Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

Unternehmen und Behörden in der Schweiz verwenden ihre Websites vermehrt zur Kommunikation mit interessierten Nutzern. Diese Entwicklung fällt zusammen mit einem Umfeld, in dem die Nutzer mit einer steigenden Informationsflut konfrontiert sind. Es ist daher nicht erstaunlich, dass Suchdienste zu den beliebtesten Anwendungen überhaupt auf dem Internet gehören. Die Ausgangslage für Suchfunktionen auf Unternehmens-Websites („vertikale“ Site-Suchen) stellt sich dabei grundlegend anders dar als bei „horizontalen“ Internet-Suchdiensten. Nicht die möglichst breite Erschliessung von Information vieler verschiedener Websites, sondern der erfolgreiche Dialog mit den Nutzern steht im Vordergrund. Die vorliegende Studie versucht eine umfangreiche Evaluation der Suchfunktionen von Schweizer Unternehmens-Websites. Nicht eine Liste von technischen Funktionalitäten, sondern die Bedürfnisse der Nutzer in ihrer Kommunikation mit der Website standen im Vordergrund. Es wurden insgesamt 74 Einzeltests grossenteils manuell durchgeführt, die in vier Hauptkriterien gruppiert wurden: Suchindex, Vergleich von Anfragen und Dokumenten, Benutzerinteraktion und Suchergebnisse. Ein wissenschaftlich fundiertes Raster wurde erstellt, in der Tradition der Evaluationen des zugehörigen akademischen Gebietes des „Information Retrieval“. Die Site-Suchen von 54 Schweizer Unternehmen und Behörden wurden der Evaluation unterzogen. Die Resultate zeigen grosses Potential für Verbesserungen. Dabei wurden kein Ranking der Websites und keine Verleihung von Awards vorgesehen. Vielmehr wurde eine Einteilung in gute, mittlere und schlechte Websites für die einzelnen Kriterien ermöglicht. Die Analyse zeigt denn auch, dass keine Website für alle Kriterien sich jeweils unter den Besten klassieren konnte. Viele Erkenntnisse betreffen direkt die Kommunikationsfunktion der Website: so konnten viele Suchfunktionen den Anforderungen hinsichtlich Vollständigkeit und Aktualität der Datenbasis, den notwendigen Voraussetzungen für gute Suchergebnisse, nicht genügen. Informationen werden oft nur mit inkorrekten Titeln oder Datumsinformationen zugänglich gemacht. Und nicht zuletzt schnitten viele Websites bei der klassischen Aufgabe des „Information Retrieval“, wo mittels „Informationsanfragen“ durch Nutzer gezielt Information zusammengestellt werden, ungenügend ab. Die Studie liefert mittels Beispielen und Empfehlungen den richtigen Einstieg, der Suchfunktion von Unternehmens-Website die Aufmerksamkeit zu schenken, die ihrer heutigen Bedeutung als Kommunikationsinstrument gerecht wird.

After it was evident that websites or online forms do not have sufficient change mass in the public sector and do not constitute a sustained Egovernment approach, the efforts of the public authorities turned towards on line services. Driving the preparation of online services citizen centric and one-stop Egovernment priorities. From this arises a precarious conflict of obligations between citizen bias and historic-grown state structures and their processes, which are far more focused on steadiness and constitutional legality. A main focus of this work is the discussion of a flexible process design as a basis for cost efficient, citizen centric and sustained integrated transaction processing. Resultant is a second main focus on integrated transaction processing as driver of design requirements, transparency needs as well as monitoring and reporting requirements. The third main focus is a generic solution proposal describing how requirements and issues derived from the above may be implemented and solved. The generic proposal examins how distributed systems may loosen the conflict between citizen bias and historic grown state structures and their processes.

