All three courses of our chair received excellent results in the summer semester 2026 teaching evaluation, with overall scores between 1.50 and 1.60 (on a scale from 1 = very good to 5 = very poor).

In IT-Projektmanagement (1.54), students praised the clear, cumulative structure, the block-based course design, and the many practical examples — and reported the strongest learning gain of all three courses, moving from little prior knowledge to confidently applying project management methods themselves.

In Business & IT Consulting (1.50), the collaboration with practicing consultants stood out: students valued working on a real-world case study and rated examination requirements and learning materials particularly well.

Personal Productivity 1: Gesund & Produktiv an der Uni und im Arbeitsleben (1.60) was described less as a typical university course and more as a structured space for reflection and experimentation. Students appreciated the high-quality materials, the exchange across degree programmes, and the open, non-hierarchical atmosphere — and above all, learning to develop a productivity approach that actually fits their own way of working.

A big thank you to everyone who took the time to give feedback. Your comments shape how these courses continue to evolve and they are the reason they keep getting better.

We're looking forward to welcoming you in our winter term courses next semester.

We are pleased to announce that our full paper "Virtual Coaches, Real Challenges: An Ethical Guide for AI-Based Virtual Coaches in Educational Settings" by Daniel Davydov, Falco Korn, and Frederik Ahlemann has been accepted for publication and presentation at the 21st International Conference on Wirtschaftsinformatik (WI2026), taking place in September 2026 at Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria.

The paper examines the ethical implications of AI-based virtual coaches in education and develops an education-specific guideline framework that bridges ethical theory and domain-specific challenges. Combining a review of prior research with twelve expert interviews, the study analyzes existing AI ethics frameworks, identifies critical gaps, and derives actionable guidance for educational settings. Its central contribution addresses the relational, pedagogical, and developmental dynamics of AI-mediated coaching; mechanisms that general AI ethics frameworks tend to overlook. The work offers concrete orientation for developers, educators, and policymakers seeking to integrate AI responsibly into education.

Congratulations to the authors! We look forward to the discussions in Linz!

Are you interested in international exchange, student mobility, and working in a university environment? Then this might be a great opportunity for you.

The Chair of Information Systems, Digital Innovation and Performance Management is looking for a student assistant to support IS:link – Information Systems Student Exchange Network.

As part of our team, you will gain hands-on experience in an international academic setting and contribute to activities related to student exchange, including support for both outgoing and incoming students.

Start Date: As soon as possible

Contract Duration: 12 months with the option for extension

Working Hours: 14–19 hours per week

Application Deadline: July 30, 2026

Further information on the position, requirements, application documents, and deadline can be found here.

The European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2026), held in Milan, Italy, brought together Information Systems researchers from around the world to exchange ideas and discuss current developments in the field. Representing the Chair of Information Systems, Digital Innovation and Performance Management at the University of Duisburg-Essen, doctoral researcher Falco Korn participated in both the ECIS Doctoral Consortium and the main conference.

As one of 23 selected PhD students, Korn participated in the invitation-only ECIS Doctoral Consortium, an international forum designed to support doctoral researchers in advancing their dissertation projects. In an interactive setting, participants presented and discussed their research, received constructive feedback from peers and senior scholars, and engaged in exchange with fellow doctoral researchers from across the Information Systems community. Korn worked closely with mentors Leona Sandra Kruse (University of Agder) and Dov Te'eni (Tel Aviv University), whose feedback and guidance provided valuable impulses for further refining his dissertation.

Following the consortium, Korn presented the paper “Mind The Mess: A Matrix of Personal Knowledge Management Challenges Across the Knowledge Lifecycle” during the ECIS main conference. Co-authored with Dennis Kolender, Rafael Ziolkowski, Erik Karger, and Frederik Ahlemann, the paper examines the challenges knowledge workers face in managing information across fragmented digital environments and develops a diagnostic framework for identifying and understanding personal knowledge management challenges.

Overall, ECIS 2026 provided an excellent opportunity to receive constructive feedback on ongoing research, engage with the international Information Systems community, and present current work to a broad academic audience. The conference offered valuable insights and perspectives that will further contribute to both Korn's dissertation project and the chair's research activities.

On May 28, 2026, the official kickoff event for the "AI for SMEs on the Lower Rhine" (KI für KMU am Niederrhein) initiative took place. The Chair of Information Systems, Digital Innovation and Performance Management was actively involved, with Professor Dr. Frederik Ahlemann delivering one of the four core keynote presentations.

