To address this gap, Prof. Dr. Frederik Ahlemann and his research team at the University of Duisburg-Essen have partnered with the management and technology consultancy Campana & Schott to conduct a large-scale empirical study. The goal: building an evidence-based picture of how AI will reshape organizations by 2030.

The study explores three core dimensions that are critical for both research and practice:

• Likelihood of AI developments: Which technological advances in AI are most probable by 2030 — and which are overestimated?
• Organizational impact: How will AI change business processes, IT landscapes, operating models, and the nature of work itself?
• Preparedness: How well-positioned are organizations today to navigate these changes — and where are the critical gaps?

Despite the growing volume of AI-related predictions, decision-makers still lack a structured, empirically grounded outlook to inform strategic planning. This study aims to separate well-founded expectations from speculative forecasts — providing executives, IT leaders, and transformation teams with a reliable basis for action.

The survey takes approximately 15 minutes. We welcome responses from executives, IT leaders, and professionals across all industries. Your input will help shape a robust, practice-oriented perspective on the future of AI in organizations.
Feel free to share the survey link with colleagues and decision-makers in your network. The more perspectives we capture, the stronger the results will be.

You can visit the survey via this link.

The colloquium featured a rich program spanning a wide range of current research topics — from maturity models and human-AI task delegation to socio-psychological dynamics in virtual environments, digital micro-interventions, CBDC architectures, anthropomorphic digital human agents, and smart city business models.

At the heart of the event were in-depth paper discussions that gave participants the opportunity to reflect on ongoing work, receive constructive feedback, and explore new perspectives. The format once again proved to be a valuable platform for strengthening collaboration and scholarly exchange across institutional boundaries. We extend the thanks to all participating colleagues for the engaging and productive discussions.

the Chair of Information Systems and Strategic IT Management (SITM) is pleased to announce our course offerings for this semester, providing both theoretical foundations and practical insights to help you develop essential skills for your academic and professional future.

• Seminar Papers via WISEM
• 2 IS Projects
  • LUMINA:Teacher – Entwicklung eines KI-gestützten Lehrassistenten für die Hochschullehre
  • DRIFT – Technische Machbarkeitsstudie für datengetriebene Interventionen gegen Prokrastination

• IT Projektmanagement (ITPM)

• Strategic Planning of IS (SPIS)
• Business & IT Consulting (BITC)

• PP1: Gesund & produktiv an der Uni und im Arbeitsleben

Join us this semester and take your skills to the next level! We look forward to seeing you in class.

You may find additional information here: https://sitm.ris.uni-due.de/teaching/summer-semester-26/ 

The panel, titled “Beyond Technology: Lessons, Challenges and Outcomes of AI Transformation” brings together practitioners and leaders who are actively shaping AI-driven change within their organizations. Prof. Ahlemann will guide the conversation alongside three distinguished speakers:

• Tessa Pfattheicher, Director AI Transformation at iteratec
• Jonas Poorthuis, Executive Assistant to the CEO at Wahl Management + Services GmbH & Co. KG
• Prof. Dr.-Ing. Patrick Tichelmann, Co-CEO & Founder of Detection X

The discussion will go beyond the technical dimensions of AI adoption and shed light on the real-world lessons, organizational challenges, and measurable outcomes that companies face during AI transformation journeys — topics that are central to the research agenda of our chair.

FUTURE LOGISTICS is an annual conference organized by startport, the logistics innovation hub of Duisburger Hafen AG. The 2026 edition takes place at the Museum der Deutschen Binnenschifffahrt in Duisburg and convenes innovators, industry leaders, and researchers from across the logistics and technology sectors.

For more information visit: https://futurelogistics-startport.de/agenda/ 
We look forward to Prof. Ahlemann's contribution to this important public discourse on responsible and effective AI transformation.

The LUMINA:Build team developed a custom-built architecture using an architecture of Angular, FastAPI, SQL Server, and Ollama for local LLM deployment to create an AI tutoring system with verified course material. The team implemented sophisticated tool calling capabilities enabling the AI to generate multiple answer formats including multiple-choice questions, fill-in-the-blank exercises, and other interactive learning activities.

Running in parallel, the LUMINA:Inquire team established the empirical foundation through systematic interviews and quantitative surveys, identifying critical pain points and translating these into evidence-based design requirements. Their research addresses whether AI supports or undermines long-term skill development and student autonomy.

The SYNAPSE team delivered impressive progress on the life operating system platform, significantly enhancing task management functionality and  overhauling the user interface. The result is a truly polished task management app that is both visually appealing and genuinely enjoyable to use, while maintaining the platform's Flutter-based cross-platform architecture.

Overall, a highly successful semester with exciting results that demonstrate the potential of combining rigorous research methods with practical software development. LUMINA:Build will be expanded in the coming semester. Interested students should watch for announcements here: https://www.ris.uni-due.de/studium/studienangebot/projekte/ and on our website.

This workshop is part of the UB|SchreibCamp at University of Duisburg-Essen, dedicated to supporting students in their academic writing. The program includes sessions on efficient literature research and management, hands-on workshops on writing tools and data handling, and discussions on AI in academic work. They also provide guidance on formal requirements, correct citation, and mental health strategies for students.

Join us and take your study habits to the next level!

• Sign up now or find the full program and additional information here: Schreibcamp Website

Students particularly appreciated the clear structure of the course and the way topics such as time management, routines and personal organization were translated into concrete, usable practices. Rather than remaining abstract, the course encouraged students to actively try out methods in their everyday lives and reflect on what actually works for them.

According to students, a key takeaway was gaining a clearer sense of how to approach their own productivity: Instead of following fixed rules or predefined systems, they described learning how to explore different methods, experiment with them, and gradually develop an approach that fits their own way of working and studying.

What stood out most, however, was how students perceived the course itself. Rather than experiencing Personal Productivity 1 as a typical university course, they described it as a structured space for reflection and experimentation. While many courses focus primarily on content delivery, this course was seen as something students could actively use alongside their studies - a framework to test ideas, adjust habits, and make sense of their own routines over time. In this sense, the course extends beyond the role of a traditional university class, offering orientation, room for experimentation, and sustainable habit-building that remains relevant well beyond university life and into future academic and professional contexts.

Because the course is closely tied to students’ everyday lives and personal routines, feedback plays a central role in how Personal Productivity 1 continues to evolve. It helps ensure that the content and format remain grounded in real experiences and responsive to the challenges students actually face during their studies.

Students interested in joining the next edition can register via the LSF system. A waiting list will again be available.

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

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