Research

The research areas of the research group ITG include the following research areas:

Big Data Analytics and Privacy in Enterprise Architecture Management
and Business Ecosystems, Information Governance Technologies and
Architectural Thinking in digital Transformations

Today, we live in an increasingly data-driven world. Digital trends such as cloud computing, the Internet of Things and social media have led to a massive growth of data both in business and in public. While the data deluge provides many opportunities for businesses, it is also composed of personal information, raising privacy concerns among people and organizations. Recent privacy scandals illuminate that awareness of privacy is playing an increasingly crucial role. As a result, modern laws like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) aim to intensify the need for organizations to handle personal data sustainably and to implement appropriate security and privacy measures. Since many organizations are overwhelmed with the rapid progress of information technology (IT) and the complexity of data flows throughout their enterprise architecture (EA) and within the ecosystems they are part of, they struggle to exploit full potential of big data and to ensure an adequate level of privacy. To ensure GDPR compliance and support continuous transformation driven by big data analytics, organizations demand for architectural models that illustrate the use of personal data. With the aim of achieving transparency, consistency and alignment of business and IT components, EA modeling provides a reasonable approach for this challenge. Moreover, organizations need to think outside of their borders, as often many partners and third parties are involved in a network of data sharing, leading to complex data ecosystems. The aim of this research is to study and develop approaches that provide transparency on both the data-driven EA of today’s organizations as well as complex data ecosystems consisting of various data-sharing actors, their interfaces and collaboration processes. This includes a special emphasis on security- and privacy-related aspects, as an adequate management of personal data is increasingly important. For practically demonstrating these approaches, such as meta-models, case studies in data-driven domains, such as smart metering, and on the use of applications that are leading to privacy-critical cases in ecosystems shall be conducted. The main hypothesis to be researched is whether EA and ecosystem architecture models can provide a reasonable key to identify potentials of big data, reveal security gaps and realize compliance with regulations like the GDPR.

For more details please contact: Fabian Burmeister

IT-Governance and Business IT-Alignment in agile Organisations

 Organizations increasingly strive to increase their ability to proactively sense and respond to market opportunities and threats to remain competitive by embracing organizational agility. As doing so often blurs traditional boundaries between business and IT, this has considerable implications for the business-IT alignment concept. In addition, traditional IT management and IT governance and their domains such as, e.g., portfolio management and enterprise architecture management (EAM) need to be reevaluated. Finally, the notion of the IT organizational setup needs examination on how agility results in strategic, structural and/or processual changes. In summary, we seek to find solutions for the overarching problem on “How to design IT setups for enabling agility?” by 1) deriving new models and frameworks for agility on team as well as tactical and strategic level, 2) conceptualizing underlying guiding principles for the design and 3) determining context factors for advising different organizational forms.

For more details please contact: Bettina Horlach

Ecosystems and Architectures for Digital Transformation within
the Social Context, Responsible and Social Innovation

 Digital innovation efforts are often technology-driven. Large consulting companies such as Gartner highlight which technology is new or popular. However, this view of innovations ignores essential aspects. If there is a pure focus on technology and not on the problem, there is a risk of overlooking a simpler and possibly cheaper solution. On a broader scale, the impact of digital innovations on society in terms of responsibility, sustainability and inclusion is initially not considered any further during the process of digital transformation. However, these are crucial issues, as they are currently coming to the fore in scientific, political and social discourse.

 In a depth study we examine the extent to which digital innovations can be designed in a responsible, sustainable and inclusive manner and the extent to which evaluation criteria can be developed apart from monetary aspects. It is particularly important to strengthen the social sector with regard to a meaningful digital transformation and to analyze which actors in the ecosystem of homeless aid have which digital needs and which solutions have been developed so far. This leads from digital short-term monetary support to the provision of information and aid for the support of reintegration.

For more details please contact: Larissa Gebken 

The "(IT-)Organization of the Future": Digital Innovation Management,
Innovation Ecosystems and (IT-)Governance

Digital technologies are becoming more and more critical for organizations today as they have highly salient characteristics with significant impact on innovation and its management. Digital entities (products, services, processes, business models) are highly malleable and offer large new areas of potential functionality. The range of what is technically and economically feasible with IT is rapidly expanding. This promotes the role of IT as a strong enabler of innovation.

However, the increasing importance of IT in organizations is accompanied by growing complexity. Legal requirements and regulatory specifications must be implemented in ever faster cycles. At the same time, there is a growing need to observe the constantly changing requirements of the business departments and to act accordingly. In recent years, IT has increasingly transformed itself from a cost factor to a partner and co-designer in the company. For this transformation to succeed, effective and efficient IT governance is required. With the goal of business-IT alignment, IT strategies must be developed and a suitable project portfolio designed.

Beyond the increasing potential of IT, digital innovations are strongly influenced by network effects. This effect enables companies with large networks to reduce costs or extend the functionalities of IT innovations. The high significance of digital innovations and the importance of strategic positioning in the innovation ecosystem fundamentally put traditional organizational designs and structures under scrutiny. Initial approaches using specialized digital units as innovation accelerators appear promising, but their effectiveness and positioning in the core organization have hardly been explored. In addition to a deeper analysis of such digital innovation units, the ITG group is researching requirements and socio-technical interfaces to ensure that the collaboration of these units with their core organization and their (innovation) ecosystem is efficacious.

For more details please contact: Jun-Patrick Raabe

Gender and Diversity

Aspects of gender and diversity may be found not only on an industrial level, but also increasingly in the field of higher education, where they are decisive factors in the emergence of successful or unsuccessful ventures. Especially concerning the subjects mathematics, informatics, natural sciences and technology, where their formative role and their combined influence on all walks of life and work are required not only to register diversity but also to actively experience, to promote and as innovative potential to employ. The importance of gender and diversity competence can therefore not be overstressed, especially in such sectors as research and product development. Increasingly also in vocational training and university education as a result of continuing underrepresentation of females in the majority of science subjects, there is a search for the reason why.

This leads us on to the subject of research results in female research and gender studies in the natural sciences which analyse on various levels the connection between science and gender. On the other hand there is the question of the practical implementation of Gender Mainstreaming and Diversity Management on a daily basis.

The individual topics include Women in Science, the construction of gender through science, gender relations as endemic to natural science or technical artefacts, the definition of science, faculty culture and self-images, didactic rudiments that are sensitive to gender and diversity. On the whole the emphasis should - rather than relying on facts and figures – be on a reflective method of analysis, and a fresh approach to subject teaching, in order to achieve a lasting transformation via gender competence and diversity management.