Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

Die zunehmende Durchdringung von Administration, Forschung und Lehre mit IT stellt die Universitäten vor neue Herausforderungen bei der IT-Governance. Im gesamten öffentlichen Sektor und insbesondere an Universitäten fehlt es bisher nicht nur im deutschsprachigen Raum, sondern auch international an belastbarer empirischer und konzeptioneller Forschung zur IT-Governance, obwohl die Literatur die Unterschiede in den Anforderungen von der Geschäftswelt betont. Der Beitrag fasst die bisherige Literatur zu IT-Governance an Universitäten zusammen und stellt das neue IT-Governance-Konzept der Universität Zürich vor. Der Beitrag ist der erste von zwei Teilen zur IT-Governance an Universitäten. In der nächsten Ausgabe von Verwaltung & Management wird die Situation in Deutschland analysiert und mit der in den USA verglichen.

With the recent emergence of Web 2.0 technologies an ancient form of financial exchange has re-emerged within the last few years; credit granting within a community - also known as ""Social Lending"". Adopting this scheme from a local, familiar and trusted community into the virtual world enables as many new opportunities as it bears potential uncertainties and risks. This thesis investigates and outlines the structural characteristics of internet based Social Lending by means of well known schemes, such as marketplaces, cooperation and community systems and further analyzes existing uncertainties as well as techniques to mitigate these hazards and risks. Based on the findings, a framework has been compiled and validated in an explorative manner by means of a survey. Among others, this thesis shows the influence of sanctioning instruments, wealth of information, reputation and substitutes of physical presence on establishing trust within a virtual community.

In the last few years the travel industry has changed deeply. In the context to the research on Ñthe travel agency of the futureì, a Smartboard advisory system has been developed. The aim of this advisory system is to shift the traditional travel agency in a cooperative experience area. In this work, the usage capabilities of this advisory system for co-worker training are to be examined. This training encloses on the one hand the multimedia supported self-improvement of product- and destination-knowing as well as a preparation on a personal computer for the cooperative consulting situation at the Smartboard. Constructing on the analysis of learning behavior of the travel advisors a web-based training prototype is developed, which connects the advantages of an explorative E-Learning application with the requirements to a cooperative consulting system. Finally a training concept for the Smartboard consultation has been tested with travel agency trainees.

In recent years, RFID has gained in importance in logistics as well as in numerous industrial sectors. The relevancy of business processes and work flows and those efficient designs have become an important aspect of many management issues. In this work, processes will be analyzed on the basis of a concrete example in economics; more precisely, those possible optimization by means of innovative and traditional technologies along the entire supply chain from suppliers to customers. The successful integration of more efficient and reliable technologies into an existing environment requires proper analysis of all work flows and interfaces between all stakeholders. The objective of this process analysis is the concept development and a precise handling suggestion to enable an optimization of logistic flows.

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Many mobile learning projects aim to support new learning forms like situated learning in a real world environment. Situated and explorative learning should be active learning, engaging students in the environment. We tested four different tasks designs in two large field tests with the mExplorer system. Two kinds of engaging tasks were observed. Interactive tasks with high context integration led to knowledge about specific aspects of an environment. Creative tasks led to a familiarization with the environment. We also analyzed other projects with situated real world learning scenarios to see what types of tasks they were using. We found that instead of sup-porting active learning, many of these projects still focus on transmissive elements and do not use the full potential of situated and explorative learning. To optimize this, we propose four design recommendations for tasks and de-scribe the circumstances under which specific types of m-learning tasks should be used.

In diesem Beitrag präsentieren wir einen Ansatz zur Unterstützung der kooperativen Reiseberatung basierend auf einem interaktiven Großbildschirmsystem, welches eine gemeinsame Visualisierung der Informations-Ressourcen zur Verbesserung der Interaktion und Kommunikation zwischen Kunden und Berater erlaubt und verschiedene Medienkanäle für den Zugriff auf Internet-Ressourcen und andere Experten integriert. Aufbauend auf einem nutzerzentrierten Szenario stellen wir einen konkreten System-Prototyp vor und diskutieren die ersten Erfahrungen aus einem Feld-Experiment in einer realen Reiseagentur. Der Einsatz des berührungsempfindlichen Großbildschirms und der Multimedia-Ressourcen fördert die emotionale Beteiligung des Benutzers, während die Integration der Community-Informationen die Vertrauenswürdigkeit erhöht. Die Ergebnisse deuten darauf hin, dass solch ein System den Kooperationsprozess bzw. die Kunden- und Beraterzufriedenheit deutlich verbessern kann.

