Web Intelligence 

Abstract: In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media.

Abstract: In recent years, firms in almost all industries have conducted a number of initiatives to explore new digital technologies and to exploit their benefits. This frequently involves transformations of key business operations and affects products and processes, as well as organizational structures and management concepts. Companies need to establish management practices to govern these complex transformations. An important approach is to formulate a digital transformation strategy that serves as a central concept to integrate the entire coordination, prioritization, and implementation of digital transformations within a firm. The exploitation and integration of digital technologies often affect large parts of companies and even go beyond their borders, by impacting products, business processes, sales channels, and supply chains. Potential benefits of digitization are manifold and include increases in sales or productivity, innovations in value creation, as well as novel forms of interaction with customers, among others. As a result, entire business models can be reshaped or replaced (Downes and Nunes 2013). Owing to this wide scope and the far-reaching consequences, digital transformation strategies seek to coordinate and prioritize the many independent threads of digital transformation. To account for their company-spanning characteristics, digital transformation strategies cut across other business strategies and should be aligned with them (Fig. 1). While there are various concepts of IT strategies (Teubner 2013), these mostly define the current and the future operational activities, the necessary application systems and infrastructures, and the adequate organizational and financial framework for providing IT to carry out business operations within a company. Hence, IT strategies usually focus on the management of the IT infrastructure within a firm, with rather limited impact on driving innovations in business development. To some degree, this restricts the product-centric and customer-centric opportunities that arise from new digital technologies, which often cross firms’ borders. Further, IT strategies present systemcentric road maps to the future uses of technologies in a firm, but they do not necessarily account for the transformation of products, processes, and structural aspects that go along with the integration of technologies. Digital transformation strategies take on a different perspective and pursue different goals. Coming from a business-centric perspective, these strategies focus on the transformation of products, processes, and organizational aspects owing to new technologies. Their scope is more broadly designed and explicitly includes digital activities at the interface with or fully on the side of customers, such as Accepted after one revision by Prof. Dr. Sinz.

Abstract: Maturity models are valuable instruments for IT managers because they allow the assessment of the current situation of a company as well as the identification of reasonable improvement measures. Over the last few years, more than a hundred maturity models have been developed to support IT management. They address a broad range of different application areas, comprising holistic assessments of IT management as well as appraisals of specific subareas (e. g. Business Process Management, Business Intelligence).

Abstract: The convergence of the so-called SMAC technologies – social, mobile, analytics, and cloud computing – has led to an unprecedented wave of digitalization that is currently fueling innovation in business and society. As digitalization is embracing all aspects of our private and professional lives, it is becoming a priority for managers and policymakers, and has made it into the headlines of newspapers, magazines, and practitioner conferences. This wave of digitalization is creating opportunities for the BISE community to engage in innovative research activities and to increase the discipline’s visibility. However, since BISE researchers have investigated the increasing exploitation and integration of digital technologies over several decades, they also naturally react with ambivalence when others claim that going digital is a new phenomenon.