Ingrid Schirmer

Hamburg University | UHH · Department of Informatics

Design-oriented research in general and action design research in particular aims to impact the real world in a way that has demonstrably positive outcomes for organizations or society. However, the current methodological guidance for action design research currently lacks a way to proactively incorporate the consideration of values into the result...

In this paper, we introduce Value-Sensitive Digital Social Innovation (VSDSI) as a new research field. Integrating insights, goals and methods from Digital Social Innovations (DSI), Value Sensitive Design (VSD), Participatory Design and Research Ethics guidelines, we propose a new research agenda for a more ethically and socially responsible resear...

We propose a research agenda on digital innovation units (DIUs) that refines the current-mainly descriptive-body of knowledge. Receiving great attention in practice, DIUs are dedicated organizational units that support and partly drive digital transformation in incumbent firms by leveraging new structures and practices that differ from those existi...

Digital Social Innovations (DSI) aim to address social challenges, such as poverty and inequality, with information and communication technologies. The development of such innovations requires a broad understanding of the DSI ecosystem and the pluralistic values of the involved actors to enable sustainable development and long-term anchoring. In va...

The field of digital social innovation (DSI) seeks to address societal challenges, including fighting poverty and inequality, strengthening justice, human rights, and gender equality, and addressing environmental issues affecting the planet and climate by leveraging digital technologies. In this article, we present a multilevel design framework for...

Privacy violations increasingly result from personal-data processing by a convoluted set of actors that collaborate in complex data ecosystems. These data ecosystems comprise numerous socio-technical elements and relations, and their opacity often obscures the manifold reasons for privacy violations. Therefore, researchers and practitioners call fo...

Digital innovations are fundamentally transforming incumbent firms. Accordingly, many firms established dedicated agile units that focus on digital innovation: digital innovation units (DIUs). DIUs assist incumbents-in addition to other tasks-in identifying digital trends that could harm day-today business. Despite recent publications about objecti...

This paper examines digital innovation (DI) types and digital trends that are especially addressed within digital innovation units (DIU). As research on DIUs is still scarce, we collected website data from German DAX30 incumbents to identify dependencies between different DIU setups, DI types and digital trends. Not surprisingly, our results show t...

The innovator's dilemma leads organizations to follow exploration and exploitation activities while simultaneously striving for ambidexterity. Whereas structures, modes, or conditions of ambidexterity have received much attention in recent studies, research on how the integration of digital innovation is achieved is still scarce. This capability is...

During the first wave of COVID-19 lockdowns, the infrastructure for supporting homeless neighbors disintegrated in many countries. As one important area of support, it became difficult to provide small donations to homeless neighbors. In an action design research-based project, as part of a national hackathon initiative and accelerator program, we...

With the ubiquitous use of mobile devices, location-based services (LBS) have rapidly pervaded daily life. By providing context-and location-specific information, LBS enable a myriad of opportunities for individuals and organizations. However, the manifold advantages come along with a radical increase in location privacy concerns and non-transparen...

Incumbent firms increasingly strive to embrace digital innovation, often via implementing dedicated digital innovation units (DIUs). As seizing the rapid and various digital innovation-related market movements may be overwhelming for an individual DIU, collaborations within ecosystems are perceived as crucial for continuously recognizing business o...

Organisations increasingly strive to increase their ability to proactively sense and respond to market opportunities and threats to remain competitive by embracing organisational agility. As doing so often blurs traditional boundaries between business and IT, this has considerable implications for the business IT alignment (BITA) concept. Based on...

Due to rapidly changing customer needs, enterprises seek to innovate continuously. This includes the capability of discovering and developing digital innovations. As a nascent phenomenon, companies increasingly use digital innovation units (DIU) as fast and flexible accelerators. Although DIUs are established in practice, research on them and their...

Organizational agility is a prominent aim for companies to thrive in today's volatile business environments. One common building block of agility are (semi-) autonomous teams for continuously fulfilling and surpassing customers' needs. However, these teams still need to see the enterprise's 'big picture' of strategic objectives, business processes,...