Over the past few years IT offshoring has become one of the most important corporate strategies in the software industry and is facing a diversity of challenges. One of them is the efficient transfer of knowledge between two companies, separated significantly in terms of time zone, geographical and cultural distance. Cultural aspects hence represent one of the most critical elements. While considering the software development process, requirements engineering is one of the most critical steps and implies an immense communication effort. When now the cross-cultural layer is added it seems to be a hardly solvable task. However, actual research on this section of knowledge transfer within offshore software development under cross-cultural settings is still limited. This is a research in progress paper using a qualitative research setting carried out with an explanatory case study involving the software requirements specification (SRS) as the knowledge to be transferred between IT companies in Germany and India. The basis of this paper is that, for the start of successful transfer of knowledge we suggest the storytelling methodology as a suitable tool to overcome these difficulties. Thus we are asking, how storytelling affects the inception of knowledge transfer in offshore software development projects.

Major search engines are briefly described after a short introduction of different search methods with a special focus on Google‘s revolutionary PageRank algorithm. After this introduction, a more recent search method called social search is explained. Special focus is put on social bookmarking and tagging. An empirical study about subjective and objective tags in different settings shows no huge difference for subjective and objective tags in terms of data retrieval in the web. Furthermore, it is indicated that a tag search might be more helpful than conventional search for brainstorming or inspiration. Conventional search, on the other hand, is more helpful to find specific information.

Users of online tourism communities are confronted with the constant increase of information. A suitable solution for an efficient access to this growing amount of data could be personalizing methods which automatically present the content trimmed to the context of an individual user. Based on the research on the concept of personalization, the six most popular methods are presented and discussed. These methods require a significant amount of metadata to filter the requested information according to the user context. Several Web 2.0 concepts are presented, which can be used to generate this metadata. The acquired basic understanding of personalization concepts and methods is then applied on the area of existing online tourism communities. To discuss these circumstances, a selection of todayís online travel communities is empirically analyzed. The results of this paper show that the large amount of interest found in literature, research and science on the subject of personalization is not a reflection of the amount found in existing online tourism communities.

Von der herkömmlichen Suchmaschine bis zur Vision einer verständnisvollen Antwort: Potenziale und Begrenzungen. Die Entwicklung von Suchtechnologien für das World Wide Web gehört heute zu den zentralen Herausforderungen der Informatik. Eine Alternative zu den heutigen Algorithmen-basierten Suchmaschinen stellen hierbei Social-Search-Ansätze dar. Das Semantic Web beinhaltet schliesslich die Vision, komplexe natürlichsprachige Anfragen beantworten zu können.

Due to the increase in technology used in the financial sector, which continues to intensify competition, tailoring consulting services is playing a decisive role in differentiating oneself from the competition. The increase in technology has created prerequisites which companies can use to offer the customer better consulting through IT support. Six Swiss banks were interviewed as part of this paper to find out whether these prerequisites are being utilized in investment consulting. The results showed that investment consulting without the help of IT tools is currently unimaginable. However, there is great room for improvement in the information technology deployed. Based on specialist literature and the interviews carried out, this paper shows improvement measures for the investment process of Swiss banks. Durch die zunehmende Technologisierung im Finanzsektor und der dadurch immer intensiver werdende Wettbewerb, spielt die Individualisierung der Beratungsdienstleistungen eine entscheidende Rolle um sich von der Konkurrenz abzuheben. Mit der Technologisierung wurden die Voraussetzungen geschaffen, dass der Kunde durch IT-Unterstu?tzung besser beraten werden kann. Um herauszufinden ob diese Voraussetzungen in der Anlageberatung genutzt werden, wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit sechs Schweizer Banken befragt. Dabei stellt sich heraus, dass eine Anlageberatung ohne IT-Hilfsmittel heute kaum mehr vorstellbar ist. Dennoch besteht bei der eingesetzten Informationstechnologie ein grosses Verbesserungspotential. Basierend auf die Fachliteratur und die durchgefu?hrten Interviews soll die vorliegende Arbeit Verbesserungsmassnahmen im Anlageprozess von Schweizer Banken aufzeigen.

Community research assumes that mobile tourism communities could change the way how travelers achieve the information needed. A successful community can only be established, if it is able to meet the user's demands. There is a gap in research in this area regarding the required investigation with basic methods. By focusing on the main interests individual travelers had, we tried to figure out in which scenarios they could be put in most possibly where a mobile tourism community could succeed. Therefore we used the methods focus group, field trip and travel diary to clarify which methods suit for further research in this domain. The results show that information about public transportation and accommodation is the most common need. A mobile community could be a good tool to resolve several needs, although we found out that too much information available could reduce travel experience.

