The ‘Eduplay Hub’ project seminar started at Provinzial-Versicherung at the beginning of October, in which nine Bachelor of Business Informatics students are participating this winter semester.

The students gain an insight into the (digital) work of a large insurance company and can work on a real business case on the topic of further and continuing education. They will take their first steps in IT project management, front-end and back-end development, stakeholder communication, and many other areas.

In addition, the students have the opportunity to network with professionals from the insurance industry and make valuable contacts.

Congratulations to Prof. Dr. Friedrich Chasin!

Friedrich Chasin took up a professorship in Information Systems at Hochschule Offenburg on 1 November 2024. Friedrich has been a research assistant at Professor Becker's chair since October 2013 - he previously supported us as an assistant. After completing his doctorate, he remained with the chair as a postdoc and habilitation candidate, interrupted by 2.5 years from April 2021 to September 2023, during which he held a professorship at the University of Cologne.

As a highly esteemed and valuable colleague, we are reluctant to let Friedrich go but are, of course, delighted that he has succeeded in obtaining this position and wish him all the best in his new role.

Have you ever conversed with a voice assistant like Google’s Assistant, Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri? Most probably yes. Have you ever purchased something using a voice assistant? Most likely not. Many marketers and voice assistant providers expected and wanted voice commerce to become a new sales channel, but these hopes hardly materialized. Therefore, Dr. Christine Rzepka, Anton Koslow, and Prof. Dr. Thomas Hess from Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München and Prof. Dr. Benedikt Berger from the Department of Information Systems at the University of Münster investigated why consumers use or don’t use voice assistants for shopping. In a mixed-methods research design, the author team first interviewed 30 voice assistant users to identify perceived benefits and risks of voice commerce. Afterwards, they conducted a survey to validate these determinants of consumers’ shopping behavior. The results show that voice commmerce, while being convenient and enjoying, is hampered by a lack of reliability, transparency, and controllability. Accordingly, the most promising avenue for a wider diffusion of voice commerce is to enrich the interaction with visual displays as showcased by some smart speakers with screens (i.e., smart displays).

In 2023, the results of this study appeared in the journal The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems, which is published by the Association of Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Management Information Systems (SIGMIS) and one of the most long-established journals in the information systems discipline. The journal’s editorial board now selected this study for the best paper award for that year.

 

Links to this news

Here you can find the Link to the journal article.

Here you can find the front matter of the issue including the article.

You can find the awards page of the ACM SIGMIS here.

The Data Base for Advances in Information Systems honors a study co-authored by Prof. Dr. Benedikt Berger

The University of Münster has been recognized by the Celonis Academic Alliance as an Academic Center of Excellence in Process Mining and Process Intelligence for the academic year 2024/25, alongside other outstanding institutions.

The selected universities represent the highest standards of innovation in Process Mining and Process Intelligence in the academic world.

This distinction is a testament to the dedication and hard work of Prof. Jan vom Brocke and his team at the Chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management.

At the beginning of October, six students from the Information Systems master's degree programme set off to Rietheim-Weilheim for the kick-off of the seminar with the Marquardt Group as part of the project seminar ‘Digital Product Innovation through Design Thinking’, supervised by Dr. Thomas Haskamp (Chair of Information Systems and Business Process Management of Prof. Dr Jan vom Brocke). With over 10,000 employees, the Marquardt Group is a mechatronic system supplier that offers solutions to make mobility and products smarter, safer and more sustainable.

Shareholder Annabelle Marquardt personally welcomed the group, and during the first dinner, the students had the opportunity to learn more about the company and its mission

After a brief product introduction the next morning, the students moved straight into the challenges, where the respective technical contact persons were available to answer questions. Within the seminar, the students will develop new digital products in a B2C context that leverage existing Marquardt technology, applying the Design Thinking methodology.

We look forward to the progress of the project and sincerely thank the Marquardt Group for their hospitality and pleasant collaboration. We are excited to see the results that will be developed during the challenge.

