
there research model to the theories of Hitt et al. (2001), that a better business capability (BUS) is able
to increase the performance of the business process. The second highest contribution result is the
correlation between ITBA to PP. This proves that better alignment between the professionals and IT
department performance overall increased. Next were the theories of Devaraj/Kohli (2000) and Lee
(2001) which supported that an extensive use of IT and the effective use of IT potential result in a
higher performance of the business process. Beimborn at al. (2006) next set of hypothetical
interrelationships that better alignment between the professionals and IT departments advance the
impact of IT on the process efficiency and the theory that the effect of professional resources to the
process efficiency could not be supported by them. Their results allow the paradoxical observations in
the literature and enlighten the IT Paradox that is supposed to disappear.
Teubner (2006) also based on the SAM and criticise the strong engineering side hitherto of the
methods rapprochement. He suggests methodologies for integrated and application design. His
emphasis on a production is the functional integration and strategic fit in context to SAM. He puts his
methodologies - Information Engineering, Business Process Reengineering and Business Engineering
- based on a comparative assessment. Information Engineering sees itself as a "(…) integrated set of
techniques, based on corporate planning, which result in the analysis, design and development of
systems which support those plans exactly" (Finkelstein, 1992). IE is a slightly expanded approach of
the strategy execution of SAM. Business process reengineering is the next method of Teubner, it is
already described earlier on in the paper. This more radical approach to IT-driven reorganization takes
its start in the identification of business processes responsible perspectives of business strategy. The
achievable technologies which support the business process innovation are the main focus of the BPR.
Teubners last method is a direct response to the business process reengineering, because
reorganization projects of the paradigm of BRP often fail. The Business Engineering (BE) aims to
relative the radical redesign and process orientation of BRP and separates strategy, processes and
systems. A feature of BE is that IT-potentials are actively implemented in IS-drafts.
The construction of project specific methods especially in change projects is one research focus of
Baumöl (2006). Even if the demand for standardization in order to minimise costs poses a significant
14

potential requires the call for flexibility individualization in special context. Baumöl (2006) therefore
recommends a standardization of separate activity levels which can be combined to an individual
method.
The following table provides an overview of the approaches selected by the authors and summarizes
the evidence of the literature review.
Author Research
method
Beimborn et al. Questionnaire Based on the SAM approach.
(2006)
Areas of IT usage, the department and
their interactions
Design, Approach Findings
Teubner (2006) Literature review Based on the SAM approach.
Information Engineering, Business
Process Reengineering, Business
Engineering
Baumöl (2006) Literature review,
Interviews,
Case studies
Association of conflicting demands
for flexibility and for standardization
Topics involved of the planning and
initiation of a change project
Individual and standardized design
elements of a change method, which
result in an appropriate IT/Business
Alignment
A design process for change methods
of the above requirements
Table 1: IT/ Business Alignment Approaches
1. Correlation BUS to
PP
2. Correlation ITBA to
PP
3. Correlation IT to PP
IT business alignment is
a prerequisite for a value
contribution of IT
generally accepted
Alignment is not to
understand as the
unilateral adjustment of
IT to the business, but
also driven by the IT and
include reaction
processes also.
There are reference
scenarios, which allow
the reuse of methods
fragments
The literature of Alignment focuses mainly on the strategic coordination of IT and division.
According to Gordon/Gordon (2000) there is a research deficit at the level of IT and business
structure.
A life-cycle-oriented view
The following lines present a literature review of all of these aspects providing one example for each,
acquisition, realization and operation. It takes both into account, German and Anglo-American
literature of the last five years, trying to represent a variety of theories and methods used.
IT investments constitute a major part of IT costs, but the benefits of IT usage are mostly not visible in
a direct way and therefore difficult to justify. The value and the benefits of IT depend on its use in an
organizational context. In order to make these benefits contribution visible, Kumar (Kumar 2004)
presents a framework for assessing the business value of information technology infrastructure based
on asset valuation literature in finance. Kumar starts his work with a literature review and identifies
three IT value related research streams: studies using econometric techniques, traditional financial
evaluation methods such as Net Present Value (NPV) or real options theory and research focusing on
15

the organizational value of flexible IT infrastructures. Kumar’s framework is based on all three
streams. As the value of IT depends on its usage within an organization, the value changes over time
according to IT usage. The author differentiates drift in value changes (small), noise term changes and
jump in value changes (large) and gives some examples of events causing these changes including
resulting benefits and costs. He describes the changes, their causes and effects in a mathematical
formula resulting in the stochastic value change of IT. Therefore the value of IT can be seen as
dynamic instead of static.
According to Zarnekow/Scheeg/Brenner (Zarnekow R.; Scheeg) IT investments are only responsible
for about one fourth of IT costs. The major part of costs results from IT production – operation,
support and maintenance. Although this cost structure is commonly known and concepts like total
costs of ownership, life-cycle-costing, zero-based-pricing, all-in-costs or the cost-ratio-method exist in
(production) literature, practice often neglects production costs. Zarnekow/Scheeg/Brenner (Zarnekow
R.; Scheeg) use the life-cycle-cost model and adopt it in order to investigate IT costs. The model
connects application related tasks with the steps of the application life-cycle-model. This way costs
for the tasks can be accounted for a specific application. Secondly the authors conduct case studies in
private companies and one public administration in order to describe application life-cycle-costs in
practice. They could build the results of their study on 30 applications. The life-cycle contains five
steps: planning, first development, production, further development and taking the application out of
order. Although the organizations participating in the case study could not provide detailed cost
information, findings show that higher costs for the development of a specific type of application
result in lower costs during the production phase of the application. The case studies proved that
managerial instruments used in practice are not sufficient for application cost accounting. In order to
avoid false managerial decisions, life-cycle-oriented cost accounting models have to be developed and
used. Existing cost accounting models do not work in practice, due to the differentiation between the
development and the usage of IS instead of utilizing a holistic, life-cycle-oriented view. It is one
challenge for IT Controlling to capture application related costs as a prerequisite for a life-cycleoriented
view on IS. According to Zarnekow/Scheeg/Brenner (Zarnekow R.; Scheeg) their model is
only the beginning for life-cycle-orientation, but has to be further developed.
Doll (Doll 2003) shows a totally different approach to the benefits of IS/ IT. He develops a process for
post-implementation (after an application is in operation) IT benchmarking. This approach is justified
by the need of continuous learning from the past in order to be able to compete in the future. In order
to build this process, Doll uses a causal model of how induced and autonomous learning factors
influence IT usage and IT impacts on organization and processes. By using the causal model CIOs are
able to identify learning problems and possible remedies. Benchmarking shows, how one company
benefits from the impacts of IT usage, compared to another. For gaining a maximum benefit Doll
adopts the typical benchmarking process identified in literature to the special needs of his causal
model. The adopted process starts with the determination of the IT benchmarking purposes. Secondly
the benchmarking objects have to be defined. Next the outcome/ process attributes to benchmark have
to be identified. The fourth step involves the collection of internal data and in parallel the selection of
external comparison data. Having all data collected one has to make both, competitive and internal
comparisons. The next step analyzes the causal models in alterative (internal vs. best-in-class) data
sets. Finally action plans have to be developed, implemented and resulting improvements monitored.
The process proposed by the author enables the benchmarking of IT outcomes (effective use and
impacts). IT benchmarking is an important tool in IT benefit analysis as it can “justify investments in
infrastructure, provide a window to user satisfaction, improve the redesign of IT-enabled business
processes, and enhance user learning or knowledge management” (Doll 2003).
Figure 1 provides an overview about the presented papers, their authors, the life-cycle-step they work
on and used theories, concepts and methods.
16

Author IS life-cycle-step Used theories, concepts and
methods
(Kumar 2004) IT investments; could be initial
investments or maintenance investments.
(Zarnekow R.; Scheeg) IT production: operation, support,
maintenance.
Asset valuation theories:
econometric techniques,
financial evaluation (NPV,
real options theory),
organizational value;
No theories but concepts and
methods: total costs of
ownership, life-cycle-costing,
zero-based-pricing, all-incosts,
the cost-ratio-method;
(Doll 2003) Post-implementation. No theories but concepts and
methods: benchmarking,
induced and autonomous
learning;
Table 2: Life-cycle-oriented approaches
The life-cycle-oriented view on IT controlling shows that IT controlling has to take both into account -
IT costs and IT benefits. Becker (Becker/Winkelmann 2004) characterizes this evaluation of IT costs
and benefits as obtaining, proceeding and analysing of data in order to prepare managerial decisions
concerning the acquisition, realization and operation of hardware and software. The data used can
contain quantitative monetary, quantitative non-monetary and qualitative data (Becker/Winkelmann
2004).
A performance-oriented view
In regard to increasing resource commitment to information systems and the growing role of IT in
achieving business goals, the measurement of the efficiency and effectiveness of IS are major topics
in IT/IS management.
This chapter will give an overview of different approaches that contribute to the question ‘How to
measure the performance of the IS function?’ with focus on (1) the IS function in general and (2) the
dependent variables and dimensions that can be used for the development of measurement models.
“Performance measurement can be defined as the process of quantifying the efficiency and
effectiveness of action.”. (Neely et al. 1995, p. 1229) This paper discusses performance measurement
of the IS function. The term ‘IS function’ thereby refers to “….all IS groups and departments within
the organization.”.(Saunders/Jones 1992, p. 64)
There are a huge number of publications about IS performance measurement on subfunctional level,
e.g. measurement of user satisfaction or information quality. Few publications within the last two
decades try to suggest a comprehensive approach for performance measurement of the IS function. As
the objective of this chapter is to give an overview about general constructs or models for IS
17

performance measurement, the literature review focuses on approaches suitable for the measurement
of the IS function in general, and not only a singular IS instance or subfunction.
In 1992, DeLone and McLean (DeLone/McLean 1992) proposed the DeLone and McLean IS Success
Model, that encompasses six major dimensions of IS success, including system quality, information
quality, use, user satisfaction, individual impact and organizational impact. These six success
dimensions are arranged within an interdependent success construct that proposes following
dependencies: System quality and information quality affects both use and user satisfaction; use and
user satisfaction impact individual performance, that should eventual have impact on organizational
performance. Based on the success research contributions of the last 10 years, DeLone/McLean
proposed an updated IS success model in 2003 (DeLone/McLean 2003). Major enhancements were
adding a new dimension – service quality – and consolidating the dimension individual impact and
organizational impact into the single dimension net benefit. According to DeLone/McLean, the
stakeholder of these net benefits – e.g. an individual or an organization – has to be defined dependent
on the context of use.
Another contribution to IS performance measurement in 1992 was made by Saunders and Jones
(Saunders/Jones 1992). They identified 10 dimensions that are critical for IS performance and set up a
ranking for these dimensions dependent on their impact in IS performance. They were inspired by the
contingency theory, that “…suggests that a number of variables influence the performance of
information systems; the better the fit between these variables and the design and use of the MIS, the
better the MIS performance.”(Weill/Olson 1989, p. 63). Saunders and Jones investigated the impact of
organizational contingency factors like the hierarchical position of the top IS executive as well as
contingency factors on the perspective of the IS evaluator. Based on the impact of these contingency
factors, a relative ranking for the selected IS performance dimensions was set up. Compared to the
DeLone/McLean model (DeLone/McLean 1992), Saunders/Jones did not propose causal relationships
between the IS performance dimensions, but suggested that this issue can be addressed in future
research in order to enhance their approach.
In 1999, Martinson (Martinsons et al. 1999) proposes a balanced scorecard approach based on Kaplan
and Norton (Kaplan/Norton 1996) for the measurement of IS activities including following
perspectives: Business value, user orientation, internal processes and future readiness. For each
dimension he proposed a set of different measures that were derived from several other approaches,
e.g. information economics that was introduced in the late 1980s as well as different IS success
approaches like that one of DeLone/McLean. He extended these approaches by the introduction of the
future readiness dimension that was not regarded in that extent in earlier approaches.
A further contribution to IS performance measurement was made by Heo and Han (Heo/Han 2003).
Influenced by the contingency theory(Weill/Olson 1989), they developed a model in order to
determine IS dimensions that are appropriate in evolving computing environments. The set of
potential IS performance dimensions was already given by the use of the IS assessment selection
model of Myers et al. (Myers et al. 1997), that basically combined the IS success dimensions of
DeLone/McLean (DeLone/McLean 1992) and the contingency framework developed by
Saunders/Jones (Saunders/Jones 1992). Furthermore they derived four IS structural typologies, e.g.
centralized computing environment and decentralized computing environment. The relationship
between the aforementioned IS performance dimensions and these typologies were tested in order to
find out which dimensions are more appropriate then others to measure IS performance in a certain
computing environment.
In 2005, Chang and King (Chang/King 2005) proposed a functional scorecard for the measurement of
IS performance. Their work was influenced by many earlier studies, e.g. that of McLean/DeLone and
Saunders/Jones. Compared to earlier studies, they proposed a more detailed measurement model
18

including 18 unidimensional factors within the three dimensions system performance, information
effectiveness and service performance. The impact of these dimensions on business process
performance, and the impact of IS performance and business process performance on organizational
performance is assumed in the model, but research on these relationships was not main objective of
their research paper.
19

Author Research method IS performance dimensions Causal
relationships
(DeLone/McLean
1992)
(Saunders/Jones
1992)
(Martinsons et al.
1999)
(DeLone/McLean
2003)
(Heo/Han 2003)
(Chang/King
2005)
- literature review
of 180 articles
- Delphi study
- Senior executive
interviews
system quality, information quality, use, user satisfaction,
individual impact, organizational impact
IS impact on strategic dimension, integration of IS planning,
quality of information, IS contribution to financial performance,
IS operational efficiency, user/management attitude about IS, IS
staff competence, technology integration, system development
practice, IS ability of assimilation of new technology
- 3 case studies business value, user orientation, internal processes, future
readiness
- review of 100
articles
- 1 case study
- mail survey of
187 IS managers
- mail survey of
120 firms
system quality, information quality, intention to use, user
satisfaction, net benefit
service quality, system quality, information quality, use, user
satisfaction, individual impact, work group impact, organizational
impact
system performance, information effectiveness, service
performance, business process effectiveness, organizational
performance
Table 3: Approaches in IS performance measurement
Yes
Tested
contingency
variables
No Organizational
perspective of
IS evaluator
Yes
Yes
No IS structural
typologies
Yes

Table 3 summarizes the major developments in IS performance measurement of the last
two decades. The main conclusion that can be drawn from the review of these articles is
that there are two different kinds of approaches for the development of models for the
performance measurement of the IS function:
(1) Approaches that provide models with predefined and interrelated dimensions
for performance measurement like that ones of (DeLone/McLean 1992),
(DeLone/McLean 2003), (Martinsons et al. 1999) and (Chang/King 2005).
These approaches focus on providing general templates for performance
measurement that can be adapted and refined according to the object of
measurement.
(2) Approaches that provide a set of possible dimensions for performance
measurement that that can be combined due to specific contingency factors of
an organization like that ones of (Saunders/Jones 1992)and (Heo/Han 2003).
These approaches focus on providing a ‘construction kit’ for performance
measurement models, including rules that describe which dimensions should be
chosen for performance measurement depended on individual contingency
aspects of an organization.
Basic for both kind of approaches is that there is no general IS performance management
model that can be applied in practice without modifications, but there is always
additional work required to adapt an approach for the individual requirements of an
organization and the object of measurement.
Outlook
As our synthesis shows, several worthwhile avenues of research could be identified:
• Although the characteristics of business processes and the activities towards
effective information systems seem to be thoroughly discussed, two main
research gaps could be identified. First, the integration of organizational
knowledge from business processes in information systems and vice versa
could tap potentials when it comes to business process redesign, continuous
improvement, and organizational knowledge management. Second, research on
deducing implications from analyzing and simulating business processes is
largely missing. The potentials from simulating and subsequently learning form
existing and planned business process may help to identify more accurate
requirements for information system development.
• In the area of IT governance several research opportunities could be identified.
For instance, how to identify the trade-off between the efforts for implementing
controls and their impact on the IT organization is still an open issue. With the
focus on IT outsourcing, research on the structure and determinants of IT
outsourcing is necessary to understand the relationship between service
customer and service provider.
21

22
• IT Controlling includes different views on validating the contribution of
information management to business performance. Following areas could be
addressed for further research:
o Regarding the evaluation of IT costs and benefits from a life-cycleoriented
view, authors apply concepts and methods known from
economic science - but they hardly do apply economic theories. Future
research in the field could extend IS knowledge by using economic
theories.
o Regarding IS performance measurement a more comprehensive
measurement model including findings from the last years should be a
main objective for further research. Especially the integration of new
findings on the relationship between IS performance and business
performance, new findings on different contingency factors and new
performance dimensions due to changes in the technological and
organizational environment would be valuable for an extended model
of IS performance measurement.
• All three analyzed topics have revealed the need of an integrated and reliable
information supply for management decisions. We argue that the information is
available at nearly all IT organizations but efficient measures to collect and
synthesize this information are missing.
Although this synthesis is far from being complete, we analyzed three important aspects
of effective and efficient information management and derived several research
opportunities.
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26

Innovation Communities
Ulrich Bretschneider, Michael Huber, Christoph Riedl
Submission for WISSS 2008 / 2
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching
{bretschneider | hubermic | riedlc}@in.tum.de
Abstract Virtual communities have been an inherent part of the internet for a long time. These
virtual communities are now more and more used for developing all kinds of innovations. In the
different fields, various forms of virtual communities have developed over the recent years. This
phenomenon of innovation communities has been researched to some degree, yet a common
definition and common understanding is lacking. This article tries to conceptualise existing
innovation communities through a literature review. Our literature review clusters innovation
community manifestations as they can be found in academic research and tries to elaborate how
they are related and where they intersect. This review serves as a first step towards a common
definition of innovation communities.
Introduction
Virtual Communities and the Phenomenon “Innovation Community”
Virtual communities have been an inherent part of the internet for a long time. Multitudinous virtual
communities have taken root in the Internet since the establishment of “The WELL”, which was one
of the first and the most famous virtual communities and is therefore often referred to as the primal
community (cp. Rheingold, 1993).
The scientific world has attended to this topic since the middle of the nineties of the last century.
Nevertheless, no commonly accepted definition of the phenomenon “virtual communities”, in
literature often also called virtual alliance, online community and virtual groups, has become widely
accepted until today.
Table 1 pictures the most prominent definitions from a general point of view.
27

