Chair of
Business information systems

Prof. Dr. Markus Bick, director of the Chair of Business Information Systems The main objective of the BIS team in teaching is that students should be able to understand how firms are using information systems as well as information and communication technologies to transform business models, develop new strategies, innovate with new services and products and achieve operational excellence. Within the various programmes at ESCP Campus Berlin, we tailor the BIS related learning objectives and learning content specifically to the learners’ needs.

- Prof. Dr. Markus Bick

Our research and publications cover the main topics in Business Information Systems and Digitization. Within these areas we currently focus on:

Digital Capabilities of the individual and the firm
- Digital Competencies
- Digital Marketing
Social Knowledge Environments and Crowd Knowledge
Social Media and Networks
Gamification

The team

Team of the chair of Business Information Systems, Berlin campus, ESCP. From left to right: Barbara Lutz, Prof. Dr. Markus Bick, Mahdieh Darvish, Luca Laule, Tristan Thordsen

KIDDINX Project

Map4Accessibility Project

Teaching
We offer the following courses:

Bachelor in
Management (BSc)

Operation Management & Business Information Systems
Academic Writing Skills

Go to the programme

Master in
Management

Business Simulation Game
AI & Big Data Business Innovation

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All
MSc Tracks

Business Information Systems

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MBA in
International Management

Research Methods
Computer Skills Prerequiste
Business Simulation Game

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MSc
Big Data and Business Analytics

Enterprise Systems Improvement

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EMBA
Executive MBA

Closing Seminar

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Research

Research Approach

In our research we mainly focus on the effective and efficient design and utilization of information systems by individuals, groups, enterprises, and society for the improvement of social welfare. By that, our research is multi-disciplinary orientated, covering important peripheral or complementary areas as well if developments in the field of business information systems are affected. Examples cover interdependencies with the fields of social media, digital business and transformation etc. Our main objective is to gather theoretical knowledge, methods, tools and intersubjectively comprehensible findings regarding modern digital information systems and technologies. In doing so, we apply methods and tools from various disciplines and sciences, if needed developing them further, to analyse, design, implement, or manage modern information systems as well as information and communication technologies in the digital age.

Research topics

Crowd Knowledge

Crowd Knowledge is constituted by the collaborative efforts of dispersed users to aggregate and enrich information. Social Knowledge Environments provide tools that facilitate processes leading to the creation and utilization of crowd knowledge. The pervasion of networks and communication technology fostered the implementation and use of crowd-based methods in our everyday life.
As Crowd Knowledge presents a cost-efficient and anytime available approach to process information and even gain knowledge, a multitude of interesting possibilities and use cases arises. In our research, we focus on two aspects. First, we aim to define crowd knowledge and establish an artefact framework to support technical interoperability as well as provide a basis for scientifically consistent analyses and discussion of crowd-based approaches. The second research area is the understanding of the effect of presented crowd knowledge artefact attributes onto users’ perception and selection, depending on the personal relevance. The exchange of complex information between persons with a high variety of educational backgrounds is common in both healthcare and consulting. Therefore, those fields often present a fertile environment for our research.

Digital Capabilities

This topic comprises both the digital capabilities of the individual (Digital Competencies) as well as those of an organization (Digital Maturity).
Digital capabilities in a working context are an increasingly popular but rather unexplored field of research. Given that current research on digitization`s impact on workforce is mainly driven by macroeconomic studies dealing with aggregated indicators such as the unemployment rate, our focus is placed on investigating the individual employee level.
In our first paper on this topic (Murawski and Bick 2017), we elaborate on the current understanding of digital capabilities based on extant literature and find that there is a lack of both sound definitions and distinctions to related concepts such as IT skills (the so-called jargon jungle). We examine and discuss further research opportunities and conclude by providing a first draft of a research agenda. In our second paper on digital capabilities (Murawski and Bick 2017), we focus on required capabilities for a specific ‘digital’ occupation, namely big data professionals. For this, we analyse online job ads by making use of a text mining approach (i.e., a topic model). Additionally, for gaining a better understanding of the short supply of data professionals on the labour market, we investigate what capabilities are imparted through data-related master`s programmes by conducting a content analysis on master’s programmes curricula. Through comparing required and imparted capabilities we can identify different ‘gaps’ for different competence areas and discuss related implications.
Current research projects aim at exploring required digital capabilities of employees in knowledge-intense industries and in identifying organizational requirements which are prerequisites for unfolding individual digital capabilities.

Adaptive Gamification

Adaptive gamification is an emerging and fast-growing research stream, that enhances traditional gamification approaches with user-centered, personalized and adaptive incentive mechanisms, tailored to a specific characteristic of different users and contexts.
While game-like elements have been successfully applied to increase end-user engagement, satisfaction and task performance in different domains, the effectiveness has often been mixed, highly context specific and varied among individuals.
Therefore our research focus is to undersand how adaptive gamification appraoches can be developed to overcome such problems.

Organizational Requirements for Digital Transformation

The digital transformation has revolutionized traditional structures of the working world in less than a decade. As new connected, smart, human-centered and cloud-based technologies find their way into organizations, innovation and product life cycles shorten drastically. Established processes and business models are challenged. Thus organizations need to evolve in order to stay competitive in this VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous) world. In this context, we investigate organizational requirements crucial for the advantageous use of the employees’ individual competencies for the purpose of ensuring the organization’s competitiveness. In order to answer our research question we conducted semi-structured expert interviews in the field of knowledge work. Through inductive content analysis of the interview transcripts and a review of the literature in this field we were able to identify a number of new organizational requirements to support the organization’s competitiveness in the era of digital transformation. Current research addresses new roles and positions emerging in the era of digital transformation.

Focus on:
Last Publications

Journal article

DURACH, C., F., T. BLESIK, M. VON DÜRING, M. BICK (2021) Blockchain Applications in Supply Chain Transactions JOURNAL OF BUSINESS LOGISTICS, 42 (1), 7-24

Journal article

BICK, M., T.-F. KUMMER, S. PELZL (2021) A conceptualisation of privacy risk and its influence on the disclosure of check-in services information INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, 57, Article number: 102266

Journal article

BÜHLER, J., M.MURAWSKI, M.DARVISH, M.BICK (2020) Developing a Model to Measure Fake News Detection Literacy of Social Media Users LECTURE NOTES IN COMPUTER SCIENCE / BOOK: DISINFORMATION, MISINFORMATION, AND FAKE NEWS IN SOCIAL MEDIA

Journal article

BÖCKLE, M., J. NOVAK, M. BICK (2020) Exploring gamified persuasive system design for energy saving JOURNAL OF ENTERPRISE INFORMATION MANAGEMENT, 33(6), 1337-1356 pp