Research

Focus

Research at the Department of Information Systems II focuses on enabling strategies, solutions, technologies and IT systems for service industries such as commerce, retail, logistics, healthcare, tourism, education, and industrial services (service business).

Service innovation, service engineering and e-business in general require close attention to the management of business processes, information and knowledge (process management and business intelligence). Inter- and intra-organizational business networking complements the "big picture" of service and process oriented e-business.

Areas of Application

Prevailing areas of application are the service industries Commerce/Retail, Education/Training and Healthcare/Homecare.

• Service Management & Service Engineering
  In today's business environments IT systems play a decisive role in all phases of service management. Numerous business and technology aspects of service science lead to terms like Services Innovation, Business and Service Engineering, Services Network Management, Service Ecosystems, Service-to-Service Collaboration or Service Process Management.
  On the one hand services are the focal product of businesses operating in the tertiary economic sector like Financial Services, Retail/Commerce, Logistics, Media/Entertainment, or Healthcare Services. On the other hand services are incorporated in traditional business processes for added flexibility, higher process quality or lower cost, e.g., when using IT solutions to automate complex tasks (IT Services).
  
  
• Process Management & Process Engineering
  This field focuses on concepts, new technologies and innovative information systems supporting the strategic as well as operational phases of Business Process Management (BPM). Both business processes and inter-organizational transaction processes are being considered. Research topics are (among others) collaborative BPM (BPM 2.0), process control using software agents, web service orchestration, networked service processes, and integrated concepts for process monitoring and controlling. IT solutions for business process management are being developed in cooperation with industry partners from various fields. A special relationship exists here with the spin-off company BIK (Business Partner for Information and Communication Management, GmbH).


• Business Intelligence & Computational Intelligence
  Enterprises are facing a rapidly growing amount of both internally generated as well as externally available unstructured information. Research at the Department of Information Systems II meets this challenge in the domains of Market Intelligence, Social Networks, Web 2.0 and Enterprise Content Management. The main goal is to enable an automated information extraction, information aggregation, and information analysis using intelligent systems. Modern instruments such as swarm intelligence, fuzzy logic, semantic networks or data and text mining methods allow the development of innovative solutions assisting enterprises in their information and knowledge management processes.