The event attracted nearly 100 guests, including representatives from small and medium-sized enterprises, regional partners, and multipliers. Following the expert presentations, a joint discussion round highlighted both the immense regional interest in Artificial Intelligence and the practical challenges SMEs still face when implementing these technologies.

To demonstrate immediate, practical applications of AI in business, Falco Korn, who is also part of the project team, showed how live survey data can be transformed into a complete, polished presentation within minutes to dynamically support moderated discussions.

Our Chair will continue to support regional businesses in addressing their open questions through an upcoming series of dedicated workshops starting this September. Registration for these sessions will open soon.

For those looking to connect earlier, the "Business beim Brötchen: KI-Café" will take place this July, offering an informal platform for networking and exchange. More information and registration details are available at: https://www.b2match.com/e/business-beim-brotchen-ki-cafe.

Against the backdrop of climate change and digitalization, cities all over the world are facing the need for a radical transformation towards “smartness” (Gimpel et al., 2021). To meet the increasing amount of customer expectations that cities are facing, municipal enterprises – such as electricity suppliers or waste management services – are continuously working on modernizing their digital service offerings and business models (Hosseini et al., 2018; Mora et al., 2019). Sometimes those offerings represent the replacement of analog tasks with digital tasks, for example, online appointment scheduling or the application of IoT sensors to enhance processes or estimate waiting times[1]. Such novel digital services are often the result of digital innovation activities (Hjalmarsson & Rudmark, 2012). Those innovation activities may be internally and externally driven, and in light of the smart city context, the complexity of the innovation process is increasing (Hjalmarsson & Rudmark, 2012).

This is among the reasons why digital innovations are increasingly critical to the success of municipal enterprises. Yet, the municipal sector could be characterized as rather non-innovative and reluctant to change (Hawlitschek, 2021). While the need for digital innovation is widely acknowledged, implementing the right measures (e.g., competence building, structural adjustments, new processes, and new forms of collaboration) is still a challenge to municipal enterprises. Further, measuring innovativeness is a challenging task (Hinings et al., 2018; Van Looy, 2021).

All those challenges as well as the rapid environmental developments are creating a very demanding situation for municipal companies, which are often characterized by highly bureaucratic processes, a strict matrix organization, and using static workflow processes that remain unchanged possibly even for decades. To this end, research finds that the innovation culture significantly impacts the degree of organizations’ innovativeness (Dobni, 2008; Dodge et al., 2017). However, less attention has been devoted to grasp the influence of municipal enterprises’ innovation culture on (digital) innovativeness. To address those challenges, municipal enterprises may benefit from a systematic approach to evaluate their innovation culture’s maturity level as well as degree of digital innovativeness and compare their maturity level to similar organizations.

To address this issue, we are looking for an engaged student who will address this topic within the scope of a master thesis. First, the student is expected to conduct a profound literature review and gather relevant findings from academia and practice. Further, those findings are to be extended by conducting interviews with representatives from German municipal enterprises to define and uncover the nature and relationships of municipal enterprises’ innovation culture and digital innovativeness. Subsequently, the student is expected to develop a measurement instrument (i.e., survey) that later allows measuring municipal enterprises’ innovation culture, its maturity level as well as its impact on the effectiveness of digital innovation activity.

Students who are interested in this master thesis are asked to contact Mr. Tim Bree.

References

Dobni, C. B. (2008). Measuring innovation culture in organizations: The development of a generalized innovation culture construct using exploratory factor analysis. European journal of innovation management.

Dodge, R., Dwyer, J., Witzeman, S., Neylon, S., & Taylor, S. (2017). The Role of Leadership in Innovation: A quantitative analysis of a large data set examines the relationship between organizational culture, leadership behaviors, and innovativeness. Research-Technology Management, 60(3), 22-29.

Gimpel, H., Graf-Drasch, V., Hawlitschek, F., & Neumeier, K. (2021). Designing smart and sustainable irrigation: A case study. Journal of Cleaner Production, 315, 128048.

Hawlitschek, F. (2021). Interview with Benjamin Scheffler on “The future of waste management”. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 63(2), 207-211.

Hinings, B., Gegenhuber, T., & Greenwood, R. (2018). Digital innovation and transformation: An institutional perspective. Information and Organization, 28(1), 52-61.