Businesses today are increasingly dependent on how they transform information into economic value, while simultaneously being compliant with intensified privacy requirements, resulting from legal acts like the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). As a consequence, realizing information governance has become a topic more important than ever to...

Due to rapidly changing customer needs, enterprises seek to innovate continuously. Incumbent firms need to improve their capabilities to develop, evaluate, and implement digital innovations. Recently, many enterprises established digital innovation units (DIUs) for accelerating their digital innovation endeavors. Although numerous units exist in pr...

Today, many e-government projects are of large scale. They can be considered as socio-technical ecosystems in which citizens, authorities, and enterprises collaborate through information systems. Several of these e-government projects are characterized as partial or total failures, because they could not master the high complexity resulting from a...

Digital transformations all over the world intend to create or influence socio-technical ecosystems in which people and organizations are collaborating today. Many of these digitization efforts are characterized as partial or total failures, as they could not master the high complexity of a focal ecosystem, including a large number of involved acto...

Digital transformation and the resulting volatile and unpredictable business environments challenge traditional enterprises to continuously fulfill and surpass customers’ expectations. They need to become agile in its organizations by proactively sensing the unpredictable change and responding accordingly with speed and dexterity. While many organi...

In the construction sector, projects for building complex structures often exceed estimated costs and time. Therefore, enterprises in this sector rethink and improve their processes. For addressing this challenge, the discipline of Building Information Modeling (BIM) developed new process models to optimize the lifecycle of structures by leveraging...

The processing of personal data has evolved into an integral component of businesses by providing several data-driven opportunities. Simultaneously, businesses struggle with the associated responsibility for privacy, as recent data scandals have shown. As a consequence, the European Commission has passed the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR...

The chainPORT community of port authorities (PAs) around the world gave their commitment to collaborate. Many PAs developed Internet of Things (IoT) based solutions to increase their operational efficiency. Within its IT solutions workgroup, the challenge of supporting the diffusion and assimilation of these IoT innovations was adressed by creating...

The chainPORT community of port authorities (PAs) around the world gave their commitment to collaborate. Many PAs developed Internet of Things (IoT) based solutions to increase their operational efficiency. Within its IT solutions workgroup, the challenge of supporting the diffusion and assimilation of these IoT innovations was adressed by creating...

The big data digital trend revolutionizes how enterprises conduct their business. Big data transforms how business models are created, services and products are provided, processes are optimized and IT landscapes are designed. Today, enterprise architecture (EA) models are used in many organizations to capture the complex interplay between business...

Within the ChainPORT community of port authorities (PAs) around the world, many different Internet of Things (IoT) based solutions have been piloted over the last years, successfully demonstrating how interconnected sensors and devices can improve business efficiency. The current challenge of how participating PAs can realize benefits by adopting o...

Agile service delivery teams with high autonomy and self-organization are spreading throughout many organizations. To foster alignment of the teams to the enterprise strategic vision while maintaining their autonomy, a corresponding IT portfolio management as linking mechanism is perceived necessary. Organizations are facing a growing number of pos...

Modern economies and especially open source (OS) communities are fueled by entrepreneurs. Yet, in case of community disruption, entrepreneurs are more affected than larger firms due to lesser resources. Initial point for our research was the Mt.Gox bankruptcy in the Bitcoin community. Based on a qualitative analysis among open entrepreneurs we inve...

During the last years, many companies established fast IT or digital IT units dedicated to build and operate digital customer-facing services. These units adopted agile methods, new tool chains as well as new organizational settings like BizDevOps teams. BizDevOps teams are responsible for continuously (re-)defining business functionality of certai...

Digital transformation as a driving force changes organizations, industries, and society in general. In this, Internet of Things (IoT) exhibits a specific potential that permeates all layers from business models over (cross-) organizational processes to (cloud-) systems, data flows and sensor equipped infrastructures. In order to improve readiness...

By implementing new technologies, enterprise architectures and their respective models are subject to change. Current changes of the enterprise architecture are often driven by the IT megatrends. In this paper, we analyze six explorative projects from a logistics company that implemented Internet of Things (IoT) technology. Our analysis focusses on...

