Research concept and partners

Information systems (IS) in business, public administration and private life are the subject of business informatics. Information systems are understood as sociotechnical human-machine systems that consist of human and machine subsystems. The design-oriented business informatics understands information systems as design objects, which must beaccepted by the user andused in benefit-creating way. The organization covers here both the conception of information systems and their development, introduction, use and advancement.

Following this guiding principle, our research is characterized by the following aspects. Our research is design-oriented and at the same timehighly variable in methodological terms. For us, design-oriented means that our research efforts  shouldcontribute directly or indirectly to the design of information systems . Depending on the maturity of a research area, this means that under certain circumstances a sufficient amount of empirically validated theoretical knowledge is available and the application of design-oriented methods, such as action design research or design science research, can be started directly. However, it can be just as well that the theoretical foundations for a systematic theory-based design are not yet available or not available to a sufficient extent. In this case, we see it as our task toassist in the development of the necessary theoretical foundations in order to create a sufficiently secure theoretical basis for the later design. Here we work then analytically-conceptually and/or with differently qualitative or quantitative methods of the empirical social research.

Another aspect that distinguishes our research is the conviction that the effective and socially desirable design of information systems very often requires the consideration and integration  ofdifferent disciplinary perspectives . This conviction is based, among other things, on the observation that information technology design is becomingincreasingly complex and that a single discipline can hardlyconsider all relevant facets (e.g., usability, acceptance, legal requirements, and economic and societal implications of technology use) in an appropriate manner . Following this conviction, we try tocooperate with scientists from other disciplines. The membership of the department in the Scientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) of the University of Kassel offers an excellent starting position for this.

In the course of the past years, researchers of the department have conducted research together with a large number of colleagues from Kassel as well as national and international partners and published corresponding results. We are very grateful to our partners for the trust they have placed in us - without these partnerships, many research and publication successes would not have been possible to this extent.