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Companies today operate in an increasingly dynamic environment. Due to their overall responsibility, managers are particularly affected by this situation. Information systems (IS) that aim at helping managers are known as management support systems (MSS). They are designed to serve as their central, hands-on, day-to-day source of information [1].

Executives in Europe have significantly expanded their role in operations—in parallel to their strategic leadership. At the same time, they need to make decisions faster than in the past. Redesigned executive information systems (EIS) should support top managers in their new roles. This article examines how corporate management is evolving, and what issues a redesigned EIS should address. Embracing a “new normal” environment, we arrive at four prescriptive statements for an EIS architecture that is more business-driven than the state of the art. This architecture differs by applying a business-to-IT approach, designed in four layers: strategy, organization, alignment, and IT support. With such a structure, it is possible to “drill-through” to information needed to executives’ more operational decisions. Furthermore the proposed architecture balances key performance indicators from five information clusters for accelerating executives’ decision making: financial accounting, management accounting, compliance management, program management, and cash flow and liquidity management.

Management support systems (MSS) help managers to perform their jobs more productively and efficiently by serving as their central, hands-on, day-to-day source of information [1]. As an umbrella term, "MSS" represents a major class of information systems (IS) covering management information systems, decision support systems, executive information systems, and, more recently, knowledge management and business intelligence (BI) systems [2].

Digital natives are increasingly populating organizations’ management. As they have higher expectations of IS accommodating their non-functional user preferences, the frontend application design of management support systems (MSS)—as managers’ direct user-interface—plays an increasingly dominant role. By means of using new-generation managers’ perspective of a business/IT alignment, this article proposes a method for a more business-driven IS design. We obtain both a set of business-driven MSS requirements and—applying this approach—initial design guidelines. We evaluate our approach with respect to the state of the art and propose avenues for future research.

In information systems (IS) design, understanding users and their preferences for interacting with IT is key. Such awareness is particularly important in the field of management support systems (MSS). We conduct a literature review on how user-group characteristics can be incorporated into MSS design and propose six design guidelines to enhance their adaptation capabilities. Three of these guidelines aim at better meeting users' functional preferences: incorporate more subjective information needs in MSS design, expand the scope of functional MSS principles beyond the user interface, and provide a comprehensive model of MSS functions for the growing number of expert users. Strengthen the constructional MSS perspective should make the design more concrete for practice. The fifth finding is to understand the characteristics of MSS usage by considering MSS use cases and access modes in addition to users' working style. Last but not least, MSS research should place more emphasis on principles for situational artefact design.

The 2008/2009 economic crisis provided a sustainable impulse for improving environmental scanning systems. Although a substantial body of knowledge exists, these concepts are not often used by practitioners. Based on a literature research, this article outlines six guidelines for designing environmental scanning systems that are more applicable than the state of the art. We incorporate these guidelines in a six-step method and focus on how the capabilities of "modern" information systems (IS) enable a better "grasp" of weak signals and a closer incorporation of the findings into the executives' decisionmaking process. Applying this reworked method at a raw materials and engineering company leads to a first instantiation--the "Corporate Radar." The version discussed here ends with a value-driver tree showing economic value added at risk on top. The resulting lessons learned helped us in two ways: providing concrete starting points for future research and arguing for the research method presented here.

In recent years, service orientation has been discussed as a new design paradigm promising better manageability and changeability of increasingly complex IS. This article examines their role in executive information systems (EIS) design and contributes a reworked architecture that is more flexible than the state of the art. Structured in terms of four layers strategy, organization, alignment, and IT support it uses cross-layer modeling chains that enable even drill-through analyses when needed. Mapping loosely coupled services within an alignment layer provides the necessary flexibility. Two typical changes in financial accounting and management accounting processes at a telecom company provided an opportunity to evaluate the reworked architecture. Finally, the lessons learned helped us in two ways: providing concrete starting points for integrating service orientation into EIS architecture design and arguing for the reworked architecture on hand.

Part 5: Future Subjects; International audience; The 2008/2009 economic crisis provided a sustainable impulse for improving environmental scanning systems (ESS). Although a rich body of know-ledge exists, concepts are not often used in practice. This article contributes a literature review addressing six findings for ESS design to become more applicable than the state of the art. They are structured by the elements of information systems (IS) design theories. Addressing the lack of a sound requirements analysis, our first finding proposes 360-degree ESS for executives’ "managing a company" task and presents how to select just the most important scanning areas to keep focus. Three other findings cover the IS model perspective focusing on a better "grasp" of weak signals: define concrete indicators and use IT to identify relevant cause-effective-chains, leverage IT to automate day-to-day routines and monitor the variety of indicators’ movements, and—as a fourth finding—leverage expert experience with an impact matrix and translate indicators’ impact into a balanced opportunity-and-threat portfolio. From the methods perspective on ESS, we propose to more closely incorporate scanning results into executives’ decision-making process by generating scenarios from a set of environment assumptions as well as to use retrospective controls to continuously update the ESS and collaborate to share the scanning findings day-to-day.