28
Author Definition
Hagel III/Armstrong,
1997, p. 143
Table 1 Definitions of virtual communities.
„Virtual Communities are groups of people with common
interests and needs who come together online.”
Preece, 2000, p. 10 „An online community consists of: 1) People, who interact
socially as they strive to satisfy their own needs or perform
special roles, such as leading or moderating. 2) A shared
purpose, such as an interest, need, information exchange, or
service that provides a reason for the community. 3) Policies, in
the form of tacit assumptions, rituals, protocols, rules, and laws
that guide people’s interactions. 4) Computer systems, to
support and mediate social interaction and facilitate a sense of
togetherness.”
Blanchard/Markus,
2004, p. 65
“[…] groups of people who interact primarily through
computer-mediated communication and who identify with and
have developed feelings of belonging and attachment to each
other.”
A virtual community can be classified on the basis of its focused issues and its objective target (cp.
Hagel III/Armstrong, 1997). Major examples for this are online health communities, whose members
are affected by various disease patterns. In their ambition these communities are matching the goals of
a self-help group (cp. Eysenbach et al., 2003; Leimeister, 2005; Maloney-Krichmar/Preece, 2002).
Nevertheless, on the Internet one can also observe virtual communities, whose members are
thematically engaged in the creation of innovations for different product categories. In scientific
literature, such kind of virtual communities are referred to as Innovation Communities, Communities
for Innovations or Communities of Innovation. In literature, there did not establish a unique taxonomy
or definition for that phenomenon, yet.
Aim and Research Method
The purpose of the present article is to illustrate the different manifestations of such communities and
to differentiate them from each other.
In the following, we describe the research method used for this literature review. We first selected the
scientific databases EBSCO and Science direct as the search space for our literature review. We then
performed a title, abstracts, and keywords search within these databases using the keywords
“innovation” and “community”. We did, however, limit search results to A-level publications as
identified by the German Scientific Commission for Information Systems (WKWI, 2008). Next, the
resulting body of 96 articles was filtered by reading their abstracts. Most of them could then be clearly
classified as being unrelated to our research objective. The resulting ten articles where included in our
review. To ensure that no relevant literature that did not use these keywords or has not been published
in one of the selected journals has been omitted we also included articles that (a) were already known
to the authors, (b) were referred in one of the relevant articles, or (c) could be found by looking in
“close proximity” of articles that have initially been identified in this review (e.g., were published in

the same issues of a journal). Thus, we achieved a comprehensive overview of innovation
communities’ literature.
The paper is structured as follows. The next section reviews open source software communities
followed by a review of innovation communities formed around physical goods. Then, the next
section reviews business communities followed by a section on customer integration communities.
Finally, innovation communities that are structured as market places are reviewed. Each of the
sections addresses the aspects history, actors, and aims of the individual communities. A discussion
concludes the article and presents an outlook on future work.
Consumer Innovation Communities
With currently more than 1.2 Billion users, the Internet is obviously an “enormous pool of knowledge,
impossible to encounter elsewhere” (Füller /Matzler, 2007, p. 381). Thus, it is the most suitable
medium to address companies’ customers and to access the creativity of individuals outside
companies’ R&D departments. As a matter of fact, there are a lot of virtual communities, broaching
different issues, discussing particular problems and collaboratively generating innovations. Literature
shows, that the innovative potential of these virtual communities is highly valuable for companies,
being able to access the “swarm creativity” (Gloor, 2005) of a huge amount of stakeholders.
Besides several other ways of integrating external people into a company’s innovation process like
mass customisation or toolkits (cp. von Hippel, 2006; Reichwald/Piller, 2006; Walcher 2007)),
literature describes the Community Based Innovation Approach as a suitable method to include
stakeholders into the innovation process (Füller, 2005; Füller et al., 2006). These communities are
mostly initiated by companies in order to trigger the community members’ creativity along the
company’s specific needs.
A first class of innovation communities that we found in our literature review are communities that
afford major innovations from the consumer product field. They are run completely by and for users.
The most prominent example in this category is the open source phenomenon. In response to open
source communities arose consumer innovation communities for other consumer products.
One common distinction of innovation communities is between autonomous and sponsored
communities proposed by West and O'Mahony (2008). A similar distinction is found by Reichwald
and Piller who distinguish between customer driven and vendor driven communities
(Reichwald/Piller, 2006, p. 184ff.). In their research West and O’Mahony distinguish innovation
communities with regard to the (predominant) involvement of for-profit organisations. In their
definition an autonomous community is one that “is presently independent of any one firm and
community managed” (West/O’Mahony, 2008, p. 149). This means in particular that such a
community operates under a governance mechanism that is outside the reach of authority that is
embedded in employment relationships. Contributors to autonomous communities may be volunteers
or paid by an organisation to do so, but the decision making process within the community remains
autonomous of any one organisation.
In sponsored communities on the other hand, long- and short-term activities are controlled by one or
more corporate entities.
Consumer Innovation Communities for Software: Open Source Communities
Talking about Open Source Communities, it is first of all necessary to define the underlying terms.
Open Source is widely used equally for free software (FS) and open source software (OSS).
According to Scacchi (2007), both types of software differ for example in the licenses they are based
29

on and to the context they refer to. Free software is mostly licensed under the GNU General Public
License (GPL) whereas open source software in many cases uses other license types which possibly
do not include aspects of free software as the Free Software Foundation (FSF) defines them.
Furthermore, free software often refers to a kind of social movement, open source software rather to a
software development methodology. In one sentence: “Free software is always available as OSS, but
OSS is not always free software” (Scacchi, 2007, S. 459).
In the following, the term F/OSS is used to refer to both kinds of Software. The term Open Source
Community refers to communities which develop F/OSS in a collaborative manner.
History
Practice shows that Open Source Communities nowadays differ in terms of organisation, sourcing and
business models. Watson et al. (2008) distinguish five (business) models regarding the history of
software production including Open Source Communities as a relevant part: (1) Proprietary (2) Open
Community (3) Corporate Distribution (4) Sponsored Open Source and (5) Second Generation Open
Source (Watson et al., 2008, S. 42 f.).
Proprietary Communities as well as Open Communities stem from the early days of software
development. Proprietary software production applies to companies hiring developers and selling their
software products to the customer keeping the source code secret. The open community model stems
from these days as well, but builds on people freely exchanging code without commercial interests
(von Hippel/von Krogh, 2003; Watson et al., 2008).
Besides these formerly dominating types, later on, other forms of software development emerged
which in many cases are based on consumer innovation communities:
Corporate distribution refers to firms creating value and generating revenue by providing distribution
methods and complementary services to highly sophisticated F/OSS software. Examples for corporate
distribution are RedHat, SuSE and other Linux based products where distribution, support and
knowledge are commercially provided by firms. Nevertheless, this business model rests upon
software, which was originally developed by a F/OSS community dealing with the development of
Linux.
Sponsored Open Source applies to F/OSS projects being sponsored by companies or foundations.
These projects often emerge from formally closed source projects where companies once opened up
the source code to the community. Examples for Sponsored Open Source are the Apache Software
Foundation Projects, the Ubuntu project or the Mozilla Foundation (Bärwolff/Gehring/Lutterbeck,
2006).
Second Generation Open Source (also OSSg2) is a hybrid of the former described models of
Corporate Distribution and Sponsored OSS. OSSg2 companies generate most of their revenue by
providing complementary services around their products. Furthermore, they provide most of the
development and maintenance resources and in most cases control the source code of the products
they freely provide. Familiar examples for this model are amongst others JBOss and MySQL.
Similar to software development nowadays, which often takes place in a globally distributed setting
(cp. for example near- and offshoring) also Open Source Communities are in need of organizational
structures ant suitable tools to enable the creation of software in a collaborative manner by developers
who are often spread all over the world. F/OSS developers in Open Source Communities are in
general organised in terms of a virtual community, contrary to development teams of for example
software firms. Usually, they use Internet-based tools for organisational tasks and code versioning.
(Scacchi, 2007, p. 461 f.).
30

Actors
The survey of Lakhani/Wolf (2003) gives a detailed view on the people Open Source Communities
consist of. In a nutshell, the majority of F/OSS developers have university-level education in computer
science and information technology. Most participants of Open Source Communities are professional
programmers, system administrators, IT managers, students and academic researchers (Lakhani/Wolf,
2003). Furthermore, “FOSS developers are typically also end-users of the FOSS they develop, and
other end-users often participate in and contribute to FOSSD efforts.” (Scacchi, 2007, p. 459)
Aims
One of the core questions regarding Open Source Communities is why do people join these
communities and contribute their time and knowledge freely to the public developing Free or Open
Source Software?
Raymond (1999) and Scacchi (2007) mention three reasons of developers for contributing to open
source communities: (1) Developers in open source communities often directly benefit from the
software they develop. They are using the software themselves and thus are creating or modifying
functionalities according to their own demands. (2) Members of open source communities contribute
just because they enjoy implementing software. (3) Developers contribute in order to gain a good
reputation developing sophisticated software and showing professional skills helps to make one’s
mark. Thus, contributing may also end up in job offerings because of companies recognising a
developer’s skills (Raymond, 1999; Scacchi, 2007). These findings were emphasised by web based
surveys Lakhani/Wolf (2003) run in 2003, asking 684 developers in 287 F/OSS projects about their
motivation to contribute their ideas and working time to these projects.
Consumer Innovation Communities in the Consumer Product Field
Comparable to the above mentioned open source example, in literature there are also consumer
innovation communities that enable major innovations from the consumer product field. As open
source communities they are run completely by and for users. These consumer innovation
communities arose in response of the open source phenomenon and became popular in scientific
literature at the beginning of 2000.
For example, Franke and Shah (2003) examine how user-innovators of sport-related consumer product
innovations gather information and assistance they need to develop their ideas and how they share and
collaboratively develop the resulting innovations. Shah (2000) as well as von Hippel (2001), (2005) or
Lüthje (2000) describes enthusiasts in sports like windsurfing, kite-surfing, or skateboarding jointly
develop new or modify existing products and test their advanced products directly. Although in
literature consumer innovation communities are described and investigated almost exclusively for
sporting goods, in practice there are innovation communities from almost every product category
(e.g., wines, cameras, and cars).
Innovation communities for consumer goods and open source communities differ in two dimensions:
the medium used (online vs. offline), and the product (intangible vs. tangible) that is created. In OSS
projects, users collaboratively develop software on the Internet. As software consists of intangible
code, software is easy to “produce” and distribute via the Internet. In this chapter mentioned
communities operate in regular in face-to-face situations, as physical products can hardly neither be
developed nor tested completely virtually.
Nevertheless, virtual customer innovation communities as described here use the Internet for the
development of tangible goods in a supportive manner. For example, in the virtual café “alt.coffee”,
31

devoted coffee connoisseurs share their ideas and thoughts about how to improve coffee machines and
bean roasters in order to enjoy the optimal coffee experience (Kozinets, 1999; Kozinets, 2002).
Another popular example of an innovative online community is the “Harley-Owners-Group”
www.hog.com. Members of this online community dedicated to Harley Davidson motorcycles discuss
and demonstrate concepts for individualised motorbikes and accessories and the producer Harley
Davidson later includes the users' ideas in the development process (McWilliam, 2000). In the study
of Füller et al. (2007) four online communities are examined focussing on basketball shoes. Members
of these communities share ideas for improving the design or other features.
Business Innovation Communities
There is another usage of the term “innovation community” in literature. From organisation theory it
is known that different industrial organisations are involved in common innovation projects.
Lynn/Reddy/Aram (1996) used the term “innovation community” in this context in their research and
developed a framework for innovation communities from organisational ecology perspective.
According to their understanding innovation communities consist of diverse populations of both substructural
and super-structural organisations: producers, vendors, distributors, trade associations,
professionals, and state agencies. Each population has a specific set of competencies and performs a
specialised role. The exact configuration of populations and the role mix will differ among different
innovation communities and within given communities over time. However, Lynn/Reddy/Aram’s
innovation communities refer only to the process of commercialisation of innovations. So, they cover
just a single phase of the innovation process. Furthermore, they do not operate solely via the Internet.
Lynn/Reddy/Aram’s (1996) approach is the only example for the above defined community concept
we found. Normally, the “community” concept does not encompass groups of (only) firms interacting
with each other in the field of innovation development. In organisation theory, cooperating firms
usually are described as a value chain, value network, or ecosystem.
Innovation Broker Models
A third class of innovation communities that stands between autonomous and sponsored communities
are communities that are initiated and sustained by a brokering model.
History
Brokers play a central role in general commerce. A broker is a party that mediates between a buyer
and a seller. Thus, it serves as a matchmaker and tries to bring supply and demand closer together.
With the advent of the information age, brokers also engaged in mediating information goods. These
brokers became known as “infomediaries”. Contrary to the believe that they might become
superfluous with the new possibilities of direct sales over the Internet infomediaries increased in
importance (Palvia/D’Aubeterre, 2007). Naturally, brokers also moved into the area of innovation,
thus trying to bring parties looking for innovations closer to parties that might be able to provide these
innovations.
Actors
In these networks brokers play a matchmaking role between “seekers” of solutions to a specific, well
defined (scientific) problem and so called “solvers” of these problems. Usually seekers offer a
(sometimes significant) amount of money for successful solution of a problem. Thus, they act as
specialist intermediaries and innovation facilitator who’s goal is that of all market places: to bring
supply and demand closer together. For their brokering and mediating activities brokers usually
receive a fee.
32

Seekers are commonly R&D intensive corporations, solvers are individual scientists or small research
laboratories spread across the world. Solvers are usually individuals with certain knowledge and skills
that work independently to solve problems posed by seekers. The motivation for solvers to participate
in such a network are monetary benefits of solving a problem, enjoyment of the scientific challenges,
and career perspectives by establishing themselves as successful scientists.
Innovation facilitators allow their clients to source innovative ideas from outside their organisations.
They allow seekers to easily access a large pool of potential solvers and thus to tab into global pool of
scientists and technologists.
One example of such a brokered innovation community is InnoCentive (Nambisan/Sawhney, 2008;
www.innocentive.com). The same concept of brokered innovation communities like InnoCentive is
also described by Birkinshaw/Bessant/Delbridge (2007) using the term “Idea Networks”.
Aims
The main aim of brokers is facilitating the discovery of solvers by the seekers of innovation. This is
usually achieved by providing a marketplace for research and development activities.
In addition to providing a marketplace and thus bringing supply and demand together, innovation
brokers can also engage in transforming ideas. Hargadon and Sutton (2000) identified four tasks
performed by brokers through which they aim at supporting others in managing innovations by
supporting four knowledge brokering activities which form a cycle:
1) capture good ideas
2) keep ideas alive
3) imagine new uses for old ideas
4) put promising concepts to the test (Hargadon/Sutton 2000).
Sawyney at al. (2003) analysed the role of brokers with regards to innovation support. They call these
actors that engage in mediating innovation “innomediaries” and identified three different modes in
which brokers can engage in building a community.
• Customer network operator: The core function assumed by customer network
operators are to create a network of customers and provide access to a specific
segment of the customer base.
• Customer community operator: These innomediaries build and operate online
communities for specific interests, lifestyles, or around specific products.
• Innovation marketplace operator: These brokers operate a market place where more
than a single company engages in sourcing information.
A summary of the broker roles is depicted in Figure 1.
33

34
Company
Company
Innomediary
Innomediary
C
C
C
C C
C C
Buyer Seller
Buyer
Buyer
Innomediary
Seller
Seller
Customer network
operator
Customer community
operator
Innovation marketplace
operator
Figure 1 Three types of virtual knowledge brokers (Source: Sawhney et al. 2003).
Innovation brokers allow companies to access innovation potential that lies outside their company
boundaries. Contrary to open source or consumer product communities they are not formed
autonomously but are formed by the broker. The broker plays the core role in these communities.
With regards to business and customer integration communities, brokers allow the client companies
(i.e., the seekers, or sellers) to increase their reach by aggregating a larger pool of solvers. This might,
for example, be due to the fact that a brokered community serves more than one client company and is
thus able to attract a larger pool of solvers and contributors. A brokered community may thus address
a broader topic (i.e., “outdoor sports” in general rather than “outdoor sports equipment by company
X”). Moreover, they allow faster extraction of innovations as communities are already in place and do
not have to be built from scratch (i.e., a company can post an innovation challenge at InnoCentive and
use the innovation potential of that community without engaging in community building).
Conclusion and Outlook
In this article we analysed literature on the various forms of virtual communities related to innovation.
First, we analysed open source communities. This area has received very much attention by
researchers over recent years. In particular, motivation schemes why users contribute to open source
have been analysed. Research suggests that users are mainly motivated by their own demands, due to
enjoyment of solving programming challenges and in order to gain reputation as a developer. Next,
we summarised work on innovation communities and how they are used in a business environment to
achieve cross-functional innovation development. Innovation communities for customer integration
allow companies to overcome the closed innovation paradigm by integrating

Open
Source
communities
Consumer
products
Business
innovation
communities
Broker
communities
Table 2 Summary of innovation communities.
Source Actor Subject Aims
Scacchi (2007)
Watson et al. (2008)
von Hippel/von Krogh (2003)
Bärwolff et al. (2006)
Lakhani/Wolf (2003)
Raymond (1999)
Franke/ Shah (2003)
Füller et al. (2007)
von Hippel (2001), (2005)
Lüthje (2000)
Customers
(professional
programmers,
system
administrators, IT
managers, students
and academic
researchers)
Innovation and
implementation
of F/OSS
software
customers Innovation for
customer
products,
especially from
Lynn/Reddy/Aram (1996) Companies and
their partners
Birkinshaw/Bessant/Delbridg
e, 2007
Hargadon/Sutton, 2000
Nambisan/Sawhney, 2008
Sawyney at al., 2003
Seekers
Solvers
Broker/community
provider
sporting
Innovation that
a ready for
market launch
Ideas, problem
solutions, R&D
tasks/solutions,
patents.
(1) Benefit from the
software they
develop
(2) Joy of creating
software
(3) Reputation
Supporting innovation
activities in real world
settings by exchanging
ideas etc.
Fostering diffusion and
adoption of innovations
1) Mediating between
seekers and solvers
2) Transformation of
ideas

customers into their innovation process. Finally, brokered innovation communities have
been discussed. These communities are characterised by the leading role a broker plays
in brining “seekers” (organisations with research problems) and “solvers” (individuals
that solve these research problems) together. Here, brokers play a matchmaking role and
allow organisations to tab into a much larger pool of potential innovators than would
otherwise be possible. Table 2 summarises our literature review.
Our research summary shows what types of innovation communities exist, what actors
are involved in the respective communities, and how and on what subjects they operate.
A general distinction between sponsored and autonomous communities can be drawn.
Although overlapping in certain parts, this distinction provides a useful framework for
analysing how a community formed and how the innovations developed within this
community are used for service and product development. Figure 2 provides a graphical
overview of the different manifestations of innovation communities.
36
Figure 2 Topic map of different research streams investigating innovation communities.
One limitation of our work is the pure focus on existing literature. Some of the emerging
innovation community phenomenon are so new that they have not been covered in
published research. A more exploratory and empirical approach that would analyse
communities that can currently be found on the web would remedy this limitation. This
research could, for example, derive a set of properties and build a taxonomy of
innovation communities. Further research would also be required to analyse the
innovation capabilities of each of the different community types and which type is best
suited for what innovation challenges.
We believe, however, that this literature review of innovation communities is a first step
in organising our understanding of innovation communities and helps to delineate the
different approaches to guide future research.
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39

Developing Hybrid Products: Integrating Products and Services
Sebastian Esch, Jens Fähling, Felix Köbler, Philipp Langer
Literature Review
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching
"It has been said: The whole is more than the sum of its parts. It is more correct to say that the whole
is something else than the sum of its parts, because summing up is a meaningless procedure, whereas
the whole-part relationship is meaningful."
(Koffka 1935)
Abstract
Hybrid products, integrated combinations of products and services, offer new ways to differentiate
from the competition and offer the customer solutions to specific problems. As hybrid products are a
young field of information systems (IS) research, this paper gives an overview over the current state
of the definitions and characteristics of hybrid products, the benefits and barriers adopting hybrid
products and analyzes different development approaches for such hybrid products. Our analysis shows
that there are several open questions regarding the role of IS in the context of hybrid products and the
integrated development of products, software and services.
Introduction
Product manufacturers see themselves confronted with growing competition. Simple products are
easily copied by competition from countries with low labor costs. Even complex products are no
longer a guarantee that they can be copied or imitated (Leimeister and Glauner 2008). Another aspect
influencing the integration of products and services is the fact that customers are not interested in the
product and service itself, but rather want a problem to be solved (Sawhney 2006). The integration of
products and services offers demanding customers a solution tailored to fit their specific problem.
Products or services offered in isolation often address only parts of customer problems.
Different disciplines research the potentials and challenges that arise from the integration of products
and services, such as mechanical engineering, service engineering and business management, IS
research and software engineering.
Mechanical engineering research has a strong understanding and long history of developing and
managing technical products for various markets (Lindemann 2006). Service engineering or service
science research is a relatively new discipline focusing on the management and development of
services (Bullinger and Scheer 2003). Management research offers methods and tools for the
41

management of complex enterprises and business networks. Every discipline provides methods,
models and tools that fit their specific aspect of products, services and companies that provide either
or both. But it is not clear, if those means are appropriate to meet the challenges in managing and
developing tightly integrated products and services - so called hybrid products (Leimeister and
Glauner 2008).
The fact that many combinations of products and services require IS to link them together, the
discipline of IS research offers the possibility to connect the different disciplines and provide insight
into the management and development of such hybrid products (Leimeister and Glauner 2008).
This paper aims to present the current state of the art in the research of integrating products and
services. Therefore all issues of the last five years of the journals with a rating of A from the current
journal ranking list in the German IS community were searched for specific keywords related to the
integration of products and services. The following keywords were used in German journals:
“hybrides Produkt” “hybride Leistung” “hybride Wertschöpfung”, “Verbundsystem”,
“Leistungssystem”, “Leistungsbündel”, “komplexe Lösung”, “Bündelung”,
“Dienstleistungsentwicklung”, “Sach- und Dienstleistungsbündel”, „Produkt-Dienstleistungs-Bündel“.
Regarding journals published in English language, the keywords used, write out to: “hybrid product“,
“service engineering“, “product service system“, “product service systems engineering“, “pss“, “pssystem“,
“compacks“, “complex packages“, “hybrid value-creation“ and “bundling“. In the next step
we analyzed the title and abstract of the articles we found and excluded those that were clearly outside
the scope of hybrid products. As the number of matching articles was very low, we extended our
review into other fields, like mechanical engineering and other publications in IS research, service
engineering and business management.
We then categorized all articles into the areas: “definition and types of hybrid products”,
“development”, “management”, “state-of-the-art”, “value of hybrid products”, “business
environment” and “value of hybrid products”.
The first section of this paper presents the different terms for product service bundles and their
definitions. The following sections discuss benefits and barriers of the integration of products and
services, followed by a selected example, representing the applied integration of products and
services. After that, different development approaches for hybrid products are compared. In the
conclusion, various interesting questions for future research are presented.
Definitions
Two different streams characterize the research area of product service systems and hybrid products.
Terms like “Leistungsbündel”, “Compack (complex package)”, ”Leistungssystem” and
„Verbundsystem“ (Botta 2007) are commonly used in management research. In German management
and information system research the terms “Lösungen”, “Hybride Produkte” or “Hybride
Wertschöpfung” ((Leimeister and Glauner 2008); (Burianek, Ihl et al. 2007; Ernst 2007)) are well
established because the terminologies are coined in the research project funded by the BMBF named
“Innovation mit Dienstleistungen” and “Rahmenkonzept Forschung für die Produktion von morgen”
(Thomas, Walter et al. 2008). In contrast, engineering research created the term “Product Service
System (PSS)” ((Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999; Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007; Botta 2007)).
While management research underlines the aspects of differentiation and output expansion, many
researchers on PSS focus more on economical aspects. According to the state-of-the-art paper about
product service systems from (Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007), the first formal definition on PSS came
from Goedkoop et al. (1999) in their final report on the project named “Product Service Systems,
42

