User,Use & Utility Research

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy. BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage. The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed. In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy. The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.     

Indicators, Green Accounting and Environment Statistics— Information Requirements for Sustainable Development

Since the "Earth Summit" in Rio de Janeiro 1992 the term "sustainable development" determines the third and current phase of environmental policy. A precise and commonly accepted definition of sustainable development (s.d.) is still missing. There are, nevertheless, some elements in the philosophy of sustainable development which–even if they are still vague–could be used as guidelines for a framework of "green" accounting and sustainability indicators. Based on theoretical considerations, the German Federal Statistical Office has developed a framework for an Environmental Economic Accounting System. The objective is to add meaningful modules to the traditional System of National Accounts which are designed to quantify the external (environmental) effects of economic activities. The framework could already be realised and published to an extent that is relevant for actual policy making in Germany.     

The Term Structure of Interest Rates in a Small Open Economy: A Stochastic Analysis

This article employs a rational expectations IS-LM model with price adjustment to study the effect of domestic monetary and fiscal policy and world interest rate disturbances on the real and nominal small open economy term structure of interest rates. The impact of both temporary and permanent shocks are investigated. Notable results include the fact that monetary expansions lead to positive yield curves, while the implications of fiscal expansions and increases in the world interest rate depend crucially on the duration of the shock.