Despite many improvements to IT support for executives, they still complain that executive information systems (EIS) bear little relevance to their management task and fail even more to accommodate their working style This indicates that business issues should more strongly drive requirements for next-generation EIS The article contributes to such an EIS design by systematically developing requirements criteria that are more business driven than the state-of-the-art To do so, requirements lists of EIS, structural models of user satisfaction and technology acceptance are evaluated with criteria derived from the requirements engineering discipline The findings show a dual gap: as the rigor of the models increases, they become less relevant for practice In comparison, the requirements lists demonstrate relevance, but do not evidence strong rigor To bridge this gap, this article applies the principle of economic efficiency to balance scientific rigor with relevance for practice A case demonstrates a first implementation and helps to evaluate the results of this article by using the same criteria as for the state-of-the-art reflection The findings should lead to better next-generation EIS design and should also be applicable to IS in general.

Business metadata plays a crucial role in increasing the data quality of information systems. Despite its importance, business metadata is primarily discussed from a technical perspective, while its business value is scarcely addressed. Therefore, this article aims at contributing to the further development of existing design approaches by explicitly accounting for the use cases of business metadata. In the course of this article a classification of use cases will be developed, which can be utilized when identifying the respective informational requirements a business metadata system needs to satisfy. A banking case is presented that demonstrates how this conceptual model has successfully been applied in practice.

How are companies managed today and what part does state-of-the-art business/IT alignment play? Executive information systems (EIS) should support top management in “managing a company.” But many executives complain that EIS bear little relevance to their management task. This article examines the role of business/IT alignment within a new-generation EIS architecture and contributes a business-driven model. A prototype demonstrates an instantiation of this approach. The findings are synthesized to seven recommendations on business/IT alignment that should lead to better EIS architecture.

Functional service domains are logical design artifacts that are intended to achieve better business/IT alignment. Their widespread utilization clearly indicates their perceived usefulness in managing the complexity of aligning business structures with IT structures. However, a common understanding of functional service domains and the associated principles that govern their design and evolution is still missing. So far, the literature provides only little guidance in closing this gap. This article contributes to the foundations that allow for the design of a situational method for functional service domain architecture management. Reviewing current literature, a framework is pro posed that supports the identification of functional service domain architecture management patterns. Based on a better understanding of functional domain architecture management approaches, situational method engineering for functional domains can be applied by identifying context types and goal vectors, designing fragments, and associating successfully adopted method fragments with specific situations. The validity of the proposed framework is tested by five case studies.

Textile Strukturen werden in grossem Ausmass als medizinische Implantate eingesetzt, um Weich- und Hartgewebe zu unterstutzen oder zu ersetzen. Im Tissue Engineering gewinnen sie an Bedeutung als scaffolds, um biologische Gewebe in vitro zu zuchten fur anschliessende Implantation oder extrakorporale Anwen dungen. Textilien sind gewohnlich anisotrope zweidimensionale Strukturen mit hoher Steifigkeit in der Ebene und geringer Biegesteifigkeit. Durch eine Vielzahl textiler Prozesse und durch entsprechende Wahl des Fasermaterials ist es moglich, Oberflache, Porositat und mechanische Anisotropie in hohem Masse zu variieren. Wegen ihrer einzigartigen strukturellen und mechanischen Eigenschaften konnen faserbasierte Materialien in weitem Masse biologischem Gewebe nachgeahmt werden [1]. Gesticke erweitern das Feld von technischen und besonders medizinischen Textilien, denn sie vereinen sehr hohe strukturelle Varia bilitat mit der Moglichkeit, mechanische Eigenschaften in einem grossen Bereich einzustellen, um so die mechanischen Anforderungen des Empfangergewebes zu erfullen (Abb. 35.1).

Die Organtransplantation stellt eine verbreitete Therapie dar, um bei krankheits- oder unfallbedingter Schadigung eines Organs die Gesamtheit seiner Funktionen wieder herzustellen, indem es durch ein Spenderorgan ersetzt wird. Organtransplantationen werden fur die Leber, die Niere, die Lunge, das Herz oder bei schweren grossflachigen Verbrennungen der Haut vorgenommen. Der grosse appa rative, personelle und logistische Aufwand und die Risiken der Transplantations chirurgie (Abstossungsreaktionen) sowie die mangelnde Verfugbarkeit von immunologisch kompatiblen Spenderorganen fuhren jedoch dazu, dass der Bedarf an Organtransplantaten nur zu einem sehr geringen Teil gedeckt werden kann. Sind Spenderorgane nicht verfugbar, konnen in einzelnen Fallen lebenswichtige Teil funktionen, wie beispielsweise die Filtrationsfunktion der Niere durch die Blutrei nigung mittels Dialyse ersetzt oder, bei mangelnder Funktion der Bauchspeicheldruse (Diabetes), durch die Verabreichung von Insulin ein normaler Zustand des Gesamtorganismus auch uber Jahre hinweg erhalten werden. Bei der notwendigen lebenslangen Anwendung apparativer oder medikamentoser Therapie konnen fur den Patienten jedoch haufig schwerwiegende, moglicherweise lebens verkurzende Nebenwirkungen entstehen. Daher werden in der Forschung Alterna tiven gesucht, um die Funktionen des ausgefallenen Organs durch die Implantation von Zellen oder in vitro gezuchteten Geweben moglichst umfassend wieder herzu stellen. Dies erfordert biologisch aktive Implantate, welche die fur den Stoff wechsel des Organs wichtigen Zellen enthalten und einen organtypischen Stoffwechsel entfalten.