Hjalmarsson, A., & Rudmark, D. (2012). Designing digital innovation contests. In International Conference on Design Science Research in Information Systems (pp. 9-27). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.

Hosseini, S., Frank, L., Fridgen, G., & Heger, S. (2018). Do not forget about smart towns. Business & Information Systems Engineering, 60(3), 243-257.

Mora, L., Deakin, M., & Reid, A. (2019). Strategic principles for smart city development: A multiple case study analysis of European best practices. Technological Forecasting and Social Change, 142, 70-97.

Van Looy, A. (2021). A quantitative and qualitative study of the link between business process management and digital innovation. Information & Management, 58(2), 103413.

[1] Example: www.wbd-innovativ.de/projekte/intelligenter-recyclinghof

For bachelor and master students, who want to carry out a study project, the SITM Chair offers one study project in the summer semester. Further information can be found in the project description.

Interested students are invited to apply until Wednesday, 14.04.2023, 23:59.

We are happy to announce the excellent feedback we received on the “Information Systems Research” course held in the 2022/2023 winter semester.

The course "Information Systems Research" is designed to provide students with an opportunity to build up basic theoretical and methodological skills needed to conceptualize, conduct, and communicate their own research. 

The course comprised two main parts: teaching in a classroom and tutorial sessions. During the tutorial sessions, the students were assigned to groups and prepared a short scientific manuscript on a recent topic.

Prof. Frederik Ahlemann presented the lecture, while Alexandar Schkolski, M.Sc., was in charge of the tutorial sessions. In addition to the lecture and tutorial, practitioners shared their knowledge and real-case experience related to the course content in a guest lecture session.

The course evaluation indicated that students were very satisfied with the tutorial, rating it 1.62 (on a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 being the best possible rating). In particular, the lecturer’s engagement, support, and responsiveness were highlighted positively. Further, participating students praised the applicability of the taught content since it can be very useful for their upcoming final theses.

We look forward to welcoming new groups of students to the next ISR course during the 2023/2024 winter semester.

The Chair for Information Systems and Strategic IT-Management has two vacancies for research aides (with completed B.Sc. or equivalent) in the GUIDE Co-Creation Lab – Digital in Duisburg. The Co-Creation Lab – Digital is located in the beautiful historic Dahlbender Villa on the Haniel-Campus in Duisburg-Ruhrort and provides co-working space for UDE student founders. It is also a place for small events related to business start-ups - primarily (but not exclusively) for digital business ideas.

These tasks are to be expected:

• active contribution to the operation of the GUIDE Co-Creation Lab
• support of organisation and realisation of meetings and events
• assistance on the continued further development of the Co-Creation Lab for UDE founder teams – in close cooperation with organisations and companies from the UDE start-up network
• developing and creating information material as well as management of the relevant channels of social media

We expect you to have a university bachelor degree and a good knowledge of German and English language (written and spoken). You should be reliable, diligent, committed, and flexible.

Your workplace will mainly be in the Co-Creation Lab – Digital in Duisburg-Ruhrort, but you should be willing to travel in the Essen – Duisburg area from time to time.

The work will be for about 15 hours / week and the contract duration will be for 6 months, but can optionally be extended. The application deadline is 28th February 2023.

If you are interested, please send your complete job application (including your CV, a current enrolment receipt and a current transcript of records) to Herr Prof. Dr. Frederik Ahlemann, Universität Duisburg-Essen, Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaften, 45117 Essen; e-mail: sabrina.schuetz@icb.uni-due.de.

For further information see the attached job advertisement in German.

The Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management has one student assistant positions vacant. The position includes the following activities:

• Support of administrative chair activities
• Developing, creating and maintaining teaching materials
• Providing research support through researching, processing, and managing of literature
• Support with project management tasks such as organizing meetings/workshops, and preparing the necessary materials
• Collaborating with the team to plan and evaluate of surveys and interviews
• On-site support in conducting surveys and interviews
• Communication with internal and external project participants, universities and institutions

It's important for us that you have a good knowledge of German and English (written and spoken), have a strong interest in conducting surveys and interviews, and are willing to travel in the Essen-Duisburg area. 

The work will be 9 hours/week. The contract is initially 6 months, but can be extendable.

The application deadline is 22.01.2023.

Students interested in this offer can send their complete application (including a current transcript of records) to anna.khodijah@uni-due.org 

For further information see the attached document.