Project seminar "Digital Product Innovation through Design Thinking"

Sustainability and data are closely linked and form the foundation of today's endeavours for a more sustainable future. This is precisely why the first conference on sustainability and data took place last September, allowing participants to join in virtually via Zoom.

Building on this, the conference hosts Lea Püchel (University of Münster) and Cancan Wang (IT University of Copenhagen) organized a discussion paper titled ‘On the Pivotal Role of Data in Sustainability Transformations - Challenges and Opportunites’. It adresses the role of data as catalysts as well as performative and socio-technical function.

They were actively supported in this endeavour: Karin Buhmann (Copenhagen Business School) emphasises the importance of aligning regulatory data requirements with sustainability goals. Furthermore, Tobias Brandt (University of Münster) discusses how sustainability reporting can drive improved data management. Jan vom Brocke (University of Münster) presents the potential of process science for analysing sustainability data. Elizabeth A. Teracino (University of Lausanne) and Christine Legner (University of Lausanne) emphasise the need for reliable, proactive data sourcing. Felizia von Schweinitz (Universität Hamburg) and Laura Marie Edinger-Schons (Universität Hamburg) assess the challenges of impact assessment and finally, practitioner Thomas Daniel Mardahl reflects on the importance of integrating environmental and financial reporting.

These discussions are more relevant than ever before, as the complexities of digitalisation impact both companies and individuals. The outstanding achievement was published in the Business & Information Systems Engineering Journal.

Links to this news:

The full discussion is available here.

The MOTO project, which originated from the project seminar "Development of a coordination app for open all-day care at Altenberge elementary school “, has started. The project seminar of the Chair of Digital Innovation and the Public Sector of Prof. Tobias Brandt was conducted during the Winter Semester 2023/24.

The seminar’s goal was for students to develop software that can digitally manage the supervision of over 400 children at the open all-day school in Altenberge. In addition to supervision, the software aims to support teaching staff in areas such as the development and safety of the children.

Working in collaboration with the Altenberge community and the OGS-Altenberge, our dedicated students developed an initial proof of concept to digitally coordinate open all-day services at OGS-Altenberge.

Based on this initial work, the chair secured funding from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) under the DATIpilot funding program, resulting in a grant of €150,000 to further develop the software! The projects’ overall goal is to create a practical, open-source product that can be shared with other municipalities and OGS facilities, making a positive impact across the community.

As part of this initiative, three outstanding students, Christian Kamann, Florian Lüttgenau and Yannick Wegner from the seminar have joined the Chair of Digital Innovation and the Public Sector as student assistants, funded by this grant, and will continue to develop the project. Additionally, the chair is exploring paths to transition this innovative product into a startup once the funding program concludes, demonstrating the entrepreneurial spirit of our department and a commitment to sustainable solutions.

Last week, the seventh Legal and Administrative Informatics Conference (RVI 2024), the INFORMATIK Festival and the eGov-Campus Workshop took place in Wiesbaden and Speyer.

The aim of the joint conference on legal and administrative informatics of the Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. is to promote the dialogue between research and practice and to substantially advance the digital transformation of the government and administration through scientifically grounded insights. The INFORMATIK Festival, titled ‘Lock-in or log out? Wie digitale Souveränität gelingt’, focused on digital sovereignty and explored what role informatics can play in strengthening it.

Three members of the department attended the events and partially presented their papers:

Michael Koddebusch presented a paper at the workshop ‘IT-Kompetenzen für die digitale Verwaltung der Zukunft“, which took place as part of the INFORMATIK Festival: Michael Koddebusch, Paul Brützke, Jörg Becker: „GovLearn: A Digital Tool to Empower Public Servants in their Search for Digital Government Competence Education“.

David Nowak presented a paper at the RVI24, which took place as a co-located conference alongside INFORMATIK: David Nowak: „Capturing trust in public service encounters“.

Dr. Michael Räckers was active in the organizing committees of both the IT Competencies Workshop and the RVI, and was primarily responsible for organizing RVI 2024.

The conference was followed by an excursion to DUV Speyer on Friday, where the participants discussed the eGov campus and its current and future direction.