In numberless communities, onlineshops, blogs, social networks or on video- and photo-platforms people are discussing about products, brands, enterprises or persons and organisations are star- ting contests for the creation of ads for their own products: User Generated Advertising (UGA) can be found at any corner of todays internet. This paper systematically defines User Generated Advertising in conjunction with classical marke- ting and user-generated content. As there will be shown, User-Driven-UGA and Business-Driven- UGA are two forms of UGA, distinguished by their initial driver. Through the study of a sample, the structural characteristics of UGA will be derived to show the similarities and differences between several UGA-examples. From those results, a framework with the success factors participation, attitude, loyalty, credibili- ty, cost, reach, resonance and motivation is built and itís hypothesisí being validated under use of structural equation modelling on a Facebook-sample. The results show a positive influence of the userís passive participation - like viewing - on the userís attitude towards the advertised item. Furthermore, User-Driven UGA has a higher credibility than Business-Driven UGA. The framework is recommended as a base for further research on UGA.

User-generated content has become widespread in the media. Due to the increasing convergence of the Internet, fixed-line and mobile telephony, as well as television, this user-generated content can be produced and consumed at any time and any place. The services enabling this will be referred to as next-generation media services in this paper and will be examined in terms of their usage in mobile communities. In the course of doing so, the focus will be on the preferences of the members of a mobile community regarding information acquisition on the one hand and how video can be applied for mobile information exchange on the other. By way of a scenario-based and user-based design procedure, a prototypical application for common mobile telephones was created in order to investigate these two issues: the „Mobile Social Touristmate“. It was conceived to be integrated into existing social networking websites at a later time and offers the possibility to manually provide multimedia blog entries with locational and further meta-information. Such entries may contain audio files, images, texts or videos and can be searched or employed as questions using the so-called Mobile Forum 2.0. During the evolutionary development, particular attention was paid to usability, which is of central importance in mobile software applications. In the field experiments carried out with the prototype, it was established that the members of the mobile community preferred to benefit from existing content instead of asking questions themselves. Mobile videos were only rarely used to exchange information.

In order to assure the security and compatibility of information technology systems despite the increasing frequency of changes in organizations, a capable Change Management is of great importance, therefore having a constant overview of the system environment, all ongoing changes and leading them efficiently. With growing size of the organization the amount of functions and their varying requirements augment. This causes an increase of complexity in control and assessment of the requests handled by the Change Management. In a global positioned company there is an additional dimension, created through the diversification of cultures of origin of the local employees. The here presented thesis researches the inducement of the requirements for a Change Management and the corresponding process by the culture of origin. Therefore the differences between the cultures as well as their implications to process requirements and their consequences for multinational organizations are analyzed and discussed.

In recent years companies have started to reconsider their business strategies and adapt them to global market structures. Most companies refocus on the customer as their most important stakeholder. CRM (Customer Relationship Management) aims at optimizing the relationship between a company and its customers. The concepts involved are of high importance even for educational institutions (such as universities), especially in retaining the relationships to their alumni. The master thesis shows how CRM concepts can be applied to alumni relations by implementing CRM for Alumni UZH, the umbrella group of autonomous alumni organisations at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Based on a survey, a CRM-Strategy is being developed and technically implemented. The IT system needs to be amended in such a way that it supports the execution of the strategy.

Abstract In today’s harshly competitive ?nancial sector, ?nancial advice turnes out to be an apropriate tool to set oneself apart form competitors. However, ?nancial advice seems to have several de?- ciencies which lead customers to lose trust in their advisors. Consequently, many customers will stop taking advice from consultants altogether. De?ciencies are mostly a result of an information asymmetry between a customer an his ?nancial advisor. The process of information gathering is supported by information technology which prepares and provides relevant information to its users. The advisor is always better informed than his customer because the customer has no access to the information system of the advisor. Agency theory provides an effective tool for analizing the various characteristics of informa- tion asymmetries between an agent (advisor) and a principal (customer). The in?uence of infor- mation technology on the principal–agency–con?ict between customer and ?nancial advisor is explored in this work against the background of the agency theory. With this aim several issues of the ?nancial advisory process and the effect of information technology on on these issues will be identi?ed. On the basis of the agency theory, possible ways towards a solution of these problems will be explored.

The Internet has challenged the traditional business model of travel agencies: What is the reason for their existence if information is abundantly available and transactions can be flexibly booked on the Internet? This paper argues that good travel advisory services create a significant added value, if they succeed in uncovering the customers’ hidden needs and creating a better user experience. Modern information systems such as the SmartTravel system developed by the authors support this effort and provide the customers with an involving “shopping” experience. SmartTravel supports the agent-customer interaction with a large display and an interface integrating professional and user-generated content. We present the design rationale and the interface design of the SmartTravel system. First evaluation results indicate that the users value the system, because it provides richer and more trustworthy information in a more enjoyable environment.