Ecological and Economic Basics”, that was commissioned by the Dutch ministries of Environment
(VROM) and Economic Affairs (EZ) in the late 1990s:
“A product service-system is a system of products, services, networks of ‘players’ and
supporting infrastructure that continuously strives to be competitive, satisfy customer needs
and have a lower environmental impact than traditional business models.“ (Goedkoop, Halen
et al. 1999)
The project was based on the following hypothesis that emphasizes the multidimensional
considerations of the PSS research:
“We have to find ways to increase the perceived value of all transactions without increasing
the environmental load of products involved. The solution could be to dematerialise
economy. One strategy for this seems a shift from an economy based on production and
consumption of physical products to a services-based economy.” (Goedkoop, Halen et al.
1999)
Based on this definition their exploration considered four viewpoints for product service system
assessment (Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999) economical aspects, ecological aspects, the company’s
identity and strategy, and the market acceptance.
As the German research community is coined by the funded research projects about hybrid products
like stated before, the following definition for hybrid products or solutions was developed in this
context:
“A hybrid product is a bundle of efforts, that represents an aligned combination of product(s)
and services(s), and that is adjusted to the individual customer needs.” (Translated from
German) (Burianek, Ihl et al. 2007)
An outline of several definitions of hybrid products and solutions can be found in Leimeister and
Glauner (Leimeister and Glauner 2008) and Schmitz (Schmitz 2008). Most considered aspects in these
definitions of hybrid products are
• the combination of products and services,
• the added value because of this combination (the solution is more than the sum of its parts) as
well as
• the adjustment of the hybrid product with the individual customer needs and additional value.
In this publication, we use the terms of Product Service System or PSS synonymously to Hybrid
Products or all the other terms stated before, because we focus on the common basis of both streams:
the combination and integration of products and services to a customer’s solution.
Characteristics of hybrid products
Mont (2002) identifies a “clear lack of common understanding of PSS elements” and gives an
overview on elements of PSSs. First of all, a PSS may consist of products and services in various
combinations. Other elements include services at the point of sale like personal assistance in shops,
financial schemes or marketing. Added to that, different concepts of product use, named product-, use-
or result-oriented (Tukker 2004) are an element of a PSS. Maintenance services with the goal of
prolonging product life cycles are the forth element. The last elements are revalorization services that
43

close the product material cycle by taking products back and utilization of usable parts in new
products and recycle of materials. Tukker provides a summary of various PSS classifications. He
identified three main categories of PSSs that are used primarily (Tukker 2004).
44
Figure 1: Main and subcategories of PSS (adapted from (Tukker 2004))
The first main category, product-oriented services, contains business models that are dominated by
product sales and some extra additional services. The second main category contains use-oriented
services. Thereby, the product still plays a central role but in contrast to product-oriented services,
however, the products’ ownership remains with the provider. This enables the provider to make the
product available in different forms and to various customers. Finally, result-oriented services
represent the third main category. Thereby, no pre-determined product is involved, because the
customer and provider agree on a specific result. Tukker mentions that PSSs in these main categories
are still very different with respect to their economical and environmental characteristics.
Product-oriented services can be distinguished in product-related services as well as advice and
consultancy (Tukker 2004). Product-related services include the sale of products with additional
services that are needed during the use phase of the product, like maintenance contracting, financing
schemes or the supply of consumables. In contrast, advice and consultancy include hints and
directions for the most efficient use, like organizational structure or optimizing the logistics, in
comparison to only sell a product.
Use-oriented services are product leasing, product renting or sharing as well as product pooling
(Tukker 2004). Because there is no transfer of the ownership from the provider to customer at product
leasing, the provider is also often responsible for maintenance, repair and control. The customer has
normally unlimited and individual access to the leased product. Product renting or sharing is quite
similar to product leasing, but differs by the access to the product. Unlimited and individual access is
normally not found in product renting and sharing. Here, the customer has to share access with other
customers, whereby the product is sequentially used by different users. Furthermore, product pooling
permits simultaneous use of the product.
Finally, result-oriented services can be distinguished in activity management and outsourcing, pay per
service unit and the agreement on a functional result (Tukker 2004). Activity management and
outsourcing means, that a provider delivers parts of activities or whole processes for a customer, like
office cleaning or catering. These services are assigned to this category, because most of these
contracts contain performance indicators for quality control of the outsourced services. Another
standard PSS category is pay per service unit. Here, the provider takes over all activities that are
needed to keep the product and services available and the customer only pays for the output of the

product. An example is a pay-per-copy unit function in offices that is already included in common
portfolios of most copier producers. Functional result is similar to activity management and
outsourcing, but adds technological independence. Tukker uses the example, that a provider does not
sell gas or cooling equipment anymore but “pleasant climate” (Tukker 2004). Thereby, the customer is
only interested in a specific climate and does not care what kind of technological system is applied.
Another approach for systemization of hybrid products is suggested by Burianek, who built up a fine
granular classification with seven categories to estimate the complexity of hybrid products: type of
customer value, scope of the output, number and heterogeneity of the subservices, degree of technical
integration, degree of integration into the customer’s value chain, degree of individualization, and
finally temporal dynamics and variability of the service provision (Burianek, Ihl et al. 2007).
The following section will introduce requirements for the development of hybrid products and
compare three methods found in literature to support the lifecycle management of hybrid products.
Benefits of hybrid products
The new trend of product-service systems promises potential benefits that range from economical
success for manufacturing and service providing companies to environmental and social gains. The
potential derives from changes in production and consumption patterns that might accelerate the
adjustment towards more sustainable practices and societies (Mont 2002). Thus the concept is a
special case of “servization” (Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007) that extends the traditional functionality of
a product by incorporating additional services by enforcing multiple stakeholders to jointly provide
processes that plan, design, develop, deliver and maintain integrated combinations of products and
services to embrace competitive strategies, environmental sustainability and differentiate from
competitors (Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007). Stakeholders of such processes can be manufacturing and
services companies. However the consumers play a more and more important twofold part, in
delivering and integrating knowledge into plan and design processes of product service systems and in
benefitting from highly aligned solutions. Furthermore, scholars see a macro-level potential for
governments, society and the environment. Consequently, benefits are grouped and described aligned
to stakeholders and beneficially affected macro-level entities; consistent to literature. Following
groups can be outlined: companies (in general), manufacturing and service companies, consumers,
governments, society and the environment.
Benefits for companies in general
Product service systems hold a variety of general beneficial impacts on companies, whereas one
company might be affected more than other companies, seeing the application as a centre of a new
business case and a survival strategy while the latter companies implement product service systems as
a natural extension of existing offers to customers and/or consumers (Mont 2002). Due to necessary
intensive collaboration between a providing company and consumers chances arise to develop durable
relationships that foster mutual trust and commitment on the organizational and personal level
(Schmitz 2008). This new relationship between companies and costumers/consumers cause an
efficient overcoming of existent information and incentive problems (Schmitz 2008), but also might
lead to possible costs. For Miller et al. (2002), product service system solutions must also deliver
benefits in form of expanded margins and volumes, stabilized revenues, differentiation from
competitors, and cross-selling opportunities. Further specific benefits arise for manufacturing and
service companies.
45

Benefits for manufacturing companies
For traditional manufactures the concept is claimed to provide strategic market opportunities (Baines,
Lightfoot et al. 2007) and display alternative ways to standardization and mass (customized)
production. The above mentioned influence of consumer decision making on plan and design phases
of the product life cycle exhibits alternative growth strategies in mature industries. In general, Mont
(2002) assumes an improvement of the total value for the costumer generated by increased servicing
and service components that enhance life cycles and functionalities of products. For a number of
scholars, product life cycles are expanded beyond the point of sale, making the entire product and/or
its components valuable through recycling processes or reuse, whereas other authors (e.g., (Mont
2002)) even see potential in take-back legislations turned into competitive advantages.
Benefits for service companies
Mont (2002) describes the increase of product component implementations for service companies as a
benefit in safeguarding market shares and certain quality levels. The former is realized by
implementing service components into the offer to exacerbate imitating and copying attempts of
competitors, while the latter needs to be established to assure a resistant high-level product quality.
Product components extend and diversify services and initiate a “materialization” of intangible
services to tangible products that are assumed to be superiorly communicable to costumers/consumers
in marketing and advertisement campaigns.
For consumers
Miller et al. (2002) combine potential consumer benefits to superior or simplified operations, cost
savings, performance guarantees, convenience, customized service, and state-of-the-art offerings.
Mont (2002) further lists the “greater diversity of choice in the market, maintenance and repair
services offerings, various payment schemes and the prospect to different schemes of product use that
suit consumers best in terms of ownership responsibilities”. The “servization” of products is assumed
to constitute an increased customization and flexibility, whereas the “productization” of services leads
to a deeper understanding of product service systems by costumers/consumers, as companies
superiorly market tangible products than intangible services. Continuative costumers/consumers even
learn about environmental features of products fostering new ways of contributions in minimizing the
environmental impacts of consumption. Furthermore, Mont (2002) proclaims that consumers are
disburdened from the responsibility for a product that stays under ownership of a producer for its
entire product life span.
Benefits for the environment
A vast amount of literature emerging from European countries describe major benefits for the
environment, as adoption of product-service systems might lead to reductions in used resources and
generated waste materials since fewer products are manufactured using fewer materials per use
(Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007). This assumption is based on an increased level of responsibility of
producing entities that close material cycles through take-back processes and newly introduced
alternative scenarios of product use, such as sharing, renting, and leasing schemes to
costumers/consumers (Mont 2002). Furthermore, scholars of this research stream predict an
incremental “dematerialization” of products which decrements material flows in production and
consumption, by “creating product and services that provide consumers with the same level of
46

performance, but with an inherently lower environmental burden” (Mont 2002). However, assumed
environmental benefits of improved technologies and offering schemes might be counteracted by
increased consumption (Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999). This phenomenon is usually referred to as the
“rebound effect” (Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999) which indicates that up streamed consumption might
counteract the efficiency benefits gained elsewhere. According to Goedkopp et al. (Goedkoop, Halen
et al. 1999) two factors can be distinguished that contribute to this effect: First, “general economic
theory predicts that the longer a product exists, the more items are produced. The product gets less
scarce. Often, the number of competing producers will increase. Additionally production costs will
decrease as result of economy of scale. Consequently, the longer a product exists the cheaper it
becomes and more people will buy and use it” (Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999). This element is closely
linked to the second effect, which states that “improvements that make products and services more
effective (e.g. energy consumption) will generally lower purchasing cost or operational costs. The
money a consumer saves will be spent elsewhere and reduced costs will attract new applications”
(Goedkoop, Halen et al. 1999). Solutions that address this problem need to include both production
and consumption patterns whereupon the focus has to shift to consumption patterns to adjust to
consumer’s needs.
Benefits for governments and society
A minor set of literature also describes possible benefits for governments and society. As mentioned
above, product-service systems might initiate a general rethinking which leads to a “new way of
understanding and influencing stakeholder relationships and viewing product networks which may
facilitated development of more efficient policies” (Mont 2002). A number of scholars (Mont 2002;
Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007) assume positive effects on job creation, as “a functional economy might
be more labor-intensive than an economy based on mass production”. This results in more jobs per
unit of material as take back systems such as repair, refurbishment or disassembly services expand the
product life cycle. However, one might argue that services offered as large-scale operations effect an
automatization which then may decrease employment (Mont 2002).
Barriers of implementing hybrid products
In the scope of this contribution the authors chose an approach to group barriers on a macro- and
micro-level, whereas the latter will be discussed according to specific phases of the product life cycle.
Two barriers exist on a macro-level. Scholars see a need for a social system or infrastructure that
“would accept or support the suggested product-service systems”(Mont 2002). Baines et al. (2007)
postulate a necessary “cultural shift”, especially in consumer minds to “place value on having a need
met as opposed to owning a product”. “Numerous examples of applications of product-service ideas in
the commercial sector did not facilitate operationalism in the private market” (Mont 2002) as
customers fail to be enthusiastic about ownerless consumption and provide a readiness to accept the
new concept. Parallel this reorientation needs to be reflected in the cooperate culture, market
engagement of companies from product to service sales and changing traditional marketing concepts.
It can be assumed that both shifts require time and resources to discard psychological barriers. Mont
(2002), for example, even sees a barrier in the variety of regulatory frameworks in different countries
and missing national and international reporting standards on product-service systems.
On the micro-level, companies face multiple barriers along the product life cycle. Companies are in
the need to built “competence of learning and working with the customer” (Ganz 2006), especially in
developing and advancing competencies of interaction with the customer/consumer (Ganz 2006);
(Miller, Hope et al. 2002; Mont 2002; Schmitz 2008). In addition, close cooperation with suppliers
47

and service producers need to be provided while parallel increasing qualifications of employees
(Meier, Kortmann et al. 2006). In the extreme these new forms of cooperation lead to value networks
that need to be built and managed. Problems may arise out of trade-offs between co-operation and
internal environmental management, information sharing, transparency and barriers in material flows,
according to Mont (2002). The above mentioned possible environmental benefits product service
systems might introduce are seen as a reason lengthening the time to market, as environmental
considerations need to be incorporate into the plan and design process. Another barrier found is the
difficulty to “develop scenarios of alternative product use because the often include elements that are
situated between production and consumptions” (Mont 2002). A clear distinction between processes is
therefore necessary. Baines et al. (2007) see three major barriers in the pricing structures of productservice
systems, firstly through the lack of experience of pricing of such offerings (Mont 2002),
secondly through the risks that fall back to the provider which were previously addressed by the
costumer (e.g. guarantee) and thirdly through the missing experience in structuring organizations to
organizational product-service requirements ((Ganz 2006; Meier, Kortmann et al. 2006)). Discussions
on the latter can be found in Galbraith (2002) while Bonnemaier et al. (2007) look into the subject of
pricing. The pricing problem is based on the “changeover from short-term profit realization at the
point-of-sale to medium- and long-term amortization periods at the point-of-service” (Mont 2002).
This factor is in line with the resistance of companies to extend their involvement with a product
beyond the point-of-sale (Mont 2002; Baines, Lightfoot et al. 2007).
Example: Off-grid Lighting provided by Osram
In today’s world about 1.6 billion people depend on fuel-based lighting because they do have limited
or no access to the electric grid, usually burning kerosene for light in different types of lanterns is the
only alternative. Based on an approximation by Osram GmbH (Osram 2008) in total 77 billion liters
of kerosene are burned every year for lighting, resulting in emissions of 190 Million tons of CO2 per
year. This application is not only very inefficient, but expensive, dangerous and poses a health hazard
for its users. Its main advantage is that it can be portioned and sold in small amounts, aligned to small
and irregular incomes. The company has recognized the problem and is providing a viable solution,
which is described in short: The heart of the off-grid solution is an energy hub which consists of
photovoltaic panels providing CO2-free energy and with an approximately 10 kW peak power. The
second function is a recharging battery unit, which is comparable to battery charging services
available in off-grid areas for some time now. The lightning products are continually exchanged for
the costumer to ensure maintenance and quality control which in turn leads to increased long service
life and recycling responsibilities of the hub provider. In a nutshell, the “keypoints of the system are
(Osram 2008):
• Efficient lamps or lighting systems using energy-saving compact fluorescent lamps and LEDs are
powered by rechargeable batteries.
• Customers return the standardized system to the hub and get a freshly charged system in
exchange. The customer pays only for the energy, echoing a great advantage of kerosene - light
can be bought in small portions according to available income. The 'deposit' for the system is
taken care of with microfinancing”.
Furthermore, the company soon realized that the hubs, which were originally designed to provide only
lightning infrastructure, could be beneficial to other services. The company installed integrated units
for water purification using special UVC-lamps. Thus it can be seen that the company is taking a
service- rather than a product-focused approach to provide off-grid solutions. On the background of
the above conducted summarization of benefits evolving from product-service system, three major
48

enefits can be outlined: the social situation of the customers undergoes major improvement by
reducing expenditure and reducing health hazards; environmental benefits are displayed in the shift
from CO2 emissions to solar energy and new business opportunities are enabled for Osram and its
partners. Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director, can be quoted
as follows “the innovation is not only providing an economic benefit for fishermen but a underlining
that small-scale solutions can be the fastest and most eco-friendly way of transforming the energy
needs of local communities.” (Osram 2008)
For a manufacturing company like Osram the introduction of off-grid solutions is a major expansion
of traditional product-focused business models.
In the following section we compare different methods that describe the development of hybrid
products.
Development of hybrid products – a comparison of different methods
Requirements for the development of hybrid products
As stated above, one of the main challenges of hybrid product development is to consider customer
individualization, which is often realized through integrating the hybrid product into the business
processes of the customer. This adaption requires a transformation from a transactional to a relational
relationship between vendor and customer (Galbraith 2002).
At the same time, standardization of non-differentiating parts of the hybrid product is supposed to be
obligatory for saving it’s profitability (Miller, Hope et al. 2002) (Sawhney 2006). Using the principle
of productizing customer specific solutions is a possible way to identify these repeatable and scalable
parts (Sawhney 2006).
The main difference to usual development processes is that the existing knowledge gained from
former solution projects is transferred into repeatable solution bricks. Therefore an important
requirement for the proposed productization is a systematic analysis of solution projects.
In the following section, these challenges are transformed into requirements for developing hybrid
products, such that customer individualization is considered. These identified requirements are then
used to compare different developing methods for hybrid products.
The most important requirement derived from these challenges is the reduction of complexity. This
reduction is reached through two strategies: Standardization and Bundling of performance parts.
Experiences in the field of products have shown that standardization at the stage of partial
performance facilitates the combinatorial flexibility to fulfill customer specific requirements (Baldwin
and Clark 2000). Therefore systematic decomposition of solutions into its parts, products and services
is requirement 1 (R1) (see Table 1).
Following the decomposition of reusable parts, the systematic bundling of these parts to modules is
the next logical step and requirement 2 (R2). Systematic bundling means that the recombination of
parts to modules must is conducted by the following rules. First, only parts that depend on each other
in a strong matter are selected and combined in common modules. Second, only a loose coupling
between these modules is allowed to maximize flexibility.
49

