Research concept and partners

Information systems (IS) in business, public administration and private life are the subject of business informatics. Information systems are understood here as socio-technicalman-machine systems consisting of human and machine subsystems. Design-oriented business informatics understands information systems as design objects that must be accepted by the user and used in a beneficial manner. In this context, design encompasses the conception of information systems as well as their development, introduction, use and further development.

Following this guiding principle, our research is characterized by the following aspects. Our research is design-oriented and at the same time highly variable in terms of methodology. For us, design-oriented means that our research efforts should contribute directly or indirectly to the design of information systems. Depending on the maturity of a research area, this may mean that 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 begin directly. However, it is just as possible that the theoretical foundations for systematic theory-based design are not yet available or not available to a sufficient extent. In this case, we see it as our task to contribute to the development of the necessary theoretical foundations in order to create a sufficiently sound theoretical basis for the subsequent design. We then work analytically and conceptually and/or with various qualitative or quantitative methods of empirical social research.

Another aspect that characterizes our research is the conviction that the effective and socially desirable design of information systems very often requires the consideration and integration of different disciplinary perspectives. This conviction is based, among other things, on the observation that information technology design is becoming increasingly complex and that a single discipline can hardly consider all relevant facets (e.g. usability, acceptance, legal requirements as well as economic and social implications of the use of technology) in an appropriate form. In line with this conviction, we try to work together with scientists from other disciplines. The department's membership of the Scientific Center for Information Technology Design (ITeG) at the University of Kassel provides an excellent starting point 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.