Business information technology deals with information and communication systems for business and administration applications. Increasingly, these systems also extend their reach into private households. Business information systems (for the sake of simplicity called Information Systems in the following) are socio-technical systems, where tasks are carried out cooperatively by humans and machines.

Research on business systems is concerned with theories, concepts, models, architectures, methods, tools for the analysis, conception, design, realization, deployment, management of information systems and studies investigating their applicability and success.

Our overall mission is the sustainable establishment of a high-quality, internationally recognized offering in research and education focusing on the areas of Distributed and Decentral Information Systems, Enterprise Interoperability technologies, Computer Supported Collaborative Work, Intelligent Cooperation Support technologies, Model-Driven automation of enterprises, and IS for Energy Management.

Our approach to achieve this objective is through local and international cooperation. Locally, we rely on collaboration and exploitation of synergies with other research areas at TUC, including computer science, economics, engineering, and energy management; internationally, we link into national and international research networks and research projects, and build and maintain partnerships with recognized scientific and industrial partners.

In the diploma programme "Business Informatics" (to run until 2012) and the new B.Sc./M.Sc. programme "Business Informatics" (B.Sc. since 2006, M.Sc. to start in autumn 2007), we cover core subjects of business information systems including foundations, models, optimization and automation of business processes, information systems architectures, Electronic Business, concepts and business applications of mobile and pervasive systems, decentralization concepts and architecture for Virtual Enterprises, and Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

Link to current course offerings

The guiding theme for the research in the Business Information Technology Unit is to gain a better understanding of mechanisms, models, scope and limitations of decentralization as a design principle for networked business information systems. Currently, our core competences lie in the following four areas:

• Enterprise Interoperability technologies
• Cross-Enterprise Collaboration
• Model-Driven Enterprise Automation
• Computer Supported Collaborative Work and Learning

For more in-depth information, we refer to our Research page.

We offer enterprises and public partners our research competences in the following areas:

• Business process modelling, optimization, management, and automation
• IT support for cross-enterprise cooperation and collaboration
• Architecture of web-based information systems
• Enabling mobile processes and application systems
• Service-oriented and distributed IT architecture, middleware, and solutions based on concepts of peer-to-peer, agent and grid computing.
• Innovative technologies and methods for enterprise interoperability and application integration
• Decentral and distributed intelligence (multiagent systems) and its application
• Organic and autonomic computing: concepts and application of self-organization and dynamic IT