Hybrid products are predestined for standardization and reuse, because products and its’ services are
narrowly aligned to each other. This means that in the process of recombination, products and services
need to be integrated. Therefore an integrated view is required (R3).
R3 is connected closely to requirement 4 (R4). In order to be able to develop integrated products and
services, the process of communication between different engineering departments (product and
service department) needs to be supported (Spath 2005).
Another important feature derived from services is the integration of the external factor into
performance delivery, which is recognized to be contradictory to standardization (Kleinaltenkamp
2001). Therefore, standardization of integrated modules requires a systematic documentation and
encapsulation of customer individual partial performances (R5).
These first four requirements describe mainly the vendor view. Following the argumentation of Tuli,
there is also a customer view (Tuli, Kohli et al. 2005). In order to provide additional value for the
customer, the hybrid product must be configured customer individually during the bid process (R6).
Therefore all dependencies between modules and parts must be evident to the vendor, so that the
consultant in charge is able to choose the right module combination during the bid process. This also
allows the vendor to concentrate on the differentiating aspects of the customer individual hybrid
product.
Finally, it is very important to allow continual development of the hybrid product (R7), because only
this allows considering new and changing customer demands during the runtime of a hybrid product
contract.
Methods for the development of hybrid products
In the following section, we describe different methods for developing hybrid products. Subsequent
we evaluate them against the requirements declared above.
The SCORE method helps information technology (IT) solution providers to benefit from a successive
standardization and reuse of non-differentiating product service- bundles. As a comprehensive
standardization of IT solutions is likely to fail, the SCORE method supports the successive
modularization of IT solutions. In particular, the method suggests to identify system service modules
that capture single hardware and software components as well as associated services to support a
simultaneous standardization and reuse of product service bundles in little (Böhmann, Langer et al.
2008).
The SCORE method fulfils multiple requirements stated above. On the one hand it supports the
development of integrated products and services, because every built module consists of product parts
and services that are provided during the product’s lifecycle. Moreover, modules are linked to single
and grouped features that represent a customer added value, such that the customer does not choose
the product because of its characteristics, but because of the results that are promised by the features.
On the other hand, the SCORE method supports modularization. Every module represents a feature
group and is linked loosely to other modules. This loose linkage of modules provides flexibility and
improves customer integration by combining modules that are relevant to the customer’s
requirements. Additionally the SCORE method categorizes modules into four different types (process
module, system module type 1 and type 2, integration module), divided by degree of customer
integration and by degree of project integration. Although the SCORE method states that integrated
product service development and collaboration is important, no explicit recommendation on how to
support them is given. Furthermore, the SCORE method uses a different approach, considering
requirements engineering. As proposed by (Spath 2005) there is a requirements engineering phase at
50

first, where the hybrid product is being elaborated. After this phase, the developed hybrid product can
only be adapted slightly to individual customer demands during the bid process in terms of choosing
and combining already standardized modules to the customer’s individual product. However the
SCORE method claims that modularization is performed on successful projects, where experts decide
which individual project services and products have the potential to be implemented in other projects
(Böhmann, Langer et al. 2008). Both appendages, development from scratch and learning from
projects are reasonable. Therefore the SCORE method should be extended.
A conceptual approach for integrating products and services through service oriented architectures
(SOA) is described by Beverungen et al. (2008). There, the attempt to implement a SOA to provide
flexibility in terms of adoption of changing customer demands and modifying organizational
structures of cooperation is described. The introduced concept consists of three phases. The first phase
“preparation” is used to identify a first regulatory concept, which helps to obtain a business process
overview of the analyzed customer. The identified business processes must comply with certain
specifications (e.g. every function must contain the supporting information system, the degree of
automation and executing departments). In the phase “service analysis” business processes are
extended in terms of customer integration. In doing so every process function is examined, if certain
functions can be outsourced to a third party provider. Additionally these functions are examined on, if
information ought to be published. Additionally, only if process functions can be transferred to
another party (external factor), the service is further examined in terms of automation. If not, the
function is not being analyzed any longer. Only if the selected service can be automated it is
furthermore analyzed. There exist different other criteria that help to build services, but these are
mostly IT related (Legner and Heutschi 2007). In the last phase “service specification”, the identified
automated services are further categorized and correlated. The categorization is done by basic
features, whereas services are divided into basic services and process services. Basic services are
additionally divided into entity services and task services (Beverungen, Knackstedt et al. 2008).
The concept describes a way of how to formalize business processes and how to transfer them in a
form, which is computable. The SOA concept helps to develop integrated product service bundles in
some aspects. It shows that the classification of modules (services) is possible by identifying
interfaces between human resources or organizations, instead of products. Additionally, the usage of
SOA might be a way to overcome communication problems between different engineering
departments, because there is a clear definition of input and output interfaces. Moreover the
compatibility of the proposed SOA structure with BPEL (Business Process Execution Language)
allows integrating business processes of the customer in the development of integrated product service
bundles.
The framework for developing product service systems by Botta (2007) is another method to do
integrated product-service development. The connection between attributes and features is seen as a
key success factor for integrated product service bundle development. The development process is
considered as an iterative process starting with requested attributes for the product to be developed.
This list of requested attributes forms the basis (Botta 2007). Then, existing features are examined and
actual attributes are derived which mainly describe the behavior of the product service bundle.
Afterwards the requested attributes are matched against the actual attributes and further demand of
development is derived from this gap analysis. The process is reiterated until the gap analysis returns
minimal differences. Moreover the approach (Botta 2007) supports the building of components and
the description of dependencies between them. Synthesis, a central term in product development, is
considered as identifying all features that are required to solve a customer problem, whereas features
are described by attributes (Botta 2007). During the analysis process, which is conducted
complementary to the process of synthesis, actually implemented features are examined and attributes
are derived. The goal of this process is to verify the chosen features in terms of impacts and effects.
By introducing features and attributes and identifying relations between them, the art presents a way
51

to integrate products and services. At the same time it fails to give certain advice on how to integrate
the customer into the development or individual configuration of product-service bundles.
The article by Thomas et al describes a development methodology for product-service systems with
which the characteristics of material and service components can be systematically derived on the
basis of properties resulting from customer requirements (Thomas, Walter et al. 2008). Characteristic
for this development process is the fact that the fulfillment of the characteristics required by the
customer is not linked to a material or service component from the first. This happens during the
development process of the product-service system. The approach introduced here adequately
integrates existing approaches for product development and service engineering (e.g. (Botta 2007)).
At first, the authors present a regulation framework consisting of two nested circles (outer customer
circle and inner developer circle). The outer customer circle starts with a customer requirements
engineering phase, which then leads to activities, where target features of the to be hybrid product are
derived (part of the inner circle). These targeted features fully depend on customer requirements and
are therefore changed only once per run. The authors additionally suggest transforming the language
of the customer, which used to describe requirements into the developer’s language by using different
means (e.g. technical literature, domain experts). The following phase of synthesizing product and
service features is very important for hybrid products and conducted in two steps: The first step
describes the structure of features that define the subsequent hybrid product. In the second step these
features are related to attributes and classified by different criteria. The following phase of analyzing
the present attributes of the hybrid product is connected to the synthesis. There the present attributes
are elaborated and a gap analysis (e.g. usability test) is started to find the missing pieces between
targeted and present attributes of the hybrid product. After several iterations and if the identified gap
is small enough the hybrid is produced finally (Thomas, Walter et al. 2008).
The methods introduced above are compared in Table 1. As one can see, none of the described
methods fulfills all requirements.
52
Methods for
developing hybrid
products
Requirements for developing hybrid products
Decomposition
of partial
performances
(R1)
Systematic
recomposition
of partial
performances
(R2)
Integrated
product and
service
development
(R3)
Framework for
developing
PSS (Botta
2007)
Property-based
Design
Property-based
Design
Simultaneous
development
SCORE Method
(Böhmann, Langer
et al. 2008)
Delivery Elements
Modules and
module types
Module consists of
products and
services
SOA Method
(Beverungen,
2008)
service analysis
of functions
Definition of
interfaces
No particular
suggestions
Hybrid product
framework
(Thomas,
Walter et al.
2008)
Property-based
Design
Property-based
Design
Synthesis
Phase

Conclusions
Collaboration
support (R4)
Encapsulation
of customer
individual parts
(R5)
Customer
individual
configuration
(R6)
Further
development of
performance
parts (R7)
Multiple runs
Integrated
Solution
Integrated
Solution
LifeCycle
product
oriented
No particular
suggestions
Integration
Modules
Hybrid product
consists of
different modules
Explicitly
supported through
transformation of
SLM2 to SLM1
Definition of
interfaces
Classification of
functions
No particular
suggestions
Definition of
interfaces allows
independent
development
Multiple runs
Integrated
Solution
Integrated
Solution
Hybrid product
consists of
different
modules
Legend: Requirement fulfilled / Requirement partially fulfilled / Requirement not
fulfilled
Table 2: Comparison of methods for developing hybrid products
Although there has been a lot of research regarding product service systems, there are various aspects
that still present challenges for understanding hybrid products from the point of view of researchers
and practitioners.
One aspect not really understood, are the wide spread characteristics of hybrid products. How do
hybrid products targeted at consumers differ from those that are targeted at business customers?
Maybe, integration into business processes is a distinguishing feature.
Another aspect is the role of IT and IS in the context of hybrid products. Automation of services and
usage-based pricing call for a strong role of IT in hybrid products and drive the need for considering
the integration of IS development into the development process of hybrid products. Research is
needed where IT can take the role as facilitator as well as enabler in designing, managing and
delivering hybrid products.
A key factor for hybrid products is the flexible adjustment to customer needs, primarily targeted at
business customers. So the modeling and the architecture of hybrid products poses new challenges
that can not be answered solely by the models and methods from product, service and software
engineering. There is a need for models that consider the hybrid product and are able to map
requirements to the different parts of the hybrid product and are able to translate the “hybrid product
requirements” to product, service and software requirements. Another challenge is to track change in
this complex requirements network and respect the different characteristics of each part, regarding
costs, lifecycle and ability to change. For example if requirements change for the hybrid product, it is
more feasible to respond to those changes by changing the software or service, as it is to change the
product.
53

What are the requirements for the IS architecture of hybrid products, if they have to be easily
integrated into customers’ business processes? How do new organizational structures providing hybrid
products, especially value networks, influence the architecture of IS among the different players in
such a network?
Another question refers to the lifecycle management of hybrid products. Are traditional lifecycle
models appropriate for designing and managing hybrid products? Different components of hybrid
products have various lifecycles that are influenced by diverse internal and external factors. So a need
arises to model lifecycles for different layers of a hybrid product and to manage dependencies
between those layers and components.
54

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Abstract
Technology Acceptance Research – current development and
concerns
Mark Bilandzic, Uta Knebel, Daniela Weckenmann
Literature Review
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching
markbilandzic@gmail.com; {knebel; daniela.weckenmann}@in.tum.de
Technology Acceptance (TA) research is considered to be one of the most mature research fields in
the information systems discipline. TA research has produced several well-established acceptance
models, among them the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the relatively recent Unified
Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), that have been broadly used for a multitude
of IS research projects in many domains and contexts. However, various authors have raised heavy
concerns against past TA research lately, and demand major changes in or even a shift of existing
paradigms. Goals of this paper are: a) to provide an overview of established TA models and their
origins, b) to present major theoretical concerns and points of criticism associated with these models,
c) to give recommendations to researchers who might want to apply TA models in their research.
Development of Technology Acceptance Research
The goal of many information systems is to increase people’s productivity and efficiency by helping
them to perform specific task. However, a perfect implementation of a technical solution does not
necessarily mean that users will adopt and actually use the system. Technology acceptance research
examines how people come to accept and use a technology, i.e. an information system. There are
several theories and approaches to understand technology acceptance behavior. In this paper, we will
present two models in more detail: the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), because it is probably
the most well-known model in the field, and the recent Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of
Technology (UTAUT), as it comprises all of the other major models. We will also point out the
difference between utilitarian and hedonic system acceptance.
Technology Acceptance Model
TAM is being referred to as the most influential and commonly used theory in information systems.
Introduced by Davis (Davis, F.D. 1986), TAM bases on the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA)
(Fishbein, M./Ajzen, I. 1975) and suggests that the adoption of technology is determined by two
constructs in the context of personal salient believes: It introduces perceived usefulness (PU) and
57

perceived ease of use (PEOU) as direct determinants for the intention to use a technology and
consequently the acceptance and actual use behavior of people in respect to new technologies.
Historically, the TRA suggests that a person’s behavioral intention, which is assumed to be a key
driver for his or her actual behavior, depends on two constructs. The first construct is the person’s
personal attitude, i.e. the strength of intention to perform this behavior. The bigger his intention is to
perform a certain behavior, the bigger the chance is that he will actually do so. The second construct is
the subjective norm, i.e. the level to which the respective person believes significant others think he or
she should perform the planned behavior. One issue about the TRA is that it assumes behavioral
intention to be an exclusive determinant for a person’s actual behavior, ignoring the existence of
personal control over one’s actual behavior. Ajzen addresses this issue with the Theory of Planned
Behaviour (TPB), which links a person’s behavioral intention and the actual behavior, by introducing
a new variable “perceived behavioral control”. TRA and TPB have been introduced as theories to
explain general behavior intention and actual behavior and then been adapted to the context of
technology acceptance, which is finally represented by TAM. During the last two decades, many
studies have investigated and reiterated TAM in different domains and mostly agreed PU as well as
PEOU to be significant determinants for the people’s intention to use and actual use of technology.
Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT)
Over the past 40 years, several different models trying to explain technology acceptance were
developed and refined, leading to relatively unconnected and even “competitive” research approaches.
In an effort to harmonize these competing approaches and integrate the existing knowledge into one
powerful model, Venkatesh, Morris et al. (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003) proposed the Unified Theory of
Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT), a model of technology acceptance based on conceptual
and empirical similarities across eight widely used technology acceptance theories (for the theories
and their interrelations see Figure 1).
58
Figure 1: Models and Theories integrated in UTAUT (own illustration)
With UTAUT, Venkatesh et al. integrate eight previously established individual models on user
acceptance of information technology to one unified model by identifying common determinants and
moderators. After empirically analyzing and comparing the individual determinants of those models,
Venkatesh et al. identified similarities across the antecedents of behavioural intention and use
behaviour across all eight models (see Table 1) and compared the explanation power of these

constructs. As a result, they solidify the antecedents and their measurement scales and propose three
direct determinants for people’s intention to use (Performance Expectancy, Effort Expectancy, Social
Influence), and two direct determinants for their actual usage behaviour (Facilitating Conditions,
Behavioural Intention).
Table 1 Roles of determinants in existing models (own illustration)
Apart from the antecedents, UTAUT culminates up to four moderating influences from various
models on each determinant and its relationship to intention and usage of technology. Those for
example include demographic characteristics like gender and age, organizational context (mandatory
or voluntary usage) and user experience with the given technology. Figure 1 illustrates the elements of
UTAUT.
Performance Expectancy
Effort Expectancy
Social Influence
Facilitating Conditions
Determinants
Key Moderators
Gender
Age
Experience
Figure 1: UTAUT (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003)
Behavioral
Intention
Use
Behavior
Voluntariness of Use
Another outcome of their initial review is that five limitations in prior tests in terms of validating the
models exist. First, the technologies that have been studied are not as complex and sophisticated as
requested from companies. Second, participants of the studies mainly have been students and research
was not conducted using data collected in organizations. Third, there was no ideal timing of
measurement, because behaviour has already become routinized. Therefore the individuals were
already familiar with the system at the time of measurement. Fourth, measurement at different stages
of user-experience was missing in the studies. Fifth, the voluntary context of all studies is not
transferable to a mainly mandatory context in organizations (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003). In their
empirical test of UTAUT, they made efforts to address these limitations (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003).
As a result, UTAUT was able to account for 70 percent of the variance in usage intention (Venkatesh,
V. et al. 2003).
59

Utilitarian versus Hedonic Systems
The models described above explain user acceptance for productivity-oriented (or utilitarian)
information systems which aim to provide instrumental value to the user. From our point of view an
interesting element exists within research on hedonic (or pleasure-oriented) information systems.
Hedonic systems aim to provide self-fulfilling value to the user. In parallel to the research on UTAUT
van der Heijden (van der Heijden, H. 2004) studied the differences between utilitarian and hedonic
systems on the base of TAM (Davis, F.D. 1986), regarding the two constructs perceived usefulness
(PU) and perceived ease of use (PEOU). The interesting additional element is perceived enjoyment
(PE). This is defined as “the extent to which the activity of using the computer is perceived to be
enjoyable in its own right, apart from any performance consequences that may be anticipated” (Davis,
F.D./ Bagozzi, R.P./Warshaw, P.R. 1992). Figure 2 shows his research model.
60
Figure 2: Research model for acceptance of hedonic systems (van der Heijden, H. 2004)
Van der Heijden recommends transferring the results to utilitarian systems, because the construct
perceived enjoyment is regarded as important for productivity-oriented information systems. From his
point of view “it seems useful to embark on systematic research on how hedonic features could add to
the acceptance of utilitarian systems” (van der Heijden, H. 2004).
Current Developments and Status Quo of Technology Acceptance Research
Since the introduction of TAM by Davis (Davis, F.D. 1986), most of the work and research has been
conducted on little modifications, incremental tweaking and application of TAM to different domains
of IS. However the outcome of this work has only produced little additional knowledge to the original
version of TAM. Due to the many different TAM variations, there is theoretical confusion about the
importance of some determinants and influencing relationships in adoption research. Historically the
overall research on technology acceptance has iterated the original TAM model and extended to
various settings and domains. Today we have various slightly different models with an overall amount
of variables moderating the key determinants of user acceptance that has reached a number of 21
across all related studies in the last two decades (Lee et al. 2003). This has led to confusion for
researchers which adoption model to use for which of their use cases. The most recent development in
the TAM evolution has been reached with the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Usage of
Technology (UTAUT) (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003). UTAUT merges all previous theories and
evolutionary variations of TAM again into one unified theory. On the one hand the UTAUT approach
seems to be a progress, since it outperforms individual theories like TRA, TPB or TAM in predicting
user acceptance (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003), on the other hand it demonstrates the ironic evolution of
TAM: TAM originated as a simplified version of the TRA (Fishbein, M./Ajzen, I. 1975), and was then
adapted to the IT context by cutting down irrelevant determinants (Davis, F.D. 1986). From then on a
huge wave of studies applied TAM on different domains and created many variants of it (Benbasat,
I./Barki, H. 2007), reaching the latest development in technology acceptance modeling with UTAUT,
that tries to accomplish the exact reverse effect by unifying all individual theories again. Such
synthesises provide hints that the research field has reached a certain level of maturity, as many of the

