Preface from the Program Co-Chairs - Volume 1

Ever growing competition requires enterprises to aim at increasing the efficiency of their operations. Information technology (IT) is a key instrument to achieve this objective. However, for taking advantage of IT, it is not sufficient to focus on advanced technological infrastructures. Instead, it will usually be required to reorganize the operations, i.e. to redesign business processes and to re-arrange patterns of (collaborative) decision making with respect to the potential of advanced software systems. Respective developments that have been going on for several years now resulted in a remarkable penetration of organizations with software systems. For many employees software is not only the main tool for doing their work, it even becomes a reification of what they perceive as their relevant work surroundings. An increasing number of customers interact with companies mainly through web browsers, i.e. through software. As a consequence, the image they develop of a company is mainly shaped by software or, in other words: The software is the company. Only if software users are provided with representations of the software and the environment it operates in, it will be possible to empower them – especially if these representations enable them to modify the systems they use according to their needs. At the same time, more and more facets of the world are represented digitally, which produces a constantly growing amount of data. On the one hand, the growing data flood demands for innovate approaches to store and retrieve data. On the other hand, it creates the opportunity to support managerial decision making by developing advanced approaches to inductive data analysis.