In the age of digital business transformation, enterprises seek to increase their agility and speed of IT delivery. To accomplish this, they change their existing control-driven IT organizational structures and processes and establish separate modes for business-oriented and traditional IT delivery (“bimodal IT”). Though the concept of bimodal IT h...

Today, enterprises from many industries experience that moving towards a digital business is a major challenge. The banking industry is heavily affected by the digital transformation as customers’ expectations drive the need for adapting strategies, processes and IT. So far, studies on the digitalization in the banking industry have either focused...

The current wave of digitalization has an impact of several industries, including the financial service sector. While the current situation and arising challenges have been analyzed from a strategic perspective and from the customer perspective, research on the internal end-user perspective is scarce so far. Based on an online survey in the German...

In many industries, companies are currently testing and adopting internet of things (IoT) technology. By adopting IoT, they seek to improve efficiency or to develop and offer new services. In current projects, a variety of IoT systems is used and gets interconnected with existing or newly developed application systems. Due to the integration of IoT...

Many countries worldwide are striving for improving the quality of care and for reducing costs in the health care sector by establishing large IT infrastructures. In Germany, the introduction of the electronic health card and the national telematics infrastructure is lagging years behind the original schedule. In this paper, we describe and analyze...

The need for acting sustainably is one of the most urgent, but challenging topics enterprises currently face. In order to implement corporate social responsibility (CSR) on each enterprise level, companies establish dedicated management structures. Notwithstanding that several tools are already available for managing CSR, there appears to be no too...

Companies today interact in an increasingly competitive environment and seek to leverage the potentials of IT for generating new business models and for changing existing ones. For these business models, companies have to align the respective business and IT architectures. This task can be supported by using enterprise architecture management. In t...

Enterprises have to continuously act in and adapt to altered environments. They have to compete and cooperate with an increasing number of actors in their business ecosystems. These actors and their interests, processes and IT need to be considered for strategy formulation, inter-organizational process optimization or large-scale projects aiming at...

In einigen Bereichen der Informatiklehre ist es möglich, die persönlichen Erfahrungen der Studierenden im Umgang mit Informationstechnik aufzugreifen und vor dem Hintergrund theoretischer Konzepte aus der Literatur gemeinsam mit ihnen zu reflektieren. Das hier vorgestellte Lehrkonzept des Reflexionsdialogs erstreckt sich über drei Seminartermine un...

Project-based learning and application-oriented approaches drawing on real-world issues and examples, have always been widely used in both secondary and higher Computer Science (CS) education. Recent demands for teaching CS or Informatics in context and building courses on coherent application areas outside CS go even further [4, 23]. In Germany th...

In einigen Bereichen der Informatiklehre ist es möglich, die persönlichen Erfahrungen der Studierenden im Umgang mit Informationstechnik aufzugreifen und vor dem Hintergrund theoretischer Konzepte aus der Literatur gemeinsam mit ihnen zu reflektieren. Das hier vorgestellte Lehrkonzept des Reflexionsdialogs erstreckt sich über drei Seminartermine un...

Complexity being an essential part of our everyday and occupational life, the following question arises: Which fundamental skills do pupils need to develop, in order to be well prepared for handling future complex technological, and social, systems? We believe that general education should address this issue by cultivating computational---or rather...

Im Wintersemester 2009/10 wurde am Department Informatik ein Projektseminar zum Thema „IT-Aneignung, Gender und Diversity“ für Bachelor- und Diplom-Studierende der Informatik undWirtschaftsinformatik durchgeführt. Ein wichtiges Element der Lehrveranstaltung war dabei die Planung und Durchführung sowie die begleitende Auswertung einer Schulprojektwo...

Die Verankerung von Architekturmanagement in Unternehmen kämpft mit einer Reihe von Herausforderungen. Organisatorische, konzeptionelle und methodische Aufgaben und Fragen nach strukturiertem Vorgehen und angemessener Werkzeugunterstützung sind zu bewältigen. Im Zentrum des Beitrags steht der Aufbau einer Architekturzentrale. Ausgestattet mit den I...