Business & Information Systems Engineering

One major development within business practice is the increasing interest in customer relationship management (CRM) in recent years. CRM thereby focuses on establishing and maintaining profitable relationships with the customer using modern information technology (IT) and has emerged as a major research field in business and information systems engineering. However, despite huge investments many CRM projects fail to achieve their objectives as the complex and interdisciplinary nature of CRM is not addressed adequately. In fact an adoption of a customer-centric orientation within a value-based management requires not only a cross-functional integration of different business departments but also a selectively adjusted collaboration of those departments. The paper provides an overview of the state of the art of CRM in literature as well as current practices in companies. Furthermore it outlines the specific challenges of a value-based CRM for the cross-functional integration and collaboration of marketing, financial management, and IT. Thus, in addition to a mutual alignment of marketing and IT, a value-based analysis, planning, and controlling of CRM-activities requires the development and implementation of standardized performance measurements and their adequate IT-support.

Process mining offers a set of techniques for gaining data-based insights into business processes from event logs. The literature acknowledges the potential benefits of using process mining techniques in Six Sigma-based process improvement initiatives. However, a guideline that is explicitly dedicated on how process mining can be systematically used in Six Sigma initiatives is lacking. To address this gap, the Process Mining for Six Sigma (PMSS) guideline has been developed to support organizations in systematically using process mining techniques aligned with the DMAIC (Define-Measure-Analyze-Improve-Control) model of Six Sigma. Following a design science research methodology, PMSS and its tool support have been developed iteratively in close collaboration with experts in Six Sigma and process mining, and evaluated by means of focus groups, demonstrations and interviews with industry experts. The results of the evaluations indicate that PMSS is useful as a guideline to support Six Sigma-based process improvement activities. It offers a structured guideline for practitioners by extending the DMAIC-based standard operating procedure. PMSS can help increasing the efficiency and effectiveness of Six Sigma-based process improving efforts. This work extends the body of knowledge in the fields of process mining and Six Sigma, and helps closing the gap between them. Hence, it contributes to the broad field of quality management.

In turbulent contexts, organizations face contradictory challenges which give rise to management tensions and paradoxes. Digital transformation is one such context where the disruptive potential of digital technologies demands radical responses from existing organizations. While prior research has recognized the importance of coping with organizational paradoxes, little is known about how to identify them. Although it may be apparent in some settings which paradoxes are at play, other more ambivalent contexts require explicit identification. This study takes a design perspective to identify the relevant paradoxes in a digital transformation context. It presents the results of a 2-year action design research study in collaboration with an organization that chose to explicitly focus on paradoxical tensions for managing its digital transformation. The study’s main contribution is twofold: (1) it presents design knowledge to identify organizational paradoxes; (2) it provides a better understanding of the organizational paradoxes involved in digital transformation. The design knowledge will help others to identify paradoxes when working with an organization and highlights dynamic and collaborative aspects of the identification process. The study also enhances the descriptive understanding of digital transformation paradoxes by showing the importance of learning and belonging tensions and by expressing a different view on what knowledge about paradoxes is, and how it is created and used.

Web service compositions coordinate Web services of different enterprises. They are expected to constitute the foundation of service-oriented architectures, to improve business processes as well as to foster intra- and inter-organizational integration. Especially in inter-organizational contexts, quality of service referring to non-functional requirements and conformance to functional requirements are becoming vital properties. With Web service compositions being asynchronous and distributed systems, the latter property – which is also called correctness – can be shown best by verification. This paper examines from a system-theoretic perspective how correctness can be operationalized for Web service compositions. It also proposes a requirements framework for service-oriented modeling techniques so that correctness can be shown by verification and Web service compositions can be modeled intuitively. In order to show the framework’s principle applicability, an example approach is analyzed with respect to the corresponding requirements.