Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - School of Business and Economics

IT Productivity

Despite high initial investments, many IT projects do not achieve the expected economic success. The question was recently brought up again in the literature: to what extent investments in IT lead to an increase in general productivity both at the national level and company level. Carr even postulated a commoditization of IT in his polarizing article, "IT Doesn't Matter".

Hence this research focus looks mainly at economic and technological questions regarding productivity measurement and economic viability of IT system solutions. The main idea is to examine the measurement of success from investments in IT such as shop systems, ERP modules and CRM or distribution systems. We develop new approaches which allow for the quantification of the success of such projects.

This area of research is inter-disciplinary and integrated to the fields of business modeling, data mining, web services, and data protection. This results in research methods from web use analysis, databases, classical hypothesis testing methods, as well as questionnaires and experiments. Thus methods like E-metrics are developed which quantify the success of more recent internet based business models ("Web Controlling"). Such operating figures are based on comprehensive of users and user behavior, product and turnover data as well as external data. The detailed analysis of personal data potentially brings conflicts regarding data protection regulation. Therefore the evaluation of the efficiency of new data protection technologies plays an important role. Thus a cost-benefit analysis also needs to be considered in the context of a new and current legal regulation.

To assess the efficiency of IT process integration, the theory on transaction cost may be applied. With methodological approaches from information economics, instruments have been developed in order to repair weak spots in the transaction process.

Portal IT Productivity

The Portal IT Productivity is a joint initiative of the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universitaet zu Berlin and of PSI AG http://www.it-produktivitaet.de/.

Researchers involved in this area:

Prof. Dr. Bettina Berendt
Prof. Oliver Günther, Ph.D.
Maximilian Teltzrow

Selected Publications

Tamm, G., Wünsche, M.: Strategies to reduce information asymmetry in web service market In: Proc. 11th European Conference on Information Systems (ECIS 2003), Naples, 2003

Teltzrow, M., Berendt, B.: Web-Usage-Based Success Metrics for Multi-Channel Businesses, In Proc. 5th ACM WebKDD 2003 Web Mining for E-Commerce Workshop "Webmining as a Premise to Effective and Intelligent Web Applications", 2003

Teltzrow, M., Günther, O.: eCRM: Konzeption und Möglichkeiten zur Effizienzmessung, Praxis der Wirtschaftsinformatik, Vol. 221, 2001

Teltzrow, M., Günther, O.: Web Metrics for Retailers. Proc. 4th International Conference on Electronic Commerce and Web Technologies, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg/New York, 2003

Spiliopoulou, M., Berendt, B.: Kontrolle der Präsentation und Vermarktung von Gütern im WWW anhand von Data-Mining-Techniken. In H. Hippner, U. Küsters, M. Meyer & K.D. Wilde (Eds.), Handbuch Data Mining im Marketing - Knowledge Discovery in Databases. (pp. 855-873). Wiesbaden, Germany: Vieweg. 2001

 
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