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Abstract: During the last decades, strategic information systems (SIS) research has become an influential stream within the information systems discipline. The success story of the Journal of Strategic Information Systems provides strong evidence. Yet, we believe that there is still a lot of untapped potential in the interaction of SIS research and industry. Put bluntly, it is impossible that results of SIS research are publicly available, reconstructable by subject matter experts, and valid beyond the single or very few cases and at the same time constitute the foundation of competitive advantage. We argue that SIS researchers need to become boundary spanners who actively engage in industry collaboration to help create competitive advantage and who disseminate their insights later on to advance the scientific knowledge base. We outline challenges of boundary-spanning SIS research and provide some ideas and recommendations. Wherever sensible, we draw on our experiences from the traditionally strong industry collaboration of the business and information systems engineering community from the German-speaking countries. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

What is the impact of business process standardization on business process outsourcing (BPO) success? This paper argues that there is a direct impact of process standardization on BPO success, due to production cost economies, and also an indirect effect via improved contractual and relational governance resulting from better monitoring opportunities and facilitated communication and coordination. This threefold impact of standardization on BPO success is empirically confirmed using data from 335 BPO ventures in 215 German banks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modeling the consumer society of the United States, Nazi Germany planned to launch its own brand of consumerism with a family of "people's products," the most spectacular of which was the Volkswagen. This article demonstrates how and why the Nazi initiatives for consumer products failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on employment and career mobility of women in France and the Federal Republic of Germany. For women, family commitments cause interruptions, restrictions on time, or even total renunciation of gainful employment. This "double role" of women is often adduced as the reason for the numerous handicaps experienced by women in working life. On the average women have lower-status occupations than men, they earn less, are on the average less qualified, and have poorer chances for advancement than their male counterparts. The antagonism between housework and professional work, in line with the antagonism between "direct satisfaction of a need" and "exchange," is, the source of "female work capacity." The skills and proclivities peculiar to women, formed in the context of housework, result in occupational discrimination, and become a structural "competitive disadvantage." Women tend to consider job content and personal interest more important than occupational advancement. In the social service occupations in particular, the "requirements of performing meaningful work stand in competition and conflict to the requirements of pursuing a professional career." Women's learned behavior is adduced to explain occupational discrimination. Women become "problem groups and marginal groups" on the labor market because they retain the patterns of behavior so necessary for family duties on the labor market. "Because they do not ruthlessly push ahead, shoving everything from their path, they receive smaller incomes and fewer chances of advancement."

The article discusses a tentative test change to Germany's Statutory Health Insurance (GDV) involving premium repayments, which private insurance carriers welcome as an instrument of competition. The article explores the preliminary results of this allowance and finds that in terms of the insured, the new regulation has a limited effect, and cost savings are minimal.

Varicella has the highest contagiosity index of all viral diseases. We report an endemic outbreak of varicella among 4 Indian students in Magdeburg in November and December 2008. An initially severe course was observed in three of these patients with a negative vaccination status. Large vesicular skin lesions with a diameter of up to 8 mm were found in all patients. Molecular genetic tests revealed African/Indian clade 5 in 2 patients, although the European clades (i.e., clade 1 and 3) are the most common in Germany, accounting for 85 %. All patients recovered without any complications after administration of intravenous aciclovir at a dosage of 10 mg per kg body weight. Although isolated cases of varicella are not notifiable according to the German Protection against Infection Act, endemic outbreaks must be reported to the appropriate health surveillance authorities., (© The Authors • Journal compilation © Blackwell Verlag GmbH, Berlin.)

Most lower respiratory tract infections (LRTIs) in children under the age of 3 years are due to respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). Epidemiological, host, and viral factors eventually account for the severity of LRTIs, but they do not completely explain it. Human metapneumovirus (hMPV) was recently identified in children with LRTIs. In a population-based prospective multicenter study (the PRI.DE study, conducted in Germany over 2 years), we tested 3,369 nasopharyngeal secretions from children younger than 3 years of age with LRTIs for RSV A and B, influenza viruses (IVs) A and B, and parainfluenza viruses (PIVs) 1 to 3. Of the children requiring intensive care (n = 85), 18% had hMPV infections, and 60% of these children were infected with hMPV in combination with RSV. We did not detect hMPV in a randomly selected subset of RSV-positive nasopharyngeal secretions (n = 120) from children not requiring intensive care support. hMPV was detected in <1% of virus-negative samples from patients without intensive care support (n = 620). Our data support the hypothesis that coinfections with RSV and hMPV are more severe than infections with either RSV or hMPV alone, at least in children younger than 3 years of age.

The issue of antibiotic resistance in Helicobacter pylori is of particular concern and has become an important factor leading to eradication failure. This paper reports the prevalence of primary resistance to clarithromycin, amoxicillin, metronidazole and tetracycline among H. pylori isolates in the north-eastern part of Germany. A total of 1644 clinical H. pylori isolates was investigated over a period of 6 years from 1995 to 2000. The MICs were determined by the Etest. The overall rate of primary resistance was 26.2% for metronidazole and 2.2% for clarithromycin. No significant changes in the resistance rates during the period of investigation were observed. No isolate was resistant to amoxicillin or tetracycline. PCR-RFLP analysis for the detection of point mutations associated with clarithromycin resistance was performed with 36 H. pylori isolates. The A --> G transition mutation at position 2143 was detected in 19 H. pylori isolates (52.8%), whereas the mutation at position 2142 was found in 13 isolates (36.1%).