In 2021, Prof. Dr. Jan vom Brocke is once again among the top 2% of the most cited scientists. In their annual ranking, Stanford University and Elsevier highlight the scientists who have the greatest influence in their field.

Jan vom Brocke has been included in the list since its inception in 2021. In the 2024 update, he is ranked #49 worldwide in the subfield of “Information Systems”, placing him among the top 0.2% (of the world’s 18,561) most cited Information Systems researchers in this field.

All results at a glance and further information on the ranking can be found here.

The 19th International Conference on Information Systems took place at the University of Würzburg from September 16 to 19 this year. The conference is the most important event in Information Systems in the German-speaking world and offers scientists, entrepreneurs, and young professionals the opportunity to learn about current research and enables an exchange between research and practice.

The future will be strongly characterized by artificial intelligence, which is increasingly permeating our lives, the economy, and society. In the age of AI, the question arises of how information systems can be designed to create efficiency, effectiveness, and added value. WI 2024, under the title "Automating the World: Information Systems in the Age of AI," focused on these topics, exploring the role of AI in decision support, business models, human-AI interaction, and its responsible use in society.

Next year, the International Conference on Information Systems will celebrate its 20th jubilee edition at the University of Münster, returning to its first venue from 1993. WI 2025 aims to provide a platform to showcase both the diversity and cutting-edge research in information systems.

Many thanks to this year’s organisers Prof. Dr. Christoph Flath, Prof. Dr. Gunther Gust, Prof. Dr. Frederic Thiesse, and Prof. Dr. Axel Winkelmann for a great and unforgettable conference.

This summer, seven students from our MSc in Information Systems program embarked upon a real-world data science project. Their tasks included analyzing data, conducting through research into various prediction models and then developing an effective prediction model.

The project seminar led by Tobias Brandt entitled “Exploratory Data Science with the Alliance Automotive Group” was a collaboration between the Chair of Digital Innovation and the Public Sector (DIPS) and the Alliance Automotive Group Germany.

The Alliance Automotive Group in Germany is headquartered in Münster and services the automotive aftermarket in Germany as a leading supplier of OEM parts.

The students worked with multiple years of customer and sales data, applying machine learning methods to improve sales forecasts at the customer and item levels.

The EGOV24 (IFIP EGOV-CeDEM-EPART 2024) conference is a scientific conference dedicated to the broader areas of e-Government and e-Democracy, including facets like Digital Government, e-Participation, Open Government, Smart Government, AI Government, GovTech, Algoritmic Governance, and related topics to digitalization and government.

This year, the conference took place in September in Ghent and Leuven, Belgium. In Ghent, a Junior Faculty School on “Academic Career Building” was organized to network young researchers before the official program begun. In Leuven, the conference program continued for three days with exciting presentations and social activities. The Chair of Information Systems and Information Management was represented by three members, each of whom presented an accepted paper:

Binh An Patrick Nguyen and Hendrik Scholta: “A method for the collaborative and semi-automated generation of conceptual models from legal regulations in public organizations” (2024).

The paper is about how concept models can be derived from laws in a collaborative process. In particular, the focus was on the interaction between digitalization officers/IT and the specialist offices/legal experts. For the method, interviews were conducted with digitalization officers from cities to determine the initial prerequisites and requirements. The improved method was demonstrated in further interviews and the subsequent feedback was integrated into the current version as presented in the paper.

David Nowak and Bettina Distel: “Trust in Times of Cyber Crisis: Understanding Organizational Trust Repair in the Public Sector” (2024).

The paper deals with how a municipal IT-provider affected by a cyberattack tried to repair the trust of its customers. In the case analyzed, the affected IT-provider primarily tried to deal with the effects of the crisis through transparent communication and compensation in the form of emergency assistance offers. However, not all partners were equally informed about the recovery at the beginning of the crisis and two cities had already created their own interim solutions before the IT-provider was able to make emergency offers, which reduced the effectiveness of the compensation measures. The case shows that measures to repair trust should be combined with those to manage a cyber crisis.

