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.     

Sectoral adjustment of employment to shifts in outsourcing and trade: evidence from a dynamic fixed effects multinomial logit model

This paper analyzes the effects of trade and outsourcing on the transition probabilities of employment between sectors, using a dynamic multinomial logit framework with fixed effects. The data cover a sample of individual Austrian male workers over the period 1988–2001. Our results strongly support the view that international economic forces are important determinants of labor market turnover. In particular, an increase in the outsourcing intensity negatively affects the probability of staying in or changing into the manufacturing sector, even more so for industries with a comparative disadvantage. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SLUM DWELLERS' HOUSEHOLD CONSUMPTION PATTERN AND ITS IMPLICATION FOR COST RECOVERY IN SLUM UPGRADING: Evidence from Dhaka, Bangladesh

Strong emphasis has recently been placed on recovery of improvement costs from slum dwellers for sustainable development of low-income urban settlements. Furthermore, socio-economic stratification of slum dwellers is perceived to influence their consumption and investment patterns in the city. Against this background, populations in six slums in Dhaka, stratified into house owners and renters, were studied. Results show that renters have stronger ties with their rural origin where they are likely to return and remit a significant portion of their income, leaving a limited amount for consumption and investment in the city. In contrast, owners have stronger attachment to the city, remit negligible amounts to their village of origin and pay more attention to city consumption and investment. Consequently, any cost recovery approach to slum upgrading implies heavy reliance on owners. But renters can also be expected to share the cost, to some limited extent, in the form of property tax or community services charges. The key point here is the concurrence of renters and owners on the sharing of costs and benefits.     

Bank Efficiency, Risk-Based Capital, and Real Estate Exposure: The Credit Crunch Revisited

The turbulent real estate market during the early 1990s coincided with the implementation of risk-based capital standards for commercial banks. In this study we use non-parametric linear programming techniques to identify the lost real estate lending due to bank inefficiency. Inefficiency may arise from one of three sources: risk-based capital standards which constrain bank real estate lending, inefficiency stemming from managerial oversight of real estate lending, and scale inefficiency which arises from banks not operating at constant returns to scale. The results indicate that the lost real estate lending associated with risk-based capital standards averaged 2.7% of total bank assets. However, banks could compensate by exercising better managerial oversight of real estate lending and by operating at constant returns to scale.