Introduction to Information Engineering and Management

• Shapiro, C. and Varian, H.R., (1999) Information rules: a strategic guide to the network economy, Harvard Business School Press
• Fensel, D. et al. (2001) Product data integration in B2B e-commerce, IEEE Intelligent Systems, 16(4). Pages 54–59.
• Kotler (1980) Marketing Management - Analysis, Planning and Control. Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 4th Edition. Pages 3–92.
• Porter (1998) Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. Free Press, New York. Pages 33–53.
• Sterman (2000) Business Dynamics: Systems Thinking and Modeling for a Complex World. McGraw-Hill, Boston. Chapters 4, 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, and 5.5. Pages 107–133, 137–159, 169–177.

Elective literature:

• Geyer-Schulz (1998) Fuzzy Genetic Algorithms. In: Hung T. Nguyen and Michio Sugeno (Eds.) Fuzzy Systems: Modeling and Control, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Boston. Pages 403–460.
• Porter (1998) Competitive Advantage: Creating and Sustaining Superior Performance. Free Press, New York. Pages 62-118.
• Senge (1994) The Fifth Discipline: The Art and Practice of the Learning Organization. Currency/Doubleday, New York. Chapters 2 and 3. Pages 17–54.
• Sterman (1989) Modeling Managerial Behavior: Misperceptions of Feedback in a Dynamic Decision Making Experiment, Management Science, 35(3). Pages 321–339.

The last years have seen the rise of information companies whose company purpose is the generation and distribution of informations. In these companies, as well as companies of the old economy, the role of information, communication, and their cost is increasing. Some of the problems related with this trend are presented and treated in-depth in the course Introduction to Information Engineering and Management.

The goal of this course is to present the foundation of information engineering and management and the necessary linking of the different disciplines in today's information society. The course is completely motivated by authentic, real-world examples. With the help of these examples, the following topics as well as the interdependencies between business administration, economics, information technology, and law, are treated:

• The foundation of a company: Choosing the legal form and financing
• Information for economic decision support.
• Organizing information flows, valuation of information
• Network Economies
• Service Engineering
• Electronic markets
• Logistics/SCM
• Web/Internet-Marketing
• Production and Procurement

The total workload for this course should be 120 hours on average. For more details please consult the german version of the Module Handbook.

The student

• is able to handle interdisciplinary case studies of information management and engineering and to consider the impact of juridical framework of information technology on the design of business processes,
• knows the basic principles of informations as source for economic decision support,
• can develop and design venture creation and independently develop and create a business plan with external help,
• knows the fundamentals of strategic and operative marketing and logistic systems,
• can model and analyze dynamic systems,
• can apply with external help causal loop diagrams and methods from System Dynamics to a well defined business problem, describe system behavior and analyze the consequences of decisions on the system behavior,
• learns to work team-oriented and independently in small groups, learns English terminology in the context of information management and he is able to read and comprehend international literature to solve the tutorial assignments.

The assessment consists of a written exam (60 min) (according to §4(2), 1 of the examination regulation) and by submitting written essays in conjunction with the exercise (according to §4(2), 3 of the examination regulation). The final grade is based on the written exam and on the assignments from the exercises. The exact allocation will be announced during the first lecture. The points obtained in the exercises only apply to the first and second exam of the semester in which they were obtained.