In Teil 9 der Alumni Stories lernen wir Inga Fechner, Senior Economist bei der ING Deutschland, kennen. Wir tauchen in ihren Arbeitsalltag bei der drittgrößten Bank Deutschlands ein und erfahren, wie sich die Entwicklungen rund um künstliche Intelligenz in der Bankenbranche bemerkbar machen. Zudem teilt die VWL-Alumna Erfahrungen aus ihren Auslandsaufenthalten während ihres Studiums mit uns.

Am letzten Freitag war es wieder so weit: Unser jährlicher BBHT Community Day fand am Eventport in Münster statt. Neben anderen Events wie dem Sommerfest, Weihnachtsfeiern oder kleineren Teamevents im Laufe des Jahres, hat besonders der Community Day eine wichtige strategische Komponente. Hier nehmen wir uns bewusst Zeit, um nicht nur aktuelle Projekte zu besprechen, sondern auch unsere Unternehmensstrategie, Kultur und zukünftige Ziele zu reflektieren. Veranstaltungen wie diese sind daher für uns immer wieder eine wertvolle Gelegenheit, um uns abseits vom Arbeitsalltag auszutauschen, neue Impulse zu setzen und natürlich als Team noch mehr zusammenzuwachsen.

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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.

In 2024, Prof Dr Thorsten Hennig-Thurau and Prof Dr Jan vom Brocke are once again among the top 2% of the most cited scientists. In their annual ranking, Stanford University and Elsevier show which academics have the greatest influence in their field. The School of Business and Economics at the University of Münster is represented twice: with Prof Dr Thorsten Hennig-Thurau in the field of marketing in 52nd place out of 14,139 and Prof Dr Jan vom Brocke in the field of business informatics in 49th place out of 18,561.

2024 gehören Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau und Prof. Dr. Jan vom Brocke erneut zu den Top2% der meistzitieren Wissenschaftler:innen. In ihrem jährlichen Ranking zeigen die Stanford University und Elsevier, welche Wissenschaftler:innen in ihrem Fachgebiet den größten Einfluss haben. Die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät der Universität Münster ist dabei gleich doppelt vertreten: mit Prof. Dr. Thorsten Hennig-Thurau im Bereich Marketing auf Rang 52 von 14.139 und Prof. Dr. Jan vom Brocke im Bereich Wirtschaftsinformatik auf Rang 49 von 18.561.

Jedes Jahr im November laden die Münsteraner Hochschulen zum Hochschultag ein. An diesem Tag verschaffen sich jährlich etwa 12.000 Studieninteressierte einen Überblick über das Studienangebot der Hochschulen in Münster. Der Hochschultag 2024 findet am 14. November statt. Auch die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät bietet ein vielfältiges Programm, das Studieninteressierten Einblicke in die vier Studienrichtungen Betriebswirtschaftslehre, Volkswirtschaftslehre, Wirtschaftsinformatik und interdisziplinäre Wirtschaftsstudiengänge ermöglicht. Ab dem 25. September um 12 Uhr sind Anmeldungen zu den Veranstaltungen möglich.

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.

Prof. Dr. Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt, Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für VWL, insb. Verhaltens- und Digitalökonomie an der Universität Münster, hat einen neuen Forschungsartikel in der Fachzeitschrift "Games and Economic Behavior" veröffentlicht, gemeinsam mit Johannes Kasinger, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, sowie Dmitrij Schneider von der Heinrich Heine-Universität Düsseldorf. Die Wissenschaftler testen darin verschiedene behaviorale Konzepte und tragen mit ihren Ergebnissen dazu bei, das Verständnis von Risikoverhalten in realen Entscheidungssituationen, wie beim Glücksspiel und in Finanzmärkten, zu vertiefen.

Prof. Dr. Markus Dertwinkel-Kalt, Professorship for Behavioural and Digital Economics at the University of Münster, has published a new research article in "Games and Economic Behavior", together with Johannes Kasinger, Tilburg School of Economics and Management, and Dmitrij Schneider, Heinrich Heine-University Düsseldorf. They test for skewness preferences in a large set of observational panel data on online poker games and found out that the effect of skewness is most pronounced among experienced and unsuccessful players but remains significant in all subsamples that they investigate, in contrast to the effect of variance.

In der heutigen Arbeitswelt gewinnt die Idee der „Workation“ zunehmend an Popularität, da es die Möglichkeit bietet, Arbeit und Urlaub zu kombinieren. Doch was genau verbirgt sich hinter dem Konzept? Welche Vorteile und auch Herausforderungen bringt eine Workation mit sich und wie wird dieses Modell bei der BBHT umgesetzt? Genau darum soll es in diesem Blogartikel gehen. 

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The Marketing Center Münster (MCM) has launched a new video series: In “One Coffee with MCM“, students from the University of Münster meet members of the MCM team at their favorite coffee place in Münster. The first episode features Prof. Dr. Thorsten Henning-Thurau, head of the Chair of Marketing & Media, at Café “1648“.

Das Marketing Center Münster (MCM) hat ein neues Videoformat gestartet: In der Reihe „One Coffee with MCM“ treffen Studierende der Universität Münster Mitglieder des MCM-Teams in deren Lieblingscafés in Münster. Den Auftakt der Interviewreihe macht Prof. Dr. Thorsten Henning-Thurau, Inhaber des Lehrstuhls für Marketing & Medien, im Café „1648“.

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.

Praktikum im Bereich Predictive Forecasting für den Finanzbereich der Telekom Deutschland. Wir versuchen mit Machine-Learning Methoden Financial und Non-Financials Prognosen zu erstellen und in die operative Nutzung zu bringen. Darüber hinaus auch viele weitere Python-basierte Use-Cases.

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.

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.

The School of Business & Economics and its alumni association, AlumniUM, present the "Alumni Stories" – an interview series where graduates of the School share their career paths and experiences at the University of Münster.

Die Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Fakultät sowie ihr Ehemaligenverein, AlumniUM, präsentieren die „Alumni Stories“ – eine Interviewreihe, in der Absolventinnen und Absolventen der Fakultät ihre Karrierewege und Erlebnisse an der Universität Münster teilen.