ecent studies only propose replications and minor incremental extensions to the old models such as
TAM. This situation has raised much critique on technology acceptance research as a whole. In 2007,
the Journal of the Association of Information Systems dedicated a whole issue on theoretical concerns
with that model.
Theoretical Concerns with the Research Field and Evolution of Technology
Acceptance Research
Research on TAM has primarily focused on investigating which factors are responsible for people
actually making use or not making use of certain technology. Indeed many researchers agree that
TAM has essentially contributed to our understanding that certain determinants, namely perceived
usefulness and perceived ease of use highly influence people’s actual use behavior on new technology
(Bagozzi, R.P. 2007; Benbasat, I./Barki, H. 2007; Goodhue, D.L. 2007). Moreover, its key
determinants have been confirmed by various research studies in different settings and domains.
However, most recently in its evolution, the general research field on technology adoption which
mostly bases on TAM, has been widely criticized (Journal of the Association for Information Systems
2007) and referred to have lost track of its original research objective (Benbasat, I./Barki, H. 2007).
Rather than actually applying TAM as a tool to investigate what design artifacts facilitate the key
determinants of TAM, the main focus of studies in the area of technology acceptance has been put on
enhancing TAM as a model, e.g. reconfirming and expanding its key determinants such as perceived
usefulness or ease of use. However, the determinants themselves have been treated as a “black box”.
There is still a huge knowledge gap when it comes to explaining what IT artifacts and designs actually
facilitate the user to perceive a system as useful or ease to use (Benbasat, I./Barki, H. 2007; Goodhue,
D.L. 2007; Straub Jr., D.W./Burton-Jones, A. 2007). Thus, TAM research has only made little
contribution to generate practical knowledge how to build useful systems.
Analyzing the history of TAM, Benbasat and Barki (Benbasat, I./Barki, H. 2007) argue that the
direction of current research studies on TAM only create an “illusion of knowledge”, since they are
basically not providing any actionable advice towards design factors and paradigms how to create and
implement usable systems. Further research should rather investigate influencing factors and system
artifacts that lead to higher usability and perceived usefulness of IT systems. Future studies have to
find an answer to the question what basically makes systems useful and ease to use. This reorientation
of the research field should provide more radical outcome in terms of opening the “black box”. The
new focus should be in investigating the antecedents of the key determinants of perceived usefulness
and perceived ease of use, resulting in a set of applicable constructs and guidelines that informs
system designers how create and implement IT that is more likely to be accepted by users (Benbasat,
I./Barki, H. 2007; Goodhue, D.L. 2007).
Goodhue (Goodhue, D.L. 2007) even suggests going one further step back. From his point of view,
technology acceptance and actual utilization does not necessarily imply better performance. This
means that before even starting to worry about user acceptance of a particular technology, one should
rather think about the question if the technology in question would really increase peoples’
performance once it actually gets accepted and is utilized. If this is not the case, the question about
how to make users accept and use the technology becomes irrelevant. First, one rather has to figure
out how the technology can be adapted towards truly meeting the users’ needs in order to help them
achieving their task. Basically, Goodhue’s point with the task-oriented approach is that new
technology has to be adapted to users’ actual task, before questioning the causes of users accepting or
not accepting this new technology. He argues this limited focus on how to get people accept and
utilize a new technology to be a key shortcoming of TAM. It implicitly assumes that utilization of
61

technology automatically leads to a better performance, which is not always true (Goodhue, D.L.
2007).
Further criticism relates to the methodology used in nearly all studies in the field of technology
acceptance. The independent variables, i.e. perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use, are
mostly measured by interviewing users on their perceptions how useful and ease to use they found the
information technology in question to be. However, the dependent variable, i.e. the user’s actual use
behavior, is mostly gathered using the same method as for the independent variables, i.e. directly
asking questions to the user. Straub and Burton-Jones (Straub Jr., D.W./Burton-Jones, A. 2007) argue
this “common self-reporting method” used for gathering the independent as well as dependent
variables is very likely to create artificial correlations, which wipes out potential theoretical linkages
between them. For example, participants who find that a particular technology is not useful to them
are very unlikely to confess afterwards that they actually use it. This argument attacks the widely
assumed validity of the TAM (Bagozzi, R.P. 2007; Benbasat, I./Barki, H. 2007; Davis, F.D. 1986;
Venkatesh/ Davis/Morris 2007) and its relationship between perceived usefulness and ease of use on
the one hand and actual usage on the other hand. In order to confirm that perceived usefulness and
ease of use truly are determinants of actual use of technology, Straub and Burton-Jones suggest further
studies that carefully avoid such potential methodological artifacts. For information about actual
usage, they propose sources that can be tapped independently from peoples’ perceptions of usefulness
and ease of use. Such data sources could for example be data logs or other indicators of actual use
(Straub Jr., D.W./Burton-Jones, A. 2007).
Bagozzi (Bagozzi, R.P. 2007) proposes a foundation of a completely new paradigm for further
research on user acceptance. The idea is that behavior is the result of one’s individual decision making
process, whereas the decision maker is mainly driven by his personal goal-orientation. In other terms,
individuals decide to act in a way that the effect of their selected behavior helps them to reach their
goal at most. Such a goal-oriented approach assumes that people, who have set specific goals,
normally strive to achieve them, which eventually forms an intention to perform a specific action and
leads to the actual behavior towards achieving the predefined goal. This approach represents the core
of universal decision making processes and provides a basis to investigate causes and effects of
specific behavior.
Practical recommendations
Although a quite mature field in information systems research, technology acceptance research and
established technology acceptance models have been heavily criticized lately. However, the suggested
alternative research approaches are still rather abstract and do not present any concrete alternative
models. Researchers might find themselves in a dilemma, knowing the shortcomings of the
established TA models, but not having any alternative approach available. For those who might have
to or want to draw on the established models, we try to derive some recommendations that may help
them to reduce prevalent points of criticism.
Be aware that TA Models can only explain part of the story. All established TA models explain only
part of the variance in using intention – ranging from 17% to 70% (Venkatesh, V. et al. 2003).
Researchers should try to understand what other factors may influence using intention.
Apply multiple methods and measures to avoid common method variance bias. Measuring two
variables using similar methods introduces a bias in their observed correlation, inflating that
correlation above the true relationship. This threatens the validity of findings. Researchers should
therefore combine multiple methods of data collection. Regarding the measures, Sharma, Yetton and
Crawford (Sharma, R./ Yetton, P./Crawford, J. 2007) found some scales to be subject to less common
62

method variance than others. According to their analysis, researchers should prefer behavioural
continuous measures with open-ended numerical scales to Likert type scales often employed in TA
research.
Do not rely on self-reporting alone. Apart from self-reporting data, researchers may consider to
include system-captured data (e.g. log files, time records etc), which may be especially useful for
measuring system usage. System-captured data is assumed to be free of common method variance
biases (Sharma, R./ Yetton, P./Crawford, J. 2007) and could be used to check self-reported data.
Adapt usage measures to research context. TAM explains IT acceptance, but the DVs in TAM are
usage intentions and usage behavior (Davis, F.D. 1989). It is not clear that either of these constructs
completely captures the notion of acceptance (Trice, A.W./Treacy, M.E. 1986). Burton-Jones and
Straub (Burton-Jones, A./Straub Jr., D. 2006) argue that researchers should pay more attention to the
systematic development of usage measures in particular contexts. Their suggested 2 stage method
(Burton-Jones, A./Straub Jr., D. 2006) provides guidance on this.
References
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Bandura, A. (1986): Social Foundations of Thought and Action: A Social Cognitive Theory, Prentice-Hall,
Englewood Cliffs, NJ 1986.
Benbasat, I.; Barki, H. (2007): Quo vadis, TAM? In: Journal of the Association for Information Systems, Vol. 8
(2007) Nr. 4, S. 211-218.
Burton-Jones, A.; Straub Jr., D. (2006): Reconceptualizing System Usage: An Approach and Empirical Test.
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Compeau, D.R., and Higgins, Christopher A. (1995): Application of Social Cognitive Theory to Training for
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Findings of Mono-method Studies. In: Submission to MISQ, (2007).
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64

Requuirements
Engineerring,
Prot totyping aand
Evaluuation
in
IInformatiion
System ms Research
Inntroductionn
Marinaa
Berkovich, HHolger
Hoffm mann, Maximillian
Pühler
WWISSS²
Panel Paper P
Technissche
Universit tät München
Lehrstuhl füür
Wirtschaftsi informatik (I 17)
Boltzmaannstr.
3 – 857 748 Garching
berkovic;hhoffmanh;pueh
hler@in.tum.dde
Reesearch
in Infformation
Sysstems
in Germmany
is often n performed bby
constructionn
and evaluat tion of
arttefacts
like moodels
and prottotypes
(Frankk
2000). When
performing such design ooriented
resear rch the
woorks
of e.g. Alexander (11973);
Carrolll
(1989); Hev vner (2004); March (19955);
Markus (2002); (
Nuunamaker
(19991);
Owen (1997);
Simon (1996); Taked da (1990); Vaaishnavi
(20044)
on the creat tion of
arttificial
constrructs
for alteering
reality are part of the t key literaature.
Those works prese ent the
foundations
of design orienteed
research, inncluding
desc criptions of reesearch
framewworks
(e.g. (H Hevner
et al. 2004)) annd
the curse oof
research inn
detail (e.g. (Takeda ( et al. 1990)). Whaat
those gener ral and
unniversally
appplicable
descriptions
are – of course – missing, is a matching of
concrete, ex xisting
meethods
to the vvarious
steps in the researchh
process.
Foor
research inn
Informationn
Systems, taargeting
at ide entifying a reelevant
problem
in practic ce and
soolving
the prooblem
or imprroving
the ressults,
a match hing of methoods
and researrch
steps is needed, n
thaat:
allows the mapping of tthe
problem too
proposed solutions
(i.e. reequirements
enngineering),
lets l the
researcher
creatte
an artefact rrepresenting
tthe
solution (i.e.
prototypingg)
and enables
the quality control c
off
the artefact, wwith
and without
the aspired
user (i.e. ev valuation/piloting).
Figure
1: Mapping
methods/mmethodologies
to Takeda’s (1990)”Desiggn
Cycle”
Taakeda
et al (19990)
describe their design ccycle
with the following five
sub-processes:
1. Awareeness
of the problem: Picking
up a problem byy
comparing the object under
considderation
with tthe
specificatiions.
This is one o aspect of requirements engineering, where
the speecification
of tthe
desired obbject
is determ mined using vaarious
techniquues.
2. Suggesstion
of key cooncepts
needeed
to solve the e problem, andd
65

66
3. Development of artefact using those key concepts as well as various types of design
knowledge. If another unsolved problem is found it is added to the collection of problems
and is tried to be solved during another iteration of the design cycle. Prototyping can be used
as a methodology for those two sub-processes, since it enables the researcher to focus on
implementing the novel features of the system and allows an iterative approach for refining
the system between short build phases.
4. Evaluation of the newly created object in different dimensions. Mismatches e.g. between the
output and the initial collected problems indicate problems during development while
negative user evaluation can also indicate undetected problems or inadequate suggestions.
5. Conclusion which of the created objects to adopt and further adapt.
In the following sections we will give a short introduction to requirements engineering, prototyping
and evaluation research as well as an overview over the current publications and state of the art in
those fields. Therefore, for each section we first present a state of the art overview followed by a
discussion of ongoing research published in major A-journals blications.
Requirements Engineering
In this section we try to give a survey about the aspects of requirements engineering and also about the
methods and tools applied in RE. So, the first step is to clear what a requirement and so requirements
engineering is.
For understanding of requirements engineering it is important to define the term “requirement”. IEEE-
Standard IEEE 610.12-1990 (1990) defines a requirement as: „A requirement is a (1) condition or
capability needed by a user to solve a problem or achieve an objective; (2) condition or capability that
must be met or possessed by a system or system component to satisfy a contract, standard,
specification, or other formally imposed documents; (3) documented representation of a condition or
capability as in (1) or (2)”. For the literature review we selected the top 5 books on requirements
engineering.
The selection is based on the sales rank of Amazon. We have searched for "Requirements
engineering" and "Requirements management" and selected the books used in our review.
There are a lot of definitions of requirements engineering. Boehm (1979) gives the following
definition: „Software requirements engineering is the discipline for developing a complete, consistent
unambiguous specification – which can serve as a basis for common agreement among all parties
concerned – describing what the software product will do (but not how it will do it, this is to be done
in the design specification)“. Nuseibeh and Easterbrook (2000) mean that “ […] software systems
requirements engineering (RE) is the process of discovering that purpose, by identifying stakeholders
and their needs, and documenting these in a form that is amenable to analysis, communication, and
subsequent implementation.” Aurum and Wohlin (2005) define RE as a process referring “to all lifecycle
activities related to requirements”. This process consists of gathering, documentation and
managing requirements. Aurum and Wohlin (2005) distinguish four approaches for describing of
requirements engineering. Thus the process of requirements engineering can be described as linear,
non-linear, spiral or incremental form. For example, Kotonya and Sommerville (1998) present a
process of requirements engineering based on linear concepts. The phases of such a process are
connected by iteration. Macaulay (1996) suggests a linear process model without any interactions.
Also the non-linear models of RE-process are spread. These models differ from the linear models in

their iterative and cyclical nature (Loucopoulos 1995). The concept of the spiral model is handling the
requirements in each round.
Aurum and Wohlin (2005) classify the activities of requirements engineering into elicitation,
interpretation, analysis, documentation, verification and validation, but also change management and
requirements tracing. Sommerville and Kotonya (1998) define the process of requirements
engineering as a summary of activities similar to the definition of Aurum and Wohlin (2005). These
activities are requirements elicitation, requirements analysis and negotiation, requirements
documentation, requirements validation. Macaulay (1996) points out that “Requirements Engineering
is not an isolated front-end activity to a software lifecycle process”. She describes this process as “an
integral part of the larger process connected to other parts through continuous feedback loops”
(Macaulay 1996).
Requirements elicitation means the requirements to be determined. This activity is based on making
consultations with stakeholders, but also examining the system documents, market studies and domain
knowledge. The second activity aims at analyzing the requirements. This phase of requirements
process includes also the negotiations with the stakeholders to decide which requirements are to be
accepted. Requirements documentation means that the accepted and determined requirements to be
documented using natural language or diagrams. Within the process of requirements validation
consistency and completeness of the requirements are to be checked (Somerville/Kotonya 1998).
Approaches of requirements engineering
In this section we try to show some approaches of requirements engineering.
model driven
requirements
engineering
(Versteegen 2007)
visual requirements
engineering
(Versteegen 2007)
knowledge-based
requirement
engineering
(Versteegen 2007)
Model driven RE expands the ideas and concepts of a continuous modeldriven
software engineering to the requirement engineering. Model driven
RE is especially suitable for projects with frequent changes.
The principle of visual requirement engineering is to describe very complex
issues clearly. Visual RE primarily addresses specialist departments, which
write requirement specifications for software to be developed.
The goal of knowledge based RE is to identify flaws in requirements
specification in an early stage systematically. The knowledge base RE
analyzes natural language documents and identifies flaws through a
predefined set of verbs and keywords.
DisIRE (Geisser 2007) DisIRE is an abbreviation for "Distributes Internet-Based Requirement
Engineering" and it is a tool-based method for distributed, internet-based
Requirement Engineering. DisIRE is based on “theoretically founded and
empirically validated approaches of collaborative requirements elicitation”.
agile requirements
engineering (Eberlein
2002)
Table 1: Approaches of requirements engineering
Agile RE means that methods of requirements engineering are incorporated
into agile software engineering. Agile requirements engineering performs
the following RE concepts: customer interaction, validation and
verification, non-functional requirements and change-management.
67

Methods applied in the process of Requirement Engineering
The following section conveys a survey on the methods applied in the different phases of Requirement
Engineering. We define the phases of Requirement Engineering in this paper as follows
(Somerville/Kotonya 1998):
Figure 2: Phases of the Requirement Engineering process
The following aspects compare the different methods and techniques of RE according to the phases of
the Requirement Engineering’s process.
Requirements elicitation
Pohl (2007) points out the following aspects of requirements elicitation: the identification of
requirements’ sources according to the context of the developing system, the elicitation of existing
requirements and the development of innovative requirements. The methods applied for elicitation of
requirements are interview, workshop, observation and perspective based reading, also brainstorming,
prototyping, Mind Maps and checklists (Pohl 2007). Similar methods are also suggested by Aurum
and Wohlin (2005). They propose protocol analysis, apprenticing, goal based approach, scenarios and
viewpoints. Sommerville and Kotonya (1998) define three aspects of structuring the knowledge about
requirements: partitioning, abstraction, projection. The techniques suggested by the authors
(Somerville/Kotonya 1998) are interviews, scenarios, observation, and prototyping. They also mean
that requirements negotiation is just a part of requirements elicitation. As techniques for requirements
negotiation checklists and matrices are suggested.
Analysis & Negotiation of requirements
Conflicts between requirements are existing, because different stakeholders have different views on
the developed system. (Pohl 2007) The goal of negotiation of requirements is to dissolve these
conflicts by analysing the origins of conflicts, applying different methods for conflict dissolving. The
way of resolution of the conflict has to be documented. The techniques for dissolving the conflicts
described by Pohl are the win-win-approach that means to establish trust and willingness to
compromise among the stakeholders and interaction matrix that visualizes and also documents the
conflicts between the requirements. Schienmann (2001) also suggest the win-win-approach to support
the process of negotiation.
Documentation of requirements
Pohl (2007) suggests a natural based documentation of requirements. The applied methods are
different forms of specifications. He also suggests a model based form of requirements’
documentation. This form of documentation is based on modelling requirements with modelling
languages such as UML.
By adding a priority to each requirement the value of the requirements regarding defined criterions is
documented (Pohl 2007). Methods for requirements prioritisation are the following: Ranking, singlecriteria-classification
(mandatory, optional, nice-to-have), Kano-classification, two-criteriaclassification,
matrices of wiegers, cost-value-analysis and a combination of multiple prioritisation
68
requirements
elicitation
requirements
analysis &
negotiation
requirements tracing
requirements
documentation
requirements
validation

techniques. Aurum and Wohlin (2005) use the following methods for prioritisation: Analytic
Hierarchy Process, Cumulative Voting, Numerical Assignment, Ranking, Top-Ten Requirements,
Combining Different Techniques.
Validation of requirements
Pohl (2007) suggests the following methods for validation of requirements: inspection, reviews,
walkthroughs, perspective-based reading and validation through prototypes. Additional activities are
checklists and the constructions of artefacts. Schienmann (2001) sees the validation as part of the
quality-assurance. He proposes two types of validation-methods: review-techniques (inspection,
review, walkthrough) and user-oriented techniques (animation, validation through prototypes).
Sommerville and Kotonya (1998) suggest reviews, prototyping and testing. Rupp (2004) proposes
inspection, prototyping, walkthroughs and checklists as techniques for validation of requirements.
Requirements traceability
“An SRS is traceable if the origin of each of its requirements is clear and if it facilitates the
referencing of each requirement in future development or enhancement documentation” (IEEE 1990).
Pohl (2007) states that the traceability information can be represented as follows: textual references,
hyperlinks, traceability-matrices and graphs. Sommerville and Kotonya (1998) points out that “the
assessment of the impact of a change on the rest of the system” is a critical element in Requirement
Engineering. Thus the traceability means “the ability to describe and follow the life of a requirement,
in both a forward and backward direction, i.e. from its origins, through its development and
specification, to its subsequent deployment and use, and through periods of ongoing refinement and
iteration in any of these phases (Gotel/Finkelstein 1994)”.
Requirements Engineering - research in progress
As Damian et al. (2006) notice, “requirements engineering is an important component of effective
software engineering, yet more research is needed” in this field. (Damian, Chisan 2006) While
reviewing some of the most important literature sources 1 over a period of the last five years, one can
clearly see that there is a tremendous amount of ongoing research. However, research distributes over
a great amount of topics and issues ranging from fundamental discussions why requirements
engineering is an important field of research (Thomas, Hunt 2004) to best practices on how to provoke
more creativity. (Maiden et al. 2004) The following illustration gives an overview of the examined
literature. The numbers in brackets indicate the number of papers found in the particular topic.
Among the 60 papers discussing different aspects and topics of requirements engineering, seven
mainly address the question why requirements engineering is an important subject. While Anton
(Anton 2003), Dromey (Dromey 2006), Gonzales (Gonzales 2005), Spinellis (Spinellis 2007) and
Thomas (Thomas, Hunt 2004) present a more general discussion of this topic, Damian (Damian,
Chisan 2006) and Sommerville (Sommerville, Ransom 2005) provide empirical studies supporting
their statements.
1 Including all category A journals as proposed in WI-Journalliste 2008.
69

Figure
3: Currennt
research in requirementss
engineering 2
Cooncerning
thee
state of the art of requirrements
engin neering, Daviss
et al. (Daviis
et al. 2006)
have
coonducted
a dettailed
review of European literature. By contrast, Robbertson
(Robeertson
2005) focuses f
moore
on the inteerdisciplinaryy
aspects of thhis
field while Neill and Lapplante
(Neill, Laplante, Phi illip A.
20003)
are providding
insights in the state off
practice with h empirical woork.
Annother
fractioon
of authors is presenting best practice es and guideliines,
varying from a “systematic
appproach
for identifying
whiich
parts of thhe
world requi ire your attenttion”
(Jacksonn
2004) to a ir ronical
coolumn
on the state of practiice.
(Maiden 22007)
Some authors a like AAlexander,
Haagge
and Lapp pe, and
Juuristo
et al. (AAlexander
20006;
Hagge, LLappe
2005; Juristo et al.
2007) are ppresenting
co ommon
guuidelines
addrressing
the ttarget
“to immprove
require ements” (Aleexander
20066)
while othe ers are
sppecialized
intoo
specific objeectives;
provooking
creativit ty (Maiden ett
al. 2004), deeveloper
integ gration
(AAlexander,
Keent
Beck 20007)
and requirrements
engin neering in auutomotive
devvelopment.
(W Weber,
WWeisbrod
2003) )
2 In
70
ncluding all categgory
A journals as
proposed in WII-Journalliste
200 08.