Michael Koddebusch, Bettina Distel, Marco Di Maria, Paul Brützke and Jörg Becker: “Getting Rid of It: An Unlearning Perspective on Digital Government Competences” (2024). The paper was honored with the Best Paper Award in the category ‘Most Innovative Research Contribution’.

In this article, the authors look at the concept of ‘unlearning’. Unlearning is the conscious discarding of outdated behaviors, routines and skills that (in our context) stand in the way of digital transformation. Using a focus group study, the authors have developed a framework that identifies such obsolete competencies at an individual and organizational level to promote their unlearning.

Last week, the 6th Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) took place at the University of Münster. The conference was organised in collaboration by the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) and the Department of Communication. The Symposium brought together international researchers from multiple backgrounds, such as communication science, computer science, computational science, political communication, journalism, and media studies.

The keynotes were held by two international researchers: Tine Ustad Figenschou, Professor of journalism at Oslo Metropolitan University (Oslo Met), and Walter Quattrociocchi, Full Professor at Sapienza University of Rome.

Other invited Speakers included Jean-Christophe Boucher, Associate Professor at the School of Public Policy and the department of Political Science at the University of Calgary; Jānis Karlsbergs, senior policy and publications manager in the NATO StratCom Centre of Excellence based in Riga, Latvia; Kyoko Kuwahara specializing in public diplomacy, strategic communications, disinformations and soft power strategies; and Dr. Ofer Fridman, senior lecturer in war Studies, King’s College London and Director of Operations at Sympodium Institute for Strategic Communications.

Together with many other speakers and participants, they successfully discussed the phenomenon of disinformation in several panels which were led by different chairs over the last three days. Furthermore, the conference included a workshop for doctoral students, where doctoral projects were presented in small groups and discussed with experienced mentors for the first time.

The conference concluded with an award ceremony. The Best Paper Award was given to Anatoliy Gruzd, Philip Mai and Felipe Soares for their paper titled “To Share or Not to Share: Randomized Controlled Study of Misinformation Warning Labels on Social Media” and the Best Presentation Award was given to Felipe Soares and Cassian Osborne-Carey for their contribution titled “Betrayal by democracy: how pro-Bolsonaro multimedia content on Facebook explains the 8th of January insurrection in Brazil”.

Overall, the conference was a great success, shaped by intensive exchanges and significant scientific outcomes.

 

Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Disinformation in Open Online Media

The 6th Multidisciplinary International Symposium on Mis- and Disinformation in Open Online Media (MISDOOM) was hosted from September 2nd to 4th by the Department of Communication in collaboration with the European Research Center for Information Systems (ERCIS) at the University of Münster. The interdisciplinary conference not only brought together perspectives from communication and computer science, but also provided practitioners from fields such as journalism and fact-checking as well as experts from the private sector a platform for networking.

In diverse panel sessions, speakers and participants were able to discuss various topics related to mis- and disinformation in open online media. In addition to speakers from around the world, two master’s students had the opportunity to present their first paper at MISDOOM.

The two students are María José González Méndez and Niklas Kloth. María is Colombian and is studying the PIONEER (ERASMUS Mundus Master of Science in Public Sector Innovation and E-Governance) program in her second semester. In this program, she attends a different university in Europe each semester, allowing her to experience a new culture in each country. This experience helps her become a digital native and an expert in the areas of public sector and eGovernment with an international perspective.

Niklas Kloth is in his second semester of the master’s degree in information systems at the Department of Information Systems. He supports the chairs of Prof. Jörg Becker and Prof. Jan vom Brocke as a student assistant. At Prof. Becker's chair, he works on the eGov Campus project, contributing both conceptually and on the process management course. Niklas Kloth works for Prof. vom Brocke in the area of Process Science and Design Thinking. He has also gained international experience through the ME310 program at Stanford University, in collaboration with TU Vienna and the University of Münster, where he participated in a Design Thinking seminar.

