Description:

Designing and implementing corporate information systems are pivotal topics of ‘Wirtschaftsinformatik’. While the modules ‘Enterprise Modelling I’ and ‘Enterprise Modelling II’ mainly focus on analysis and conceptual design, this lecture emphasizes a bottom-up perspective on implementation level artefacts, such as applications, technologies, and standards. Methods and technologies to develop integration systems as well as to foster the integration of existing systems are at the core of the lecture. The lecture starts by motivating the need for integration and reusability. Since integration is a vastly overloaded term, the students will be provided with a concept of integration that accounts for the peculiarities of information systems and can be applied to organizational integration – IT business alignment – as well. To further illustrate the need for integration in current IT landscapes, the participants will get an overview of functions covered by traditional business applications such as systems for accounting, human resource management, or production planning. Against this background, key approaches to promote the integration of corporate information systems will be presented and evaluated. This will include data exchange formats for loosely coupled systems and corresponding standards, database technologies as well as persistence in general. These approaches will be discussed and evaluated from both software-engineering and managerial perspectives. The presentation of decision support systems will provide further insights into the need for integrated information systems. For this purpose, their conceptual foundation and the need to integrate them with operational level systems will be analysed. Having gained an appropriate understanding of the concepts and technologies presented in the lecture, students are given the opportunity to practice their use in the accompanying tutorial.

You can access the Moodle course via the password in the materials section below after login with your ZIM-Account.

Learning Targets:

The students

• understand essential approaches to integrate business information systems and are able to explain the key concepts underlying these approaches
• are able to explain and critically discuss the relevance of integration as well as problems and challenges associated with integration
• are familiar with a differentiated concept of integration, are able to describe the demand for integration of business information systems, and can assess traditional approaches (e.g., CIM systems or ERP systems) with respect to meeting this demand
• are able to classify and assess integration approaches that are based on data exchange formats and have the ability to implement these approaches using corresponding tools and technologies
• know different database technologies, are able to assess these technologies as a means of integration, and have the ability to apply these technologies using selected tools
• understand the structure of data warehouse systems, can describe a method for developing data warehouse systems, and are able to practically apply this method using selected tools 
• know different forms of decision supporting information systems including knowledge-based expert systems, and are able to assess both prerequisites for applying these systems and prospective bene-fits of these systems

Outline:

1. Motivation
2. Foundational Concepts
3. Integration through Data Exchange Formats
4. Integration through Database Technologies
5. Integration through Data Warehouse Technologies
6. Modelling Methods for Supporting Integration Projects
7. Decision Support Systems

Literature:

• Brachman, R. J.; Levesque, H. J.: Knowledge Representation and Reasoning. Morgan Kaufmann: San Francisco 2004
• Frank, U.: Anwendungsnahe Standards für E-Business: Überblick über aktuelle Initiativen. In: Wirtschaftsinformatik, 43 Jg., Heft 3, 2001, S. 283-293
• Frank, U.: Integration - Reflections on a Pivotal Concept for Designing and Evaluating Information Systems. In: Kaschek, R.; Kop, C.; Steinberger, C.; Fliedl, G.: Uniscon 2008 Proceedings. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 6, Springer: Berlin, Heidelberg 2008, S. 11-22
• Frank, U.; Strecker, S.: Beyond ERP Systems: An Outline of Self-Referential Enterprise Systems. ICB-Research Report, Institut für Informatik und Wirtschaftsinformatik (ICB), Universität Duisburg-Essen, No. 31, Universität Duisburg-Essen 2009
• Goldfarb, C.; Rubinsky, Y.: The SGML Handbook. Oxford: Clarendon Press 1990
• Golfarelli, M., Maio, D., Rizzi, S.: Conceptual Design of Data Warehouses from E/R Schemes. In Proceedings of the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences; Kona, Hawaii, January 6-9, 1998
• Hichert, R.; Moritz, M.: Management-Informationssysteme. Praktische Anwendungen. 2. Aufl., Springer: Berlin u.a.: Springer 1995
• Inmon, W.H.: Building the Data Warehouse. 3rd ed., John Wiley & Sons; New York et al., 2002
• Klettke, M. ; Meyer, H.: XML & Datenbanken. 1. Aufl. dpunkt: Heidelberg, 2003.
• Turban, E.: Decision Support and Expert Systems. Management Support Systems. 4th ed., Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall 1995 (neueres Werk)
• Witten, I.H., Frank, E.: Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques. 2nd ed., Elsevier,: Amsterdam et al., 2005

Formalities:

Constitutive meeting:

The introductory session for all our master courses will take place on 05.04.2022 at 4pm. The first session for IBIS 1 will take place on 06.04.2022, 2 pm.

This course will be held in English.

Organization:
This lecture is part of Integration of Business Information Systems 1 and is linked closely to the respective tutorial. Therefore, some lectures might be interchanged with tutorial sessions (you will receive information about this during the semester via Moodle). We strongly advise you to take part in both parts of the module (lecture and tutorial) in the same semester.

Exam:
There will be one module exam covering both contents from the lecture and tutorial (6 CP).