The biggest group of researchers is working on different approaches for requirement engineering
purposes. In total, there are eight different approaches, discussed in 11 articles: Lan Chao and Ramesh
are discussing aspects of agile requirements engineering practices (Lan Cao, Ramesh 2008; Ramesh et
al. 2007), Geisser et al. are working on distributed internet-based requirements engineering (DisIRE)
(Geisser et al. 2007), Gonzalez et al. and Kavakli et al. on goal oriented requirements engineering,
(Gonzalez‐Baixauli et al. 2005; Kavakli, Loucopoulos 2006), Gordijn et al. are integrating “two
requirements engineering techniques, i* and e3 value” (Gordijn et al. 2006), Anton and Potts are
proposing functional paleontology as a means for reverse engineering (Anton, Potts 2003), Gault et al.
are discussing immersive scenario-based requirements engineering with virtual prototypes (Gault et
al.), Malcom “uses the discipline of "requirements engineering" to validate the use of Rapid
Application Development (RAD) techniques” (Malcom 2001) and finally, Natt och Dag et al. and
Sawyer et al. are discussing linguistic-engineering approaches. (Natt och Dag, Joachim et al. 2005;
Sawyer et al. 2005)
Thought stakeholders are the probably most important aspect in requirements engineering, only three
articles could be found dealing with them. With their “outcome‐based stakeholder risk assessment
model” (OBSRAM), Woolridge et al. developed “a step‐by‐step approach to identifying stakeholders
during requirements engineering”. (Woolridge et al. 2007) Decker et al. are proposing a wiki-based
approach for stakeholder integration (Decker et al. 2007) and Niu is focusing on developing
stakeholder consensus on software goals. (Niu, Easterbrook 2007)
Early phases of requirements engineering, especially the subject of requirements elicitation, are
discussed by Kandrup and Baniassad et al. (Kandrup 2005; Baniassad et al. 2006). In addition,
Alexander describes the usage of misuse cases in requirements engineering (Alexander 2003),
Robertson the importance of business cases and Sangsoo et al. provide insights into value‐innovative
requirements for unknown customers. (Sangsoo Kim et al. 2008)
After requirements have been elicited, the next major step is the documentation of those requirements.
Bontemps et al. are showing how to get “from live sequence charts to state machines and back”
(Bontemps et al. 2005) and Barbara Norden describes how to write good textual requirements.
(Norden 2007) Accessorily, Azar et al. are discussing how to prioritize requirements and Martin and
Melnik (Martin, Melnik 2008) are describing a method for writing early acceptance tests. (Martin,
Melnik 2008)
Concerning the validation of elicited and documented requirements, Gulla is proposing “a general
explanation component for conceptual modeling in CASE environments”. (Gulla 1995) The aspect of
tracing and tracking requirements is discussed in Dick, Vickers and Hayes et al.. (Dick 2005; Vickers
2007; Hayes et al. 2005)
Regarding aspects of computer supported requirements engineering, Maiden et al. discuss how
“mobile RE tools help elicit stakeholder needs in the workplace”. (Maiden et al. 2007) In addition,
Syeff et al. are addressing this subject by “implementing several requirements applications on mobile
devices.” (Seyff et al. 2006)
Finally, there is a set of miscellaneous and specialized topics given attention to in recent research.
Bhat et al., Damian, Gumm and Hanisch and Corbit are working on issues regarding global software
engineering. (Bhat et al. 2006; Damian 2007; Gumm 2006; Hanisch, Corbitt 2007) The management
of requirements for specialized purposes are covered by the work of Daneva (“ERP requirements
engineering practice”) (Daneva 2004), Kohl (“Requirements engineering changes for COTS‐intensive
systems”) (Kohl 2005) and Moon et al. (“An approach to developing domain requirements…”).
(Moon et al. 2005) Concerning special types of requirements, Regnell et al. are dealing with quality
requirements (Regnell et al. 2008) and Haley et al., Kablawi and Sullivan as well as Mellado et al.
71

(Haley et al. 2008; Keblawi, Sullivan 2006; Mellado et al. 2007) are working on security
requirements. Besides the pure existence of requirements engineering methods and approaches it is
crucial for its success to be well implemented in the organizational practice, a subject, Adam et al. are
working on. (Adam et al. 2008) Another approach, the usage of extreme programming, is proposed by
Drobka et al. (Drobka et al. 2004)
By taking the recent research in the field of requirements engineering into consideration, one can state
that this subject is largely diversified and there are a lot of open questions left. Especially the question
of implementing well working requirements engineering practices as well as issues of stakeholder
integration and communication are highly relevant issues to be worked on in future research.
Prototyping
When presenting a prototype to potential end users, developers can expect more detailed feedback on
several aspects of the prototype. This feedback by the user can range from new or clarified
requirements (Andriole 1994; Schrage 2004) up to an evaluation of the usability of a new system
(Sharp, Rogers, Preece 2007; Te’eni, Carey, Zhang 2006). Developers might also present a prototype
to support the choosing between several alternatives (Andriole 1994, p.3). There are different forms of
prototypes that can be built, depending on what aspect the developer would like to receive feedback to
(Floyd 1983, p. 6-12; Sharp, Rogers, Preece 2007, p.531-538).
Depending on the stage in the development cycle and the question that is tried to be answered,
different kinds of prototypes can come to use. The approaches for developing a prototype can range
from simple sketches on a piece of paper showing the usage scenario (“low-fidelity” prototype) to
software that is, in parts, functional (“high-fidelity” prototypes) (Sharp, Rogers, Preece 2007, p.531-
536; Te’eni, Carey, Zhang 2006, p. 308-309).
Low-fidelity prototypes don’t look very much like the final product, i.e. they just depict scenarios or
user interface designs. Those types of prototypes are rather cheap, simply built and easy to modify, so
they are useful for purposes of exploring new ideas and designs. This is especially true for early stages
in development. High-fidelity prototypes are closer to the final product than low-fidelity prototypes.
They are usually made using materials that one would expect in the final product, or for software
prototypes, already show interactive parts of the final system. Because of this close resemblance of the
final product, high-fidelity prototyping is used for presenting ideas to stakeholders as well as testing
the technical feasibility of certain aspects of the system.
Davis (1992) defines a prototype as follows: “A prototype is the partial implementation of a system
built expressly to learn more about a problem or a solution to a problem”. Riddle (1983) points out
that prototyping is an approach of software development that can be used as “a prelude to preparing a
version that is considered to be complete and fully certified”. A prototype is an immature version of
software that is used as a basis for assessment of ideas and decision. Also Floyd (1983) suggests that
prototyping is a part of software development methodology that provides means of communication
between developers, stakeholders, and environment. Prototyping base on four aspects as: functional
selection, construction, evaluation and further use (Floyd 1983). The first step, functional selection,
means the choice of functions to be introduced by prototyping. Construction means the effort to be
made in order to get prototype available. The next step is evaluation to be taken into consideration if it
brings benefits for next phases of the process. The further use of the prototype can have different
goals. It can be used for learning goals or it can be also a part of a future system.
Floyd distinguishes (1983) three approaches to prototyping: exploratory, experimental and
evolutionary prototyping. The approach of exploratory prototyping considers the aspects of
72

coommunicationn
between softtware
developpers
and users.
This approacch
focuses onn
the early pha ases of
thee
developmennt
process andd
can be utilizeed
in order to explore new aspects of thee
target system m or to
geenerate
new iddeas.
This forrm
of prototypping
is applied d in order to clarify requireements
of the e target
syystem.
Exxperimental
pprototyping
iis
applied to ddemonstrate
a proposed sollution
of a prooblem.
This form fo of
pr rototyping cann
also be consiidered
as an extending
part of the target ssystem’s
speccification.
The e phase
off
the developmment
involvinng
prototypingg
defines the role of the pprototyping
inn
the process. It can
serve
as a commplementary
fform
of specification,
a form
of refinemment
of the sspecification
and a an
inttermediate
steep
between specification
annd
implementa ation.
Evvolutionary
pprototyping
iss
one of the mmost
powerful approaches bbut
it is also very
remote fro om the
orriginal
meaninng
of a prototype.
Instead
of focussin ng on differeent
aspect of f a system lik ke the
exxplorative
or eexperimental
pprototypes
do, , an evolutiona ary prototype is improved aand
extended until it
reaaches
the finaale
functionality
of the targget
system. Th herefore, somme
authors arggue
that it sho ould be
caalled
developmment
in versionns.
Prrototyping
- rresearch
in prrogress
Prrototyping
is aan
important a
reqquirements
sppecifications
faiilures.”
(Daviis,
Venkatesh
doone
much earllier
in the sys
Veenkatesh
20044)
The follow
in software andd
system eng
research
journalls.
3
and relevant ffactor
during software s deveelopment
projects
since ”er rrors in
have been iddentified
as a major contriibutor
to costtly
software project p
2004) Therefoore,
the questi ion arises howw
“user accepttance
testing may m be
stem developmment
process than has tradditionally
beenn
the case.” (Davis, (
wing section prrovides
a glim mpse overvieww
of current pprototyping
re esearch
gineering by observing pu ublications ovver
the last ffive
years in major
Figure
4: Currennt
research in
ncluding all categgory
A journals as
proposed in WII-Journalliste
200 08.
ncluding all categgory
A journals as
proposed in WII-Journalliste
200 08.
3
In
4
In
prototyping 4
73

While considering those twelve publications concerning issues of prototyping in the context of
software and system development, on can identify three major topics of research: Prototyping
approaches, prototyping frameworks and platforms and the application of prototyping.
Berling and Runeson introduce “a systematic approach to the prototyping and the validation of a
system’s performance” (Berling, Runeson 2003). Shortly summarized, they are regarding prototyping
and evaluation as experiments and have confirmed their approach by conducting case studies.
Lancaster is proposing paper prototypes as a means of user interface development (Lancaster 2004).
Regarding the development of frameworks and platforms, Broil et al. are proposing an augmented
reality framework for rapid prototyping purposes (Broil et al. 2005), Athanasas and Dear are dealing
with “complex vehicle systems (CVSs)” (Athanasas, Dear 2004), “prototyping systems that are used
to demonstrate a new functionality inside a prototype vehicle” (Athanasas, Dear 2004), and Wang and
Yang are discussing the “design of a rapid prototype platform for ARM based embedded system” (Rui
Wang, Shiyuan Yang 2004).
The application of prototyping techniques is discussed in Amouh et al. (Amouh et al. 2005) who have
developed a clinical information system. Li et al. are using virtual prototypes for “design verification
and testing of power supply system” (Li et al. 2003) and Furse et al. are using “simple inexpensive
prototyping” (Furse et al. 2004) in a teaching environment.
Accessorily, to the previous described issues on prototyping, Serich is discussing the application of
prototyping in software projects and in which situations one would be well advised to avoid
implementing this technique (Serich 2005). Finally, Davis and Venkatesh are underlining the
necessity of early user acceptance test (Davis, Venkatesh 2004), which current prototyping techniques
do not sufficiently support.
Evaluation Research and Piloting Artefacts
In the following paragraph we present the methods and means for determining the outcome of the
requirements engineering process or the prototyping process respectively. This is one of the central
building blocks in the scientific community, no method or artefact should be presented to the
community without a proper evaluation.
The terms evaluation and evaluation research are used in multiple different meanings, e.g. it is used in
everyday language to specify an assessment of value, a technique for the assessment or the specific
actions taken to quantify the value. In the context of information systems research we are talking
about the assessment of constructs (e.g. methods and artefacts) by an evaluator that has specific
knowledge needed to perform this task. The methods used for evaluation have to be objective and be
grounded on justification criteria and standards (i.e. the rationale behind the criteria can be stated)
(Kromrey 2001; Weiss 1974).
While this narrows down the meaning of the term “evaluation” there still is a multitude of instances of
evaluation science. Chelimsky (1997) thus propose three paradigms as classification schemes for the
different types of evaluation based on the evaluation’s purpose, Stockmann (2007a) describes similar
purposes and adds a fourth one:
74
1. evaluation for accountability (Kromrey (2001), Stockmann (2007a): control purposes)
2. evaluation to support the development
3. evaluation to extend the knowledge base (Stockmann (2007a): findings)

4. evaluaation
to legitimmate
an artefacct
or measure
Figure
5: Purpooses
of evaluattion,
based onn
(Chelimsky 1997; 1 Kromreey
2001; Stockkmann
2007a) )
MMost
of the avaailable
literatuure
concerningg
evaluation is
written fromm
a social reseearch
viewpoi int and
thuus
describes aand
employs mmethods
fromm
empirical soc cial research ( (Stockmann 22007b;
Weiss 1974).
Thhe
hypothesis being tested iin
such a settiing
is “Does the t artefact acccomplish
the tasks it is sup pposed
to accomplish?” ”. This leads tto
three differeent
potential classes c of resuults
(see. Figurre
3).
Figure
6: Possibble
courses of f an evaluationn
(Weiss 1974 4, p.63)
Thhis
model is innsufficient
for
the evaluatioon
of artefact ts in design baased
IS researrch
since the central c
pa art, the designn
that creates the artefact iin
the first pla ace, is not beeing
considereed.
However, Weiss
(1974,
p. 22f) aalso
writes, thhat
the purpose
of evaluati ion is to bencchmark
the efffects
of an artefact a
aggainst
the goalls
it meant to achieve not oonly
in order to help the ddecision
makinng
process (se ee Fig.
X) ), but also to iimprove
futurre
planning of f the program. The latter inttent
indicates tthe
flux of (de esign-)
infformation
intoo
a next designn
phase.
Thhis
utilizationn
of evaluatioon
for assessmment
of the “pre-artefact” ” phases is thhe
main thou ught of
Heeinrich
and PPomberger
(20000).
They prropose,
that the
evaluationn
of a prototyype
can be us sed for
reqquirements
enngineering
by making detailled
textual req quirements specification
obbsolete.
The fa act that
thoose
prototypees
can be usedd
to test certain
functionalit ty with potenttial
users in thhe
aspired fiel ld is of
sppecial
interest for computeer
science as well as IS re esearch. Reseearcher
are abble
to perform m very
focused
evaluattions,
e.g. of a system’s ussability
(Niels sen 1993)(USSABILITY
TEESTING)
or look l at
thee
impact of thhe
artefact in thhe
field on a bbroader
basis using pilot stuudies.
Acctivity
theory emphasizes tthe
fact, that aartefacts
that are a being put to use directly
by a human n, have
whhat
a Bannonn
call a “doubble
character” (1991). Artef facts themselvves
can be reflected
on, bu ut they
75

also mediate the users’ activities with the environment. When evaluating this mediating character of
artefacts the evaluation should take place in the aspired field and with the aspired users
(Schwabe/Krcmar 2000), piloting the artefact. The fundamentals of pilot projects were described by
Szyperski (1971) and Witte (1997) with a focus on the use and usage of new technologies.
Instantiations of pilot project research can be found in (Schwabe/Krcmar 2000), focusing on the
support of city council work, and in (Leimeister/Krcmar 2006), focusing on virtual communities.
Using either approach, i.e. “just” evaluating the artefact against the requirements or evaluating the
artefacts use (and thus also evaluating the requirements), leads to an assessment of the artefact in the
chosen setting as well as input for further iterations of the design oriented research model.
(Abdi‐Jalebi, McMahon 2007)
Conclusion
In this paper we conveyed a survey on the approaches of the requirements engineering, prototyping
and piloting. We have analyzed the most relevant literature and we took a look at the publications in
A-journals proposed in the “WI-Journalliste 2008” of the last five years. In this way we were able to
get the most popular approaches and the most recent research works.
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Performance of Information System
Bögelsack, A.; Jehle, H.; Gradl, S.; Kienegger, H.
Literature Review
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching bei München
{boegelsack, jehle, gradl, kienegger}@in.tum.de
1 Introduction - “If you can’t measure it – you can’t manage it”
(Peter F. Drucker)
To make use of the term “performance”, we need a rating system for performance (Lilja
2000). Thus, the performance can be classified and ranked in metrics to be analyzed,
compared, optimized and used for prognosis. The next chapter will introduce some terms
used by performance metrics and for collecting performance data (Perlis et al. 1981). After
that, performance evaluation will be used to provide key performance indicators for complex
IT-systems (Lucas 1971).
At first, we need to define the term performance. Performance describes the systems
capability to execute given tasks in a given time (John/Eeckhout 2006). The more tasks of a
fixed type a system can finish in a fixed period of time, the higher is its’ performance
(Schmietendorf/Dumke 2003). In the beginning of the development of computer systems, a
systems performance was given by the theoretical reachable number of calculations the
system can perform in a period of time. This method turned out to be not significant because
the systems peripheral architecture may prohibit the execution of tasks at full speed
(Buhr/Fortier 1995). Thus, the process of collection performance data was changed soon to
measuring methods, running special programs to execute tasks and mark the needed time. If
this method is used in order to achieve the highest possible performance value, the reached
performance value is called benchmark (Hoetzel et al. 1998). The term benchmark is the first
example of an introduced metric. The highest possible throughput of tasks in a time is the
most describing value known for IT-systems capabilities. It is used by hardware vendors to
compare their products with competitions ones. Software developers and vendors use
benchmarks to specify the requirements for their product. System landscape designers use
benchmark values for sizing it infrastructures for future needs. As shown above, benchmarks
are often used by different prospects, but measuring performance data is a non trivial task in
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most cases (Gmach et al. 2008). That is why only few prospect do really measure the
performance and thus collect own benchmarks, most others rely on collected data by others.
In most cases, the benchmark is measured by hardware vendors. Their main focus is to get
out the highest possible value of any benchmark, to survive any comparison with the
competition in the best way. To achieve this, they optimize the measured systems up to
unusable configurations for the every-day usage what makes the collected data true but
meaningless for the operative usage (Saavedra/Smith 1996).
One way to achieve realistic data of the systems performance is to execute representative
tasks of everyday usage of the system and measure the taken time for it on the one hand and
observe the systems status while execution on the other hand. Representative tasks must be
determined by hand. This is often done by taking a detailed look at the logfiles of a system.
It is also possible to take statistic excerpt of so called monitoring-data (see below). After
finding a sequence of often used tasks, this sequence can be defined as the individual
reference-load for the examined landscape. The execution time of this reference sequence
can now be optimized for maximum speed or for optimal resource usage. Optimizing for
maximum speed will generate an individual benchmark – it may be incomparable to other
landscapes, but – if the reference-sequence is well chosen – it is a very good value to
compare own systems during the lifecycles and change-processes (Lacey/Macfarlane 2002).
Optimizing the resource usage of the examined system needs the observation of the systems
status. The systems status is collected and visualized in so called monitoring systems
(Buhr/Fortier 1995). Monitoring systems do not estimate the systems overall performance
capabilities but the do collect performance values by raising relative systems load data.
Therefore, the target system of measuring runs a special program (which must be designed
very efficient and slim to not disturb the collected data) which reports the systems status to a
central database. The data collector on the target system will report actual resource usage
like CPU or memory utilization, load of the input/output system like storage and network or
even internal statistics like cache hits or misses of database systems. The central database of
the monitoring system will generate an aggregated view to display the systems status but
also offers detailed views to the systems components (Wilhelm 2003).
Observing the systems status while running different tasks can reveal bottlenecks of the
utilized resources – on the other hand it shows the remaining reserves on resources while
handling every days’ workload. Comparing the resource usage for a reference workload
sequence, while not running for maximum throughput, is called baselining (Lucas 1971). It
helps to assure the expected systems behavior after change-processes at the systems
configuration.
As mentioned before, benchmarks are often used by hardware vendors as metrics to solicit
their products, but these benchmarks are often useless for everyday usage. Contrariwise,
individual benchmarks and baseline-values are a good option to provide data for managing
IT-Landscapes. Measuring the resource utilization used to provide the required services is
one step towards the assignment of cost drivers inside the IT infrastructure. On the other
hand, the utilization of resources shows up the efficiency of the IT infrastructure and thus
can be used as key performance indicator (Berler et al. 2005).
Thus, detailed measuring the systems performance is the first step to reveal relevant data for
managing the infrastructure.
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2 Performance in the field of simulation
Starting with the performance results the next step is the system analysis. Therefore the
measurement results are leading to the field of performance estimation of not yet installed
systems. When talking about service oriented architectures these results may be used for a
performance estimation of business processes consisting of a number of partly composite
services. To estimate the performance of those so called composite applications it is an
important step to measure all the combined services. But following the General Systems
Theory by Ludwig von Bertalanffy, published in 1968, it is not enough to describe all the
parts of a system as “the first step is the study of the system as a whole” (Coarfa et al. 2006).
So, “We are forced to deal with complexities, with “wholes” or “systems” (Coarfa et al.
2006) as ”The constitutive characteristics are not explainable from the characteristics of
isolated parts”.
In (Coarfa et al. 2006) another method for performance analysis is given. The paper states
out that current research is not only dealing with simulation of complex computer systems
but with analyzing them. Analyzing is the first step in simulation on computer systems or
information systems.
Another aspect of current performance research is shown by (Denaro et al. 2004). Here, the
measurement of computer systems is not used for creating a model. It is stated out that “In
the long term and as far as the early evaluation of middlewares is concerned, we believe that
empirical testing may outperform performance estimation models, being the former more
precise and easier to use” (Denaro et al. 2004). The statement shows the current progress in
performance research concerning complex systems. Different research groups try to reach a
similar aim: managing information systems.
To describe systems as a whole on a different level, in research petri nets are widely used as
they have “equal shares of declarative (i.e. place) and functional (i.e. transitions)
subrepresentations” (Fishwick 1992). But as the complexity and the size of the systems are
raising permanently, those descriptions and models become very hard to handle. Simulations
based on these big and complex descriptions are often very hard to be computed. They “can
[…] require fantastically large computing resources” (Nicol 2008). It states that simulations,
once implemented, can “simulate the overall system, but this can be very time consuming”
(Ledeczi et al. 2003).Current research is dealing with making those simulation algorithms
more efficient, so the simulation does not require that many resources. Another opportunity,
making the simulation more practicable, is simplification of the models. Current research is
trying to convert very complex models into smaller ones without loosing any information or
modeled details. (Nicola and Nitsche 2008) Another point of interest in current research is
the power of the modeling languages. It is often impossible to describe the system as a
whole. To get a detailed overview about the systems, researchers simulating the system quite
often so they can have a look at the system from different perspectives in order to get a full
representation of the object. This leads to the point that “developing a single embedded
application involves a multitude of different development tools including several different
simulators. Functional simulators are used to verify that the selected algorithms do indeed
result in the desired system behavior. High-level performance estimators can be used to
obtain early system wide performance numbers. Cycle-accurate simulators are used to obtain
accurate performance estimates for individual system components” (Ledeczi et al. 2003). In
(Matloff 2005) another popular approach to the description of information systems is shown.
It is about the estimation by indirect or secondary data. The approach uses statistical
83