During her research internship at the Department of Information Systems, María José took the initiative to research polarized political communication on X (formerly Twitter) and developed a project to identify indications of polarisation in the case of the Colombian President Gustavo Petro. At the department, she collaborated with Niklas. Their multicultural qualitative evaluation benefited from reducing cultural bias as well as in analysing the results. Throughout the process, the two master’s students were constantly supported by Michael Koddebusch, Research Assistant at the Chair of Information Systems and Information Management. Their collaborative paper, “Understanding political communication and polarisation: A case study of the Colombian President's X utilization”, was successfully submitted to MISDOOM and accepted as a full paper.

Their paper examines the dynamics of Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s use of X, formerly known as Twitter, focusing on how he employs political communication on the platform and how he uses his posts to polarize. To analyse this, they applied the Framing Theory (based on the framework of Masroor et. al.) to his tweets. The two most active months of tweeting during his first year in office were classified using the framework to analyse how often and on what topics Petro makes use of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation. The case study by González Méndez and Kloth found that President Petro significantly polarizes through his tweets by using both positive and negative frames. The case study provides valuable insights into the current use of polarizing language on social networks such as X and demonstrates current techniques for creating political divisions using social media as an information system. As such, the paper as whole contributes to the ongoing discussion in the field of political communication studies.

Michale Koddebusch (Research Assistant at the Chair of Information Systems and Information Management) is proud of the project: “I had a lot of fun supporting María’s and Niklas’ research project, and I’m very happy that they managed to get it published in the end. And, of course, it makes me a little proud too.

Links to the news:

The paper can be viewed in full text here.

Technical progress in the machine processing of language and media content has reached a new stage of development with large language models based on transformation technology. These models can generate texts, images, sound, and videos using text inputs (prompts). The models and the systems based on them are referred to as generative AI systems. In addition to creating new content, generative AI systems can be used to analyse existing documents or data by linking them. Interaction with the language models occurs through various interfaces, such as a chat. Large software providers are increasingly integrating generative AI as assistive functions into their applications to support users in their work.

Given the rapid spread and further development of generative AI systems, it is expected that they will impact work and organisational structures within companies. The Chair for Transformation of Work (Prof. Dr. Julia Backmann), the Junior Professorship for Digital Transformation and Society (Prof. Dr. Benedikt Berger), and BASF Coatings, in particular the global communication department (Lena Köhne), want to investigate this impact together.

The externally funded project will begin in autumn 2024 and is scheduled to last for three years.

Until 19 August 2024, you can still apply for a position as a Doctoral Research Associate (salary level E 13 TV-L, 100 %) for the project. Further information can be found here.

Links to this news

Chair for Transformation of Work

Junior Professorship for Digital Transformation and Society

BASF Coatings

Collaboration between the Chair for Transformation of Work, the Junior Professorship for Digital Transformation and Society and BASF Coatings

Congratulations to Henry Hosseini, Jonathan Neugebauer, Sara Schiffer, Laura Troost, Kevin Wesendrup and Nina Herrmann on their successful completion of their PhD , which they celebrated together at Münster Castle two weeks ago.

Henry Hosseini wrote his doctoral thesis on "Towards Automated Multilingual Privacy Policy Analysis“, supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Thomas Hupperich. Jonathan Neugebauer's thesis is about "Model-Driven Software Development - Applications in Enterprise Computing and Digital Health and Particularities of Developing Standardized Editor Integrations" which was supervised by Prof. Dr. Herbert Kuchen. Sara Schiffer’s research topic was "Understanding the Evolution of an Incumbent Firm and ist Digital Innovation Units - A Longitudinal Study of Conflict and Learning" supervised by Prof. Dr. Stefan Klein.
Laura Troost wrote her doctoral thesis on "An Integrated Comprehensive Dynamic Data-Flow Analysis of Object-Oriented Programs - Data-Flow Coverage for Imperative Testing" also supervised by Prof. Dr. Herbert Kuchen. Supervised by Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Hellingrath, Kevin Wesendrups doctoral thesis is about "Integrating Prescriptive Maintenance into Production Planning and Control". Nina Herrmann worked on "The Algorithmic Skeleton Library Revisited - The Münster Skeleton Library". She was also supervised by Prof. Dr. Herbert Kuchen.