The structural changes in the banking industry in the last decade forced a renewal of the IT infrastructure. The individual and flexible solutions, which were demanded by the customers and the market, could not be realised employing the monolithic information systems dating back mostly to the seventies. With a component-based approach, an extensive program for the gradual replacement of the old systems in the UBS was conducted in the last seven years. IT architecture and its management played a significant role in this process. This case study examines the development of architectural management by means of expertinterviews under specific consideration of the interaction between the architectural department and the different stakeholders within the bank. From data gathered thereby and from the comparison to the architectural approaches of other financial service providers, success factors and guidelines were deducted, which have added to the acceptance and significance of the IT architecture department within the UBS.

The measurement of the efficiency of securing information technology (IT) based information systems is a very difficult undertaking, but could aid the promotion of a better understanding of the key factors involved in the security of IT based information systems. First of all a general understanding of what security means to IT based information systems will be established and a model of the security process will be developed. Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) is a linear programming based technique for measuring the relative performance of business processes where the presence of multiple inputs and outputs makes comparisons difficult. After modeling the security process this work focuses on the potential use of DEA in the field of security of IT based information systems. It is shown that DEA is a practical tool and helps to better understand the security process. Potential best practices are concluded from the results and it is argued that compliance to laws, business strategy alignment and security policies help to increase the protection of IT based information systems. The models and ideas developed motivate for further research in the field of IT based information systems combined with DEA.

The thesis aims to investigate theoretically and empirically the business performance management practices in financial services industry, following a multi-disciplinary approach, which allows to carry on a multilevel analysis. Information management, information systems and technology, performance management from business perspective, resource-based theory and information goods economics, all in context of organization change in current information age are the major areas that constitute the theoretical background of the work. The aim of this work is to provide insights into Business Performance Management in Financial Institutions. As there is no common understanding on terms like Business Performance Management or Business Intelligence, this work will attempt to clarify differences, identify the historical development of Information Systems and illustrate the subject by observations gained in a global financial institution in Zurich. This study refers to applications and reporting output of business performance management, with focus on internal information in financial institutions. A case study describes historical background and recent developments of Global Management Information System in the Global Wealth Management & Business Banking – a group of UBS. Moreover, additional interviews in other big financial institutions – SwissRe were conducted to obtain different perspective on this subject as well as identify applied solutions and practices. As a result, common problems and success factors were presented in conclusions and further research directions identified. A systematic view on this subject results from interdisciplinary approach.

Searching for travel information on the internet becomes more and more common. In that context online tourism communities play an important role. This diploma thesis provides an analysis regarding the timeliness of traditional online tourism communities (forums), wiki communities and printed travel guides. The theoretical part discusses potential measures for timeliness such as age of information, rate of changes of information or up-to-dateness. A simplistic model to categorize travel information based on the rate of change is introduced. The timeliness of the presented media is then empirically analyzed by applying the theoretical measures. The analysis is focused on prices of accommodation and the existence of restaurants. The assumption that online communities are more up-to-date than printed travel guides was not supported. However, the results show that increasing activity and systematic technical improvement can enhance the timeliness of online communities.

In recent years, knowledge management has gained in importance in practice as well as in numerous industrial sectors. The relevancy of knowledge and its selective handling have therefore become an important aspect of many management issues. This abstract aims to examine concepts of knowledge management – in particular, the knowledge transfer within a specific environment; more precisely, the handling of knowledge within an IT outsourcing partnership. Subcontracting important secondary IT processes to external service providers requires new practices in knowledge management as basis for a mutually beneficial relation. The corporate cultures participating in the partnership thereby make a significant impact on the knowledge transfer in outsourcing. In particular, the culture’s characteristic in relation to knowledge, i.e., a specific knowledge culture, can show a positive effect on the outsourcing relation. During the examination of four businesses participating in outsourcing, practical methods of knowledge transfer within IT outsourcing, including their problems, are identified, whereas, the cultures of the partners are additionally recorded in quantity and compared in relation to the knowledge transfer. The objective of this analysis thereby is a reference process based on best practice, as a guideline for the handling of knowledge in IT outsourcing and a precise handling suggestion for the management of the own corporate culture, to enable it to display its positive effect on the outsourcing relation.