assumptions like Poisson to build estimators to describe one detail of a very complex system
e.g. file-access and modification rates in the internet. The accuracy of these estimations is
another point of interest in current performance research. As those estimators can also work
well when working with non-Poisson web data on which the tests are based on.
3 Performance Aspects in the Context of Service-oriented
84
Architectures (SOA)
Performance can mean different things in different contexts. In general, it is related to
response time (how long does it take to process a request), throughput (how many requests
overall can be processed per unit of time), or timeliness (ability to meet deadlines, i.e., to
process a request in a deterministic and acceptable amount of time) (Drummond 1969).
Comparing former IT architectures with the here discussed service-oriented architecture
shows us new performance aspects. Especially the introduction of new components (e.g. the
SOA Stack) is combined with new uprising challenges. In this special case, we focus on the
performance aspects in context of SOA. Figure one is showing us some performance aspects
that will be discussed later in this chapter.
Application 1 Application 2
SOA
Application 1 Application 2
Stack
data transfer
Figure 1: Performance aspects
- Standards
-Network
- Process Orchestration
- Service Providing
In most cases, performance is negatively affected in SOAs. The architecture should be
carefully designed and evaluated prior to implementation to avoid performance pitfalls
Integrating real-time information from different systems brings real advantages, but they are
offset by the extra time it takes to bring the information together (Gmach et al. 2008; van
Oosterhout et al. 2006).
SOA involves distributed computing. Service and service user components are normally
located in different containers, most often on different machines (Gmach et al. 2008;
Siedersleben 2007). The need to communicate over the network increases the response time.
Typical networks used for SOA, such as the internet, do not guarantee deterministic latency.
Therefore, SOA is not considered a feasible solution for real-time systems where timeliness

is a strict requirement (Colajanni and Yu 2002; Jin and Nahrstedt 2008). SOA presents
challenges for near real-time systems, where latency is not a safety-critical requirement but
rather a business one (i.e., meet business goals) (Yu et al. 2007). For a heavily used service,
many queued requests may already be outstanding, and they are usually serviced in a FIFO
manner. Such a situation can have a significant impact on latency, though it can still be
predicted stochastically. However, if more queue space has to be created dynamically,
latency will be impacted further.
The ability to make services on different platforms interoperate seamlessly has a
performance cost (Jin and Nahrstedt 2008). Intermediaries are needed to perform data
marshalling and handle all communication between a service user and a service provider.
Depending on the SOA technology or framework being used, stubs, skeletons, SOAP
(Simple Object Access Protocol) engines, proxies, and other kinds of elements are in place.
All such intermediaries negatively impact performance (Oosterhout et al. 2006).
Using standard based web services removes much of the complexity and lock-in of earlier
integration platforms, but existing infrastructure is ill-equipped to handle the extra overhead.
The performance (response time) of web services is typically worse than the bare underlying
functionality. This is due to and compounded by the overheads of XML (e.g. delivery,
parsing, validation, serialization), the implementation of composite services (e.g. use of other
services including 3rd party services and legacy applications), service orchestration
(infrastructure and protocols), service invocation (e.g. security, transports), resources
(physical or software resources, e.g. CPUs, threads), and resource models (e.g.
virtualization). Optimally allocating resources to services is also difficult, as resources may
not be correctly distributed, and individual services in a workflow for which there is high
demand, may become bottlenecks due to resource constraints (Zeng et al. 2004).
Using orchestration and services can affect the performance of the total system. Nowadays
BPEL (Business Process Execution Language) mainly is used for defining the orchestration,
WSDL (Web Service Description Language) for defining the service interface and SOAP for
defining the messages. All these standards are XML based (Papazoglou and van den Heuvel
2007). This makes them ‘human-readable', but also creates a lot of overhead for system-tosystem
communication. Imagine the difference in performance between a Java function call
(which is compiled into byte code) and a service invoke sending a SOAP message over
HTTP. Conclusion: the higher the granularity, the more SOAP calls are needed. More SOAP
calls means a lower performance (Winkler 2007; Yu et al 2007).
85

86
Figure 2: Overview of issues in service identification
Figure 2 summarizes the issues in service identification. Neither try to see relations between
distances and curves nor search for scientific foundations, the Figure just attempts to clarify
how they relate. On the x-axis the granularity is shown. From left to right the granularity
increases meaning that the services become smaller. On the y-axis the four issues are shown.
Low and high complexity, flexibility and performance are straightforward. By a high reuse
the percentage of services that are used in more than one orchestration is meant.
4 Performance in the context of ERP systems
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems are an essential part of the infrastructure to run
and support a company’s business processes. Hence, it is important that the performance of
such ERP systems is suitable and does not affect working capabilities of the users, e.g. in
waiting for the system situations. Many works have focus on such influences – they all
focused on the user performance in the ERP system, which actually means: how does the
user perform in the ERP system. Beside this performance understanding there is another
performance which is not considered extensively in the literature so far. This is the
performance of the ERP system itself.
Before the performance of an ERP system may be discussed, we should consider the
architecture of an ERP system. The ERP system may be described as a huge software
system, consisting of several different software components. After the idea of service
oriented architectures becomes more and more reality, the complexity and intricacy of ERP
system grow significantly. On the one hand this is because of the distribution of software
components in several software landscapes and on the other hand because of the
heterogeneity of the components. This complicates performance measurements of ERP
systems.
Beside this we should consider another trend which has consequences on ERP system:
virtualization. Virtualization was firstly introduced in the IBM mainframes world as the early

VM/370 systems were developed (Creasy 1981). The theoretical fundament of virtualization
was developed by Popek and Goldberg (Goldberg 1973 and Popek et. al. 1974). The theory
mentioned a mapping component, which is responsible to map virtual resources to real
existing resources. In today’s virtualization solution this mapping work is done by an
additional software component, called the hypervisor. After running dry in mainframe’s
world in the 1980s, in the 1990s a software company called VMware started the
virtualization trend again. This time they applied virtualization not to the mainframe world
but to the personal computer world (Walters 1999). Today a lot more virtualization solutions
in the near of VMware and conceptually far away from VMware are available on the market.
The importance of such virtualization technique grows enormously (InfoTech 2007). With
the spreading of virtualization, different types of virtualization were developed to satisfy
special requirements (full virtualization, paravirtualization as well as hybrid virtualization
solutions). So when coupling this virtualization trend with the complexity and intricacy of
ERP system, the question is how does virtualization influences the performance of ERP
systems?
Often the hypervisor is a starting point for extensive performance measurement tests:
Apparao et. al. 2006, Barham et. al. 2003, Bhargava et. al. 2008, Cherkasova et. al. 2005,
Huang et. al. 2006, Young 2006, Matthews et. al. 2007, Menon et. al .2005, Ongaro et. al.
2008, Soltesz et. al. 2007, Whitaker et. al. 2002, Youseff et. al. 2006. Till today different
performance measurement projects focused on the hypervisor and tried to determine the
influences on the performance of software or hardware running on top of the hypervisor by
testing the hypervisor indirectly. It is not possible today to test the hypervisors’ mapping
functionality directly. In fact, the mentioned papers focused on very special performance
tests:
� Whitaker et. al. 2002 focused on the performance of a self-developed
paravirtualization solution by applying some throughput benchmarks to their
system.
� Apparao et. al. 2006 characterized the network processing overhead in a
paravirtualization solution be using a TCP/IP performance benchmark.
� Barham et. al. 2003 used SPEC INT2000, SPEC WEB99 and some other
benchmarks to evaluate the performance of their paravirtualization solution.
� Bhargava et. al. 2008 had a look onto the memory management of a
virtualization solution by comparing different memory benchmark results.
� Cherkasova et. al. 2005 focused on the CPU overhead for I/O processing in a
paravirtualization solution. They used an I/O benchmark for this.
� Huang et. al. 2008 analyzed the performance overheads in a paravirtualization
solution for a high performance computing environment.
Till today nobody focused on more complex software systems, like ERP systems.
A common accepted way to measure the performance of an ERP system is by applying
benchmarks to the system. These benchmarks measure the capability of the ERP system to
handle massive data load and a growing set of users. One example for such a benchmark is
the SAP SD benchmark. Hardware as well as software vendors use this benchmark to
demonstrate the performance of their hardware or software (like operating system vendors).
Of course there are some commercial tests available, where virtualization was used. For
example: we discovered 14 certified SAP SD benchmark results where the virtualization
87

solution from VMware was used. But unfortunately there are no direct comparisons between
a virtualized and a non-virtualized SAP system available.
So the main question is now: what happens to the performance of such huge software
systems, when applying a new software layer (hypervisor) to the architecture of the system
compared to the same ERP system without this additional software layer? Does it influence
the performance of such systems positively or does it have a negative impact on the
performance? From the papers above we know that virtualization always have an impact –
no matter if positively or negatively. Following this question our expectations would be as
follows:
� Performance of ERP systems is partly positively affected by virtualization
techniques – Simple experiments show, that additional buffers can accelerate the
performance of ERP systems.
� Overall performance (especially when dealing with extensive performance tests)
will be decreased by virtualization.
� We expect a scalability effect where the hypervisor is not able to handle
increasing load fairly.
� There may be other impacts o the ERP system that we cannot know yet.
88

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90

Introduction
Workflow Management in Healthcare
Mauro, C.; Mayer, M.; Rathmayer, M.; Sunyaev, A.
Literature Review
Technische Universität München
Lehrstuhl für Wirtschaftsinformatik (I 17)
Boltzmannstr. 3 – 85748 Garching
mauro, manuel.mayer, sunyaev@in.tum.de
m.rathmayer@meierhofer.de
In the area of healthcare workflow management systems (WfMS) are utilized as in other industrial
areas to automate business processes, e.g. the flow of patient records, patient billing, resource utilization
and other processes which need information from the overall treatment process (Murray 2003).
Clinical Guidelines, Clinical Pathways and Evidence-based Medicine are terms which are closely
connected to workflows in the area of healthcare, i.e. they describe the non-IT aspects of Workflow
Management.
From the organizational point of view workflows in the area of healthcare can be found in three areas:
Intersectoral workflows are workflows between the practitioners and the hospitals. Interdisciplinary
workflows are workflows between departments within the hospitals. And finally there are workflows
within departments and special units for example the operating room or the radiological department,
which depend more or less directly from the role of the performer.
Practitioner
Research Landscape
Three major research areas can be identified:
Inter-sectoral
Figure 1: Workflows in Healthcare (Source: Own figure)
• Methods for modelling healthcare workflows
Inter-departmental
Intradepartmental
Clinician
91

92
• Technical aspects of healthcare WfMS
• Implementation of workflow management
Figure 2 illustrates the three areas of our research landscape. Additionally we made a subclassification
within these areas. The next chapters address selected parts of the landscape. The focus
is on modelling methods, interoperability standards and device integration.
Architecture
Technical Aspects
of Healthcare WfMS
Interoperability
Standards
Device
Integration
Frameworks
Modelling of Healthcare Workflows
Adaptive
Workflow
s
Methods for Modeling
Healthcare Workflows
Implementation
of Healthcare Workflows
Problem reports
and guidelines
Reengineering
Ontology
based Resourceconstraint
Modeling
Process
Quality and Cost
Measurement
Figure 2: Research landscape (Source: Own figure)
Modelling and improvement of healthcare workflows is found as an organizational learning process.
Therefore it is both cost-intensive and time consuming to continuously create and refine healthcare
workflows.
Lin et al. (2000) are using data mining to re-engineer healthcare workflows. This method is adapted
from non-healthcare, means industrial experiences and is mainly focused to find the time dependency
patterns within the workflows. In Lin, Hsieh and Pan (2005) the same research group published an
approach to continuously improve already implemented workflows analysing electronic patient records
(EPR) using an available stochastic method. Xing et al. (2007) describe a more general approach
introducing an algorithm mining workflows from event logs.
Sutherland and van den Heuvel (2006) introduce another approach. They adapt workflows while
documenting activities and alert if any activities are forgotten or a combination of activities is conflicting
with known rules. In that case the approach is introduced for the operation room. It should be
investigated whether it can also be used in other areas of healthcare workflows, e.g. intensive or normal
care.

Browne, Schrefl and Warren (2004) introduce the approach of self-modifying workflows. They provide
a set of operation to be applied to a workflow schema, which turn abstract sub-workflows into
concrete ones through completion and alteration of template primitives.
Wang et al. (2007) describe their theoretical approach of a resource-constrained workflow modelling
approach, which is stated to be used for an emergency response system workflow management. This
is one of those special areas in healthcare where different workflow management system must be
implemented. There are other special areas e.g. outpatient treatment where an investigation would be
interesting, whether there are differences to “normal” healthcare workflows.
Because workflow implementation and measuring improvement finally leads to benchmarking between
different hospitals and their differences in workflow implementation the mapping between
different workflow models will become more interesting. Haller, Oren and Kotinurmi (2006) address
this problem by introducing their multi meta-model process ontology. And as a practical input they
show the mapping by “translating an IBM Websphere MQ Workflow model into the m3po ontology
and subsequently extracting an Abstract BPEL model from the ontology”.
An interesting aspect of modelling is also the problem, that environmental conditions (e.g. staff
changes, room changes, etc.) change during long-running workflows while the execution is still authorized.
Shafiq et al. (2006) describe the problem “to provide the right data to the right person at the
right time” which leads to the approach of dynamic adaptation of long-running workflows.
Implementation of Workflows
Murray (2003) describes in a multiple case study the implementation of a commercially available
healthcare workflow system in two hospitals settings. He concludes, that even though the technology
is receiving broad acceptance, there are many barriers to its implementation. The change from manual-based
workflow to computer-based workflow is stated as more complex than expected. But there
is no quantitative measurement of key factors. An investigation in this area would be very interesting,
because there are very few case studies in Germany, too.
Interoperability Standards
Standardized communication enables the exchange of data between all participating healthcare information
systems (Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2006, 2). Interoperability
processes in healthcare and the medical market require generally accepted standards (Kuhn et al.
2006) in order to achieve the following: efficient and effective combination of distributed medical
systems, increase competition and reduce costs, easily update or replace healthcare IT products, and
reduce errors to make healthcare services safer (WHO 2006; CEN/TC 251 European Standardization
of Health Informatics). IT standards in the healthcare sector can be divided into two groups: syntactical
and semantic standards. For an overview of current and worldwide accepted healthcare IT standards,
see Figure 3. Sunyaev (2008) provides a comprehensive discussion of accepted IT standards in
healthcare.
93

Figure 3: Medical Communication and Documentation Standard (Source: Own figure)
The correct transmission of medical and administrative data between heterogeneous and distributed
medical information systems is based on syntactical standards. These are mainly HL7/CDA (Health
Level Seven Inc. Ann Arbor MI 2005; Dolin et al. 2001; Dolin et al. 2006), DICOM (NEMA 2005)
and EDIFACT (EDIFACT 2006). The German standard xDT, promoted by the National Association
of Statutory Health Insurance Physicians (KBV (Kassenärztliche Bundesvereinigung Deutschland)
2005) focuses on data transfer in the German healthcare system.
Semantic standards on the other hand ensure correct interpretation of the content of the electronically
exchanged data. Established standards are LOINC (Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes
(LOINC®) 2006), SNOMED (SNOMED International 2005), ICD (DIMDI 2006, WHO, 2006 #589),
MeSH (UMLS 2006), and UMLS (UMLS 2006).
The current standardization situation in the healthcare sector has been described as being unsatisfactory
(Institute of Medicine of the National Academies 2001). Until there is a generally accepted standardization
of syntactic as well as semantic standards, all advantages listed previously cannot be exploited
(Haux 2005). To improve health services, reduce costs, and gain the vision of seamless healthcare,
the problem of standardized software solutions must first be solved. As it can be assumed that
there will not be a global standard for the integration of semantic and syntactic data, an integration
solution has to be capable of dealing with different established standards. The complete interoperability,
the consent identification concerning the meaning of the medical data and meaningful cooperation
of functions, are the primary ones of the main challenges for the near future of development of healthcare
information systems (Frist, 2005).
There are many different approaches to standardize the electronic communication and documentation
in healthcare to achieve the interoperability. Some of the promising standardization initiatives are
summarized in Table 1. The analysis described in Table 1 shows that the existing standardisation
approaches for interoperability in healthcare can be divided in two opposing groups (Märkle &
Lemke, 2002). On the one hand, there is basically industry that propagates and adopts proprietary
standards like HL7 and DCOM. On the other hand, there are generally university- and state-funded
initiatives which use and support open standards as initiated by European Committee of Standardization
(CEN/TC 251 European Standardization of Health Informatics). This difference is also based
regionally - the former are mainly located in the U.S., whereas the latter initiatives come from Europe.
94

