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User, Use & Utility Research

The Digital User as New Design Perspective in Business and Information Systems Engineering

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Abstract

Business and Information Systems Engineering (BISE) is at a turning point. Planning, designing, developing and operating IT used to be a management task of a few elites in public ad-ministrations and corporations. But the continuous digitization of nearly all areas of life changes the IT landscape fundamentally. Success in this new era requires putting the human perspective – the digital user – at the very heart of the new digitized service-led economy.

BISE faces not just a temporary trend but a complex socio-technical phenomenon with far-reaching implications. The challenges are manifold and have major consequences for all stakeholders, both in information systems and management research as well as in practice. Corporate processes have to be re-designed from the ground up, starting with the user’s perspective, thus putting usage experience and utility of the individual center stage.

The digital service economy leads to highly personalized application systems while organizational functions are being fragmented. Entirely new ways of interacting with information systems, in particular beyond desktop IT, are being invented and established. These fundamental challenges require novel approaches with regards to innovation and development methods as well as adequate concepts for enterprise or service system architectures. Gigantic amounts of data are being generated at an accelerating rate by an increasing number of devices – data that need to be managed.

In order to tackle these extraordinary challenges we introduce ‘user, use & utility’ as a new field of BISE that focuses primarily on the digital user, his or her usage behavior and the utility associated with system usage in the digitized service-led economy.

The research objectives encompass the development of theories, methods and tools for systematic requirement elicitation, systems design, and business development for successful Business and Information Systems Engineering in a digitized economy – information systems that digital users enjoy using. This challenge calls for leveraging insights from various scientific disciplines such as Design, Engineering, Computer Science, Psychology and Sociology. BISE can provide an integrated perspective, thereby assuming a pivotal role within the digitized service led economy.

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Notes

  1. http://www.Car2go.de.

  2. http://www.apple.com.

  3. http://www.amazon.com.

  4. http://www.parkatmyhouse.com.

  5. http://uk.zopa.com.

  6. http://www.mytaxi.de.

  7. http://www.gumroad.com.

  8. The positioning of the field ‘user, use & utility’ as a design perspective is analogue design perspectives such as ‘governance’, ‘security’ (see Op ‘t Land et al. 2009) or ‘information and data’ in BISE.

  9. http://www.zapier.com.

  10. The term ‘digital natives’ is used to describe people that were born after the year 1980 and who therefore grew up with digital technology.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Information Management, University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Walter Brenner,  Hubert Österle, Charles Petrie,  Falk Uebernickel &  Robert Winter

  2. University of Vienna, Vienna, Austria

    Dimitris Karagiannis

  3. University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany

    Lutz Kolbe

  4. Hasso-Plattner-Institut, Potsdam, Germany

    Jens Krüger &  Hasso Plattner

  5. Stanford University, Stanford, CA, USA

    Larry Leifer

  6. FTM - Frankfurt Technology Management GmbH, Frankfurt am Main, Germany

    Hermann-Josef Lamberti

  7. University of Kassel, Kassel, Germany

    Jan Marco Leimeister

  8. University of St. Gallen, St. Gallen, Switzerland

    Jan Marco Leimeister

  9. University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Gerhard Schwabe

  10. Technical University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Rüdiger Zarnekow

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  1. Walter Brenner
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  13. Robert Winter
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  14. Rüdiger Zarnekow
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Falk Uebernickel.

Additional information

Accepted after two revisions by the editors of the special focus.

This article is also available in German in print and via http://www.wirtschaftsinformatik.de: Brenner W, Karagiannis D, Kolbe L, Krüger J, Leifer L, Lamberti H-J, Leimeister JM, Österle H, Petrie C, Plattner H, Schwabe G, Uebernickel F, Winter R, Zarnekow R (2013) User, Use & Utility Research. Die Gestaltungsperspektive der Wirtschaftsinformatik auf den digitalen Nutzer. WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK. doi:10.1007/s11576-013-0394-y.

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Brenner, W., Karagiannis, D., Kolbe, L. et al. User, Use & Utility Research. Bus Inf Syst Eng 6, 55–61 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12599-013-0302-4

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