By outsourcing services a company intends to gain economic benefits. Cost advantages are typically seen as a potential key benefit. Outsourcing, however, does involve certain risks as well. A prominent risk is the loss of competence which may result in dependence on the external service provider. The greater the dependence, the more difficult it will be for a company to change the external service provider or to retrieve the process. This diploma thesis addresses the knowledge management and in particular the knowledge transfer in the context of outsourcing. In the first part the thesis focuses on the theoretical framework of outsourcing and knowledge management. The second part of the thesis will consider a practical example and show knowledge transfers that take place when changing an external service provider, the methods that can be applied and what factors influence such knowledge transfer.

This thesis looks towards the development of a software tool to reduce the dependency resulting from an outsourcing relationship between a large Swiss financial institute, and a software development company. To reduce the knowledge asymmetries between these two organizations, an initiative is started to transfer knowledge from the provider to the client. The first step in this process is the elicitation of knowledge with the help of a software tool using the topic map standard. The requirements for this software prototype are gathered by both theoretical concepts and user interviews. The software prototype allows for the collaborative creation of a knowledge graph, based on a shared material metaphor. The collaboratively created knowledge map can be seen as a large semantical indexing mechanism, representing the organizational memory.

In recent years banks have started to review and reorganize their value chain and cost structure. Besides outsourcing for cost optimization, also new outsourcing models in form of cooperative partnerships are emerging. Banks hope to be able to realize innovations and transformations in a shorter time, more professionally and at a lower cost. To enable these transformations, a true partnership between the client and the outsourcing provider is important, but also the successful Transfer of Knowledge in both directions plays a key role. This master thesis analyses the Knowledge Transfer and Knowledge Management in four Swiss banking outsourcing projects. An Outsourcing Knowledge Transfer Reference Process has been developed in collaboration with three other Master students, by unifying the best practices discovered during the analysis of the outsourcing projects.

At the beginning of the 21st century turbulences at the financial markets and decreasing interests of fixed assets forced the insurance industry into a serious crisis and led to the enormous pressure of cost savings. The advisory process as an organizational component offers cost saving opportunities by increasing profitability. This diploma thesis therefore examines the existing problems and potential improvements in the advisory process, based both on customer and advisor questionings and on the analysis of current advisory processes regarding the fulfillment of customer’s expectations. After identifying existing advisory process approaches the analysis of customer’s expectations will led to revised approaches of the advisory processes. Additionally the thesis will point out how these advisory process approaches can be supported by IT-solutions enabling efficient, innovative and customer needs aligned processes.

Tourists face a lot of information needs on their holidays that have to be satisfied in a short time frame: What should I do? When will I do it? Where is it located? How can I get there? To solve these kind of ad hoc problems tourists need a high-performance, upto-date travel guide. In the presented diploma thesis, mobile tourism communities have been evaluated in use of city travellers by an exploratory field test. It occurred that a mobile Internet connection isn’t sufficient to be a stand-alone travel guide. Even tough the study analysis showed that a mobile device offers added value due to daily up-todatedness and information diversity, these advantages couldn’t compensate the deficiencies like long response times, unreadable websites due to missing PDA optimization and the lack of usable maps that emerged during the test.

Rarely does a project proceed according to plan. The more dynamic, international and complex a project is, the higher are the chances for the project team to face unpredictable situations and deviate from its original plan. Often, a deviation from the plan requires quick decisions to be taken within the team, and even a reorientation of the team. How does a team cope with such challenges if its members are frequently traveling? Mobile devices heavily influence our normal course of life: hardly anybody leaves home without a mobile phone. It is predicted that mobile phones and PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) will converge more and more in future. Due to this fact, PDAs are experiencing a boost in their popularity. Thus, mobile devices can play a key role in enabling cooperation between traveling team members, who need to collaborate in order to carry out common tasks that could not be planned in advance. This thesis analyses the potential of PDAs to support teams carrying out such ""ad-hoc"" tasks. It provides a characterization of this particular variant of group work, and identifies the special problems arising. A solution to this problem has been proposed, and a prototype system based on the solution has been implemented. Finally, the solution as well as the prototype have been verified to meet the stated requirements of a group using experiments.