For the future healthcare system, it remains to be aspired that both camps learn from each other and
may grow together, and with it, the vision of complete interoperability in the healthcare sector can
become true. Nevertheless, they all provided important issues and contributed indispensable knowledge
in attaining the present status.
Architecture of Workflow Management Systems in healthcare information systems
The term architecture in the area of workflow management is defined by Jablonski 1996. Subsequently
Becker and zur Mühlen investigated the architecture of WfMS (Becker et al. 2002) and discussed
the granularity of those systems in Rocks, Stones and Sand in (zur Muehlen/Becker 1999).
Today most workflow management systems are based on standard workflow engines. Haux et al.
(2003) and Reinhardt (2007) describe the architecture of Sorian and Lechleitner et al. (2003) the architecture
of Cerner Millenium, but they do not work out whether there are specific requirements regarding
the architecture for healthcare information systems, which support workflow management.
95

Table 1: Overview of Current Approaches for Integrating the Digital Healthcare Enterprise (Source: Own figure)
Initiatives for information
integration in
healthcare
Integrating the healthcare
enterprise (IHE, Hornung/Goetz/Goldschmidt
2005)
Professionals and citizens
network for integrated care
(PICNIC, Danish Center for
Health Telematics 2003)
Open electronic health
record (openEHR, openEHR
2004; The openEHR foundation
2006)
Standardization of communication
between information
systems in physician’s
offices and hospitals using
XML (SCIPHOX, Standardized
Communication of
Information Systems in
Physician Offices and
Hospitals using XML (SCI-
PHOX) 2006; Gerdsen et al.
2005)
www.akteonline.de (Ückert
et al. 2002; akteonline.de
2006; Schwarze et al. 2005)
96
Characterization and Goal Approach and assignment
of internationally accepted
standards
IHE is an international initiative,
driven by healthcare professionals
and industry, to improve the communication
of medical information
systems and the exchange of data.
PICNIC is a European project of
regional healthcare providers in a
public private partnership with
industry to develop the new healthcare
networks and to defrag the
European market for healthcare
telematics.
OpenEHR foundation is dedicated to
develop an open specification and
implementation for the electronic
health record (EHR). OpenEHR
advances the experiences of GEHRprojects
(GEHR 2006; Blobel 2006)
in England and Australia.
SCIPHOX is a German initiative
with the aim to define a new common
communication standard for
ambulant and inpatient healthcare
facilities.
akteonline.de is German state-aided
project to develop a Web-based
electronic healthcare record.
Service Oriented Medical Device Integration
IHE’s approach for the information
integration is based on propagation
and integration/usage of HL7 and
DICOM standards. IHE promotes and
advances these standards as a suggestion
for standardizing bodies.
The development is an open source
model, i.e. an open and interoperable
architecture with exchangeable
components (aim is an easy and
simple integration of external products).
All components must be based
on established standards, such as
HL7/CDA.
The project works closely with
standards (e.g. HL7). However, it
does not adopt them verbatim but
tests, implements and improves their
integration and application while
giving feedback to the standard
bodies.
The basis for the information exchange
is the XML-based HL7/CDA
standard. SCIPHOX adapts and
improves this global standard for
local (German) needs.
akteonline.de developed dynamic
Web pages, which can be accessed
via internet and look similar to physicians
and hospital software. The
project is based on the common
communication standards (DICOM
and HL7/CDA).

Medical devices are playing a decisive role in the process of medical treatment. In the context of
workflows, devices must be integrated in a way that WfMS can handle them. Thus the interoperability
of medical devices is an important factor. A definition of interoperability in the context of medical
devices is given in Lesh et al. (2007) and will be discussed in the following sub-chapter. Afterwards
the state of the art concerning the service oriented integration of (medical) devices will be presented
and research gaps will be identified.
Device Interoperability
Lesh et al. (2007) base their definition of interoperability on complexity (fig. 4). Least complex interoperability
addresses physical connectivity. Most complex interoperability addresses communication,
which is defined as “the act or process of transmitting information” (Merriam-Webster 2002), i.e.
dealing with syntax and semantic. For service oriented device integration the most complex end of the
interoperability continuum is necessary, because devices will be interpreted as business units and they
provide their functionality as service.
Device Interoperability (Source: Based on Lesh et al. (2007, 2))
Figure 4:
Lesh et al. (2007) are listing 23 potential benefits of having interoperable medical devices, e.g. improved
quality of care and better workflow support. However “interoperability is an almost nonexistent
feature of medical devices” (Lesh et al. 2007, 1). The reasons are manifold, e.g. there is no
incentive for device manufactures to interoperate with other manufactures’ devices. Several consorts
are trying to fix this issue by developing recommendations for standardized device communication,
e.g. the Medical Device Plug and Play program (MD PnP) 1 , Continua Health Alliance (Continua) 2 and
Integrating the Healthcare Enterprise (IHE) 3 . But these approaches as well as several current publications
(e.g. Zitzmann and Schumann (2007), Garguilo et al. (2007) and Hotchkiss, Robbins and Robkin
(2007)) are not addressing a service oriented integration of medical devices.
Service Oriented Device Integration
In the healthcare domain only one publication can be found that addresses the service oriented integration
of medical devices. It is published by employees of Drägerwerk AG and Dräger Medical AG
respectively (Strähle et al. 2007). They try to interconnect modalities of an anaesthesia workplace
(ZEUS, Dräger Medical) and an endoscopic surgery workplace (OR1 KarlStorz). Devices are plugged
on a Web Application Server which can interpret the proprietary device protocol and offers their functionalities
as web services.
1 http://www.mdpnp.org
2 http://www.continuaalliance.org
3 http://www.ihe.net
97

In the non-medical domain some important projects can be found concerning the service oriented
device integration. First of all the European research project “SIRENA” 4 started in 2003 with the
objective to develop a service infrastructure for real time embedded networked applications. Four
main application domains are represented: Industrial, Home, Automotive and Telecommunications.
The specific domain requirements were collected and existing device-level SOA technologies were
analyzed (OSGi, HAVi, JINI, UPnP and DPWS). Finally Microsoft’s DPWS (Devices Profile for
Web Services) 5 was the technology that perfectly met the requirements (Bohn/Bobek/Golatowski
2006). Within the project the world’s first DPWS implementation for embedded devices was delivered
(Jammes/Mensch/Smit 2007). In the context of manufacturing processes the manufacturing services
(provided by SOA-enabled devices) could be orchestrated (Jammes et al. 2005). Several benefits of
the SIRENA approach were promoted: Interoperability, scalable service composability and aggregation,
uncoupling of logical and physical aspects, plug-and-play connectivity, seamless integration with
enterprise networks, integration with legacy technology and simplified application development
(Jammes/Smit 2005). When the project finished in 2006 the WS4D (Web Services for Devices) 6 initiative
was formed to follow up the development of different DPWS toolkits. In addition the follow-up
projects SODA (Service Oriented Device and Delivery Architecture) 7 and SOCRADES 8 (Service-
Oriented Cross-Layer Infrastructure for Distributed Smart Embedded Systems) were founded. SODA
focuses on the creation of “a comprehensive, scalable, easy to deploy ecosystem built on top of the
foundations laid by the SIRENA project” (de Souza et al. 2008, 2) while SOCRADES “aims to further
design and implement a more sophisticated infrastructure of web-service enabled devices” (de Souza
et al. 2008, 2), i.e. also the ERP integration is addressed (Karnouskos et al. 2007).
A project referring to the healthcare domain is the Eclipse Open Health Framework (OHF), including
the sub-project SODA (Service-Oriented Device Architecture) 9 . An OSGi based architecture is proposed,
but except a high level description (de Deugd et al. 2006) and some slides presented at eclipseCON
2007 and eclipseCON 2008 no further publications are available.
Identified Research Gaps
Existing works (e.g. de Deugd et al. (2006) and Strähle et al. (2007)) about service oriented device
integration often present quick solutions without analyzing the requirements of the specific domain
and without consideration of existing projects or publications. Also possibly used research methods
are not mentioned. An exception is SIRENA and its follow-up projects. The requirements of selected
domains were analyzed and existing technologies for device integration were reviewed. Unfortunately
the requirements for a service oriented integration of medical devices were not analyzed. Because of
that it is not clear if the proposed solutions can be directly transferred to the healthcare domain. Therefore
the next step for further research must be a complete requirements analysis and afterwards an
analysis of exiting solutions concerning their suitability.
Conclusion
The area of workflow management is a broad field. Within this article only selected aspects could be
addressed in detail. Many articles about different modelling requirements and their possible solutions
4
http://www.sirena-itea.org
5
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/connect/rally/rallywsondevices.mspx
6
http://www.ws4d.org
7
http://www.soda-itea.org
8
http://www.socrades.eu
9
http://www.eclipse.org/ohf/components/soda
98

were found. The different modelling requirements indicate that the area of healthcare workflow is
complex and will be still interesting in the future because only a few of the shown solutions are implemented
and the outcome is not proved. The area of architecture of WfMS depends from the modelling
area. So if there is still modelling research running, this indicates also that there will be changes
in architecture as well. Maybe, standard workflow architecture as introduced today in healthcare will
have to change in the future. In the area of implementation of WfMS only a few case studies could be
found. Therefore investigations in this area would be very interesting and could turn out new aspects
for research.
It was shown that interoperability is an important factor in the healthcare domain. A number of approaches
exist for integrating the digital healthcare enterprise, but as it seems, none of them became
widely accepted. As presented especially the integration of heterogeneous medical devices is an unsolved
problem. Service oriented integration seems to be a promising approach, but the associated
research is only at the beginning.
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101

Bisher erschienene Arbeitspapiere und Studien des Lehrstuhls für
Wirtschaftsinformatik der Technischen Universität München
Stand: Juli 2008
Arbeitspapiernr.
33 Sunyaev, A.; von Beck, J.; Jedamzik, S.; Krcmar, H.: IT-
Sicherheitsrichtlinien für eine sichere Arztpraxis. Arbeitspapier Nr. 33, Garching
2008
32 Huber, M.; Sunyaev, A.; Krcmar, H.: Technische Sicherheitsanalyse der
elektronischen Gesundheitskarte. Arbeitspapier Nr. 32, Garching 2008
31 Schwertsik, A.; Rudolph, S.; Krcmar, H.: Empirische Untersuchung zur Ist-
Situation der Planung und Steuerung der IT in großen mittelständischen
Unternehmen.. Arbeitspapier Nr. 31, Garching 2007
30 Baume, M.; Schulze, E.; Kettler, S.; Hummel, L.; Lucas, Y.; Thalhammer,
V.; Rathmayer, S.; Krcmar, H.: Nutzung von eLearning-Komponenten in
CLIX - Evaluation einer Lehrveranstaltung im Rahmen des Projektes „elecTUM“
an der TU München. Arbeitspapier Nr. 30, Garching 2007
29 Baume, M.; Schulze, E.; Nuber, C.; Rathmayer, S.; Krcmar, H.:
Plattformunterstützte Prozessabläufe in der Lehre der TU München.
Arbeitspapier Nr. 29, Garching 2007
28 Ortmann, M., Böhme, M., Schweiger, A., Krcmar, H. (2007): Ermittlung von
Verbesserungspotenzialen und Entwurf von Lösungskonzepten zur flexiblen und
dynamischen Unterstützung der Prozesse in der Klinik für Anaesthesiologie am
Klinikum rechts der Isar der Technischen Universität München durch gezielten
IT-Einsatz. Arbeitspapier Nr. 28, Garching 2007.
27 Bögelsack, A., Wittges, H., Krcmar, H. (2007): White Paper: Techniques for
SAP hosting under Solaris 10. Arbeitspapier Nr. 27, Garching 2007.
26 Hörmann C., Klapdor, S., Leimeister, J.M., Krcmar, H. (2006):IT
Management in deutschen Krankenhäusern – Eine Bestandsaufnahme und die
Sicht der IT-Entscheider. Eine empirische Untersuchung zur Identifikation von
Bedürfnissen, Trends und Prioritäten im IT Management deutscher
Krankenhäuser. Arbeitspapier Nr. 26, Garching 2006.
25 Wolf, P.; Wolf, M.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Multilinguale Unternehmensservices in
Stuttgart (MUSS). Arbeitspapier Nr. 25, Garching 2006.
24 Walter, S.; Heck, R.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Problem Management in der IT
Infrastructure (ITIL) – Hinweise für die erfolgreiche Umsetzung. Arbeitspapier
Nr. 24, Garching 2006.
23 Böhmann, T; Taurel, W.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Produktmanagement für IT-
Dienstleistungen in Deutschland. Arbeitspapier Nr. 23, Garching 2006.
22 Müller, A.; Leimer, S.; Baume, M. (2006): Evaluationskonzept für die
Begleitforschung des Projektes „elecTUM“ an der TU München. Arbeitspapier
22, Garching 2006.
21 Böhmann, T.; Schermann; M.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Reference Model
Evaluation: Towards an Application-Oriented Approach. Arbeitspapier Nr. 21,
Garching 2006.
20 Walter, S.; Leimeister, J.M.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Chancen und
Herausforderungen digitaler Wertschöpfungsnetze im After-Sales-Service-
Bereich der deutschen Automobilbranche. Arbeitspapier Nr. 20, Garching 2006.
19 Hauke, R.; Baume, M.; Krcmar, H. (2005): Kategorisierung von Planspielen –

Entwicklung eines übergreifenden Strukturschemas zur Einordnung und
Abgrenzung von Planspielen, Arbeitspapier Nr. 19, Garching 2005.
18 Taranovych, Y.; Rudolph, S.; Förster, C. (2005): Standards für die
Entwicklungsprozesse digitaler Produktionen. Arbeitspapier Nr. 18, Garching
2005.
17 Voelkel, D; Taranovych, Y; Rudolph, S; Krcmar H. (2005): Coach-
Bewertung zur Unterstützung der Coach-Suche im webbasierten Coaching
digitaler Produktionen. Arbeitspapier Nr. 17, Garching 2005.
16 Mohr, M.; Krcmar, H. (2005): Bildungscontrolling: State of the Art und
Bedeutung für die IT-Qualifizierung, Arbeitspapier Nr. 16, Garching 2005.
15 Jehle, H.; Krcmar, H. (2005): Handbuch: Installation von SAP R/3 Enterprise,
ECC 5.0 und BW 3.5 IDES auf SunFire v40z. Arbeitspapier Nr. 15, Garching
2005.
14 Kutschke, C; Taranovych, Y; Rudolph, S; Krcmar H. (2005): Web
Conferencing als Erfolgsfaktor für webbasiertes Projekt-Coaching. Arbeitspapier
Nr. 14, Garching 2005.
13 Baume, M.; Hummel, S.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Abschlussbericht der Evaluation
im Projekt Webtrain. Arbeitspapier Nr. 13, Garching 2004.
12 Baume, M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Beurteilung des Online-Moduls
„Informationsmanagement“ aus kognitionswissenschaftlicher, lerntheoretischer
und mediengestalterischer Sicht. Arbeitspapier Nr. 12, Garching 2004.
11 Leimeister, J.M. (2005): Mobile Sportlerakte. Arbeitspapier Nr. 11, Garching
2005.
10 Mohr, M.; Wittges, H.; Krcmar, H. (2005): Bildungsbedarf in der SAP-Lehre:
Ergebnisse einer Dozentenbefragung. Arbeitspapier Nr. 10, Garching 2005.
9 Hummel, S.; Baume, M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Nutzung von Teamspace im
Projekt WebTrain. Arbeitspapier Nr. 9, Garching 2004.
8 Hummel, S.; Luick, S.; Baume, M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Didaktisches Konzept
für das Projekt WebTrain. Arbeitspapier Nr. 8, Garching 2004.
7 Wolf, P.; Krcmar, H. (2003): Wirtschaftlichkeit von elektronischen
Bürgerservices – Eine Bestandsaufnahme 2002. Arbeitspapier Nr. 7, Garching
2003.
6 Esch, S.; Mauro, C.; Weyde, F.; Leimeister, J.M.; Krcmar, H.; Sedlak, R.;
Stockklausner, C.; Kulozik, A. (2005): Design und Test eines mobilen
Assistenzsystems für krebskranke Jugendliche.Arbeitspapier Nr. 6 Garching
2005.
5 Schweizer, K.; Leimeister, J.M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Eine Exploration
virtueller sozialer Beziehungen von Krebspatienten. Arbeitspapier Nr. 5,
Garching 2004.
4 Knebel, U.; Leimeister, J.M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Empirische Ergebnisse eines
Feldversuchs: Mobile Endgeräte für krebskranke Jugendliche. Arbeitspapier Nr.
4, Garching 2004.
3 Rudolph, S.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Zum Stand digitaler Produktionen.
Arbeitspapier Nr. 3, Garching 2004.
2 Mohr, M.; Hoffmann, A.; Krcmar, H. (2003): Umfrage zum Einsatz des SAP
Business Information Warehouse in der Lehre. Arbeitspapier Nr. 2, Garching
2003.
1 Daum, M.; Krcmar, H. (2003): Webbasierte Informations- und
Interaktionsangebote für Krebspatienten 2002 – Ein Überblick. Arbeitspapier Nr.
1, Garching 2003.

Studien-
nr.
13 Krcmar, H.; Böhmann, T.; Leimeister, J.M.; Wolf, P.; Wittges, H. (2008):
2 nd Workshop on Information Systems and Services Sciences 2008 (2 nd WISSS
08)
12 Leimeister, S.; Krcmar, H. (2008): CIO-Trends 2008 – Ergebnisse einer
Befragung unter deutschen IT-Führungskräften, Garching 2008.
11 Krcmar, H.; Böhmann, T.; Leimeister, J. M.; Wolf, P.; Wittges, H. (2008):
Workshop on Information Systems and Services Sciences 2008 (WISSS 08)
10 Mohr, M.; Schubert, U.; Wittges, H.; Krcmar, H.; Schrader, H. (2008):
Enterprise Software Training: Current Status and Trends - Results of the 4th
UCC Training Needs Analysis 2007
9 Mohr, M.; Schubert, U.; Wittges, H.; Krcmar, H.; Schrader, H. (2007):
Unternehmenssoftware-Ausbildung: Aktueller Stand und Trends - Ergebnisse der
4. UCC-Bildungsbedarfanalyse 2007
8 Mohr, M.; Ebner, W.; Wittges, H.; Krcmar, H.; Schrader, H. (2007):
Unternehmenssoftware-Ausbildung an deutschen Hochschulen und Schulen:
Ergebnisse der 3. UCC-Bildungsbedarfanalyse 2007
7 Mohr, M.; Krcmar, H.; Hoffmann, A. (2006): Studentenorientiertes
Anwender-Einführungstraining für integrierte Unternehmenssoftware:
Konzeption und Kursdesign am Beispiel mySAP ERP. Studie Nr. 7, Garching
2006.
6 Böhmann, T.; Taurel, W.; Dany, F.; Krcmar, H. (2006): Paketierung von IT-
Dienstleistungen: Chancen, Erfolgsfaktoren, Umsetzungsformen:
Zusammenfassung einer Expertenbefragung. Studie Nr. 6, Garching 2006.
5 Hauke, R.; Baume, M.; Krcmar H. (2006): Computerunterstützte
Management-Planspiele: Ergebnisse einer Untersuchung des Planspieleinsatzes
in Unternehmen und Bildungseinrichtungen. Studie Nr. 5, Garching 2006.
4 Rudolph, S.; Taranovych, Y.; Pracht, B.; Förster, C.; Walter, S.; Krcmar,
H. (2004): Erfolgskriterien im Projektmanagement digitaler Produktionen.
Studie Nr. 4, Garching 2004.
3 Wittges, H.; Mohr, M.; Krcmar, H.; Klosterberg, M. (2005): SAP-Strategie
2005. Die Sicht der IT-Entscheider. Studie Nr. 3, Garching 2005.
2 Hummel, S.; Baume, M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Abschlussbericht des Projekts
WebTrain - Teilprojekt der TUM. Studie Nr. 2, Garching 2004.
1 Junginger, M.; Krcmar, H. (2004): Wahrnehmung und Steuerung von Risiken
im Informationsmanagement - Eine Befragung deutscher IT-Führungskräfte.
Studie Nr. 1, Garching 2004