The German business and information technologies project

Bidault, Francis; Goebel, Christoph; Günther, Oliver; Hildebrand, Thomas; Krasnova, Hanna (2009). The German business and information technologies project. In: The UCLA Anderson Business and Information Technologies (BIT) Project: A Global Study of Business Practice (pp. 145-172). Singapore: World Scientific Publishing 10.1142/9789812839466_0005

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The Business and Information Technologies (BIT) project strives to reveal new insights into how modern IT impacts organizational structures and business practices using empirical methods. Due to its international scope, it allows for inter-country comparison of empirical results. Germany — represented by the European School of Management and Technologies (ESMT) and the Institute of Information Systems at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin — joined the BIT project in 2006. This report presents the result of the first survey conducted in Germany during November–December 2006.

The key results are as follows:

• The most widely adopted technologies and systems in Germany are websites, wireless hardware and software, groupware/productivity tools, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems. The biggest potential for growth exists for collaboration and portal tools, content management systems, business process modelling, and business intelligence applications. A number of technological solutions have not yet been adopted by many organizations but also bear some potential, in particular identity management solutions, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), biometrics, and third-party authentication and verification.

• IT security remains on the top of the agenda for most enterprises: budget spending was increasing in the last 3 years.

• The workplace and work requirements are changing. IT is used to monitor employees' performance in Germany, but less heavily compared to the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007).1 The demand for IT skills is increasing at all corporate levels. Executives are asking for more and better structured information and this, in turn, triggers the appearance of new decision-making tools and online technologies on the market.

• The internal organization of companies in Germany is underway: organizations are becoming flatter, even though the trend is not as pronounced as in the United States (Karmarkar and Mangal, 2007), and the geographical scope of their operations is increasing. Modern IT plays an important role in enabling this development, e.g. telecommuting, teleconferencing, and other web-based collaboration formats are becoming increasingly popular in the corporate context.

• The degree to which outsourcing is being pursued is quite limited with little change expected. IT services, payroll, and market research are the most widely outsourced business functions. This corresponds to the results from other countries.

• Up to now, the adoption of e-business technologies has had a rather limited effect on marketing functions. Companies tend to extract synergies from traditional printed media and on-line advertising.

• The adoption of e-business has not had a major impact on marketing capabilities and strategy yet. Traditional methods of customer segmentation are still dominating. The corporate identity of most organizations does not change significantly when going online.

• Online sales channel are mainly viewed as a complement to the traditional distribution means.

• Technology adoption has caused production and organizational costs to decrease. However, the costs of technology acquisition and maintenance as well as consultancy and internal communication costs have increased.

Item Type:	Book Section (Book Chapter)
Division/Institute:	03 Faculty of Business, Economics and Social Sciences > Department of Business Management > Institute of Information Systems > Information Management
UniBE Contributor:	Krasnova, Hanna
Subjects:	000 Computer science, knowledge & systems 300 Social sciences, sociology & anthropology > 330 Economics
ISBN:	978-981-283-945-9
Publisher:	World Scientific Publishing
Language:	English
Submitter:	Rahel Winkelmann
Date Deposited:	24 Apr 2014 15:14
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2022 14:31
Publisher DOI:	10.1142/9789812839466_0005
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/47026