More and more consolidated companies have their subsidiaries distributed all over the world. Despite this worldwide distribution, they virtually move closer and closer together. New technologies like chat, audio- and videoconferencing allow an efficient and effective communication between these companies without the need for meeting each other faceto-face. The possibility of virtual communication helps them to save a lot of money and time. Nevertheless, to be able to replace a real face-to-face meeting, it is very important to choose the right communication technology depending on the task. The use of two different technologies, audio and chat, based on two different tasks solved by students is analysed and discussed in this diploma thesis. The results are then used to verify the hypotheses, which are adapted from different media choice theories. These outputs are also compared with the findings of smaller groups. The goal is to determine which technology is used the best regarding the situation, task and group size.

The global market for outsourcing ventures in IT and software development is continuously growing. There is great potential for development of this area considering the depth of knowledge lying in organizations. This thesis explores the current research on knowledge management and knowledge transfer in outsourcing efforts. A total of sixty articles were analyzed and categorized according to research focus, references and date of publication. The knowledge cycle is presented and carefully analyzed. In addition, the reader will find a selection of promising concepts presented in current literature. In conclusion, the concepts in research as well as practice are just developing from embryonic stage, but follow well-defined trends.

Because of a general decline of customer confidence, an increasing hybrid customer behaviour and a strong demand for efficiency, we see a need for advisory solutions in the insurance industry that are both efficient and customer?oriented. This motivated us to develop an approach that connects key advisory strategies with concrete operative guidelines. Based on interviews with insurance advisors, surveys with small and medium business customers and observations of processes, we successfully identified existing advisory approaches. We then compared them to the customer expectations and found discrepancies that led us to formulate new approaches that promise an improved effectiveness. Furthermore, by raising specific issues and weighting them according to their relevance, we determined that the efficiency of existing approaches shows room for improvement. Finally, we propose specific IT measures that can improve the efficiency and support an effective customer?oriented deployment of new approaches, and thereby facilitate the implementation of IT?supported innovations in advisory processes for the small and medium business segment of the insurance industry.

At the Departement of Informatics of the University of Zürich, a team under the lead of Christoph Göth is working on a game for Pocket PC’s called mobileGame. With this game, new students can become acquainted with the environment of the University in a playful and easy way. This mobileGame already contains different functionalities which help the players to orientate themselves. One of these functionalities locates the player and shows his position on the Pocket PC. This diploma thesis has expanded these functionalities by a new efficient and clear visualization of the track. The players can select various visualizations to see their track on the Pocket PC.

This thesis shows the applicability of the Real Options Analysis approach for decisions of tactical and strategic IT-outsourcing pro jects. Therefore, the characteristics of different types of IT-outsourcing pro jects are analyzed. Further, flaccidities of traditional qualitative and quantitative decision models are identified. Afterwards, the Real Options Analysis is introduced and the valuation of IT-outsourcing pro jects on behalf of Real Options is shown. Besides the applicability, the application in practice is also sub ject of this thesis. For this purpose, several interviews with experts were done. On this basis, practical recommendations are given to close the gap between the theoretical applicability and the practical application.

The outsourcing of IT services to a specialist provider can enable a company to restructure its activities or concentrate on its core competences. This outsourcing activity places various challenges on the outsourcer (contractor) and the outsourcing provider (contractee) relating to the knowledge transfer. The transfer of knowledge can be a critical factor in the relationship between the two parties. Based on the background knowledge, practical qualitative research was done in the thesis. Using interviews, experts from two outsourcing and one business process outsourcing project were questioned about the transfer of knowledge and the IT support of the knowledge management. From this, relevant influencing factors and challenges were worked out using an analysis framework. The knowledge obtained was integrated into a reference knowledge transfer process which was developed by further graduates. The reference process should show the best practices of knowledge transfer, based on eleven case studies in outsourcing projects.