Blockchain ist derzeit ein Hype. Bekanntlich folgt nach dem Gipfel der überzogenen Erwartungen der Absturz in das Tal der Enttäuschungen. Das liegt unter anderem daran, dass bisher nur wenige der sinnvollen Anwendungsfälle auch tatsächlich praktisch umgesetzt werden konnten und viele existierende Szenarien auch mit herkömmlichen Technologien ohne Blockchain funktionieren würden. Und dennoch kann Blockchain sinnvoll eingesetzt werden, beispielsweise auf dem Katasteramt oder in einer elektronischen Patientenakte.

IT support for collaboration has gone through quite some change since the beginning of the century and is providing more and more support for knowledge workers. Although single systems are getting easier to use, they are often not replacing former systems but accompany them, which makes the overall system landscape harder to oversee for knowledge workers. Future information systems should therefore combine the existing building blocks under a consistent user interface and assist the user in storing information at the right place. Seamlessly switching between formats, so that the user doesn’t have to decide upfront whether a blog entry, a wiki page or a text processor document is better suited for the information. This section discusses the development of digital collaboration solutions and shows how social software has changed them to better support knowledge processes.

Im folgenden Kapitel geht es um das Privatleben in der digitalen Welt. Wie wird es sich verändern? Welche Produkte werden wir nutzen? Was können sie heute schon, welche Funktionen und Fähigkeiten werden sie in naher Zukunft haben? Wird unser Leben dadurch angenehmer oder sollten wir uns vor so einer digitalen Zukunft fürchten? Anhand vieler Anwendungsbeispiele werden Sie verstehen, was das aktuelle Schlagwort Digitalisierung für das Privatleben bedeutet, und anhand zweier ausgewählter Technologien wird Ihnen ein kleiner Einblick hinter die Kulissen der technischen Entwicklung eröffnet.

Purpose – Technologies such as smart advisors, smart factories and the “Internet of things” have again sparked large interest in IT-enabled knowledge management. Although there have been numerous case studies and empirical studies on how the management of knowledge in large organizations has benefitted from these technologies, we have only scarce information on how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can manage the corresponding digital transformation necessary. In line with the emerging paradigm of physical-cyber-social computing (Sheth, Anantharam & Henson, 2013), we intend to foster the digital transformation that might boost SMEs’ resilience concerning the increasing demands of hypercompetitive environments. The research question discussed in this paper is how enterprise knowledge infrastructure services that are available publicly can support SMEs in building knowledge capabilities that strengthen their organizational resilience. Design/methodology/approach – The methodology used for this discussion consists of (1) a review of related work on the knowledge-based view, resilience and enterprise knowledge infrastructures plus (2) case examples taken from exploratory interviews with representatives of six German SMEs. As we study the relationships between IT, activities and outcomes, we build our research on the input-process-output model (McGrath, 1964) or, more specifically, an integrative framework for studying knowledge management enablers, processes, and organizational performance (Lee & Choi, 2003). Originality/value –Our contributions are two-fold: (1) we propose to employ capabilities in order to detail the concept of organizational resilience and (2) we present a model to illustrate how services of an enterprise knowledge infrastructure can support organizational resilience with the help of knowledge activities. Practical implications – The application of our approach to decompose organizational resilience into capabilities and to weave enterprise knowledge infrastructure services together with cloud service models to support such capabilities provides the basis for SMEs to benefit from comprehensive cloud-based offerings to build organizational resilience. By using such cloud offerings, SMEs can avoid issues with the development of own services. Cloud providers can use our decomposition of organizational resilience to design cloud-based IT services in a way that these services help to build capabilities for such resilience.

One could think that knowledge management (KM) is already fully digitized and therefore the discussion about digital transformation is already too late here. Documents are mostly created digitally for quite some years. Communication is happening mostly in digital form and also cooperation is often social media that raises awareness for things colleagues are doing. However, the mega trend digitaliza-tion stands for more than just electronic forms of data creation, management and storage.

The capability to operate cloud-native applications can generate enormous business growth and value. But enterprise architects should be aware that cloud-native applications are vulnerable to vendor lock-in. We investigated cloud-native application design principles, public cloud service providers, and industrial cloud standards. All results indicate that most cloud service categories seem to foster vendor lock-in situations which might be especially problematic for enterprise architectures. This might sound disillusioning at first. However, we present a reference model for cloud-native applications that relies only on a small subset of well standardized IaaS services. The reference model can be used for codifying cloud technologies. It can guide technology identification, classification, adoption, research and development processes for cloud-native application and for vendor lock-in aware enterprise architecture engineering methodologies.

The Semantic Web has matured from a vision and research area of a few AI specialists to an important technology being used in a large number of research and a few practice projects. Most building blocks of the Semantic Web stack are filled with concrete technologies and W3C standards, but there are still enough areas for research. However, even with existing technologies, the potential of semantic applications within corporations is not yet fully harnessed as the adoption of Semantic Web technologies lacks behind other technologies like NoSQL databases or Web 2.0 technologies. This paper reviews the state of the art of Semantic Web technologies, discusses important terms and developments as well as currently active research streams. It further analyses available tools and applications with a focus on corporate scenarios and open source software and concludes with the suggestion of an architecture for a corporate semantic intranet.

Docker provides a good basis to run composite applications in the cloud, especially if those are not cloud-aware, or cloud-native. However, Docker concentrates on managing containers on one host, but SaaS providers need a container management solution for multiple hosts. Therefore, a number of tools emerged that claim to solve the problem. This paper classifies the solutions, maps them to requirements from a case study and identifies gaps and integration requirements. We close some of these gaps with our own integration components and tool enhancements, resulting in the currently most complete management suite.

Der Hype um das Container-Werkzeug Docker ist auch drei Jahre nach seiner ersten Veröffentlichung ungebrochen. Docker
adressiert sowohl Entwickler, die einen einfachen Weg suchen, um ihre Anwendungen zu testen und anschließend in die
Produktivumgebung zu bringen, als auch Cloud-Betreiber, die durch die Verwendung von Containern statt Virtuellen Maschinen
(VMs) eine höhere Packungsdichte und Performance realisieren können. Während die Handhabung für Entwickler mit einzelnen
Docker-Containern recht einfach ist, setzen die „Googles“ und „Netflixe“ dieser Welt häufig selbstentwickelte Werkzeugketten
ein, um die Komplexität in großen Umgebungen durch Automatisierung beherrschbar zu machen. Dazwischen stehen mittel-
ständische Cloud-Anbieter oder Rechenzentren größerer Unternehmen, die sich keine Entwicklerschar für Docker-Tools leisten
können oder wollen, andererseits aber die Komplexität manuell nicht mehr handhaben können. Für diese gibt es eine schier
unüberschaubare Anzahl an Open-Source-Werkzeugen, die das eine oder andere Problem mildern, jedoch kaum eine um-
fassende Lösung aus einem Guss. Der vorliegende Artikel zeigt, welche Aufgaben zu erfüllen sind, welche Werkzeuge welche
Aspekte davon abdecken und welche Kombinationen von Werkzeugen miteinander harmonieren, um eine umfassende Lösung
zu erreichen.

Bei auf die Infrastruktur bezogenen Szenarien hat Open-Source-Software in den vergangenen Jahren ihre Tauglichkeit für den Firmeneinsatz bereits hinreichend unter Beweis gestellt.

Entgegen der landläufigen Meinung bietet freie Software auch im Bereich klassischer Enterprise-Applikationen durchaus ernstzunehmende Alternativen zu den proprietären Produkten.

Anwender sind bei Problemen aber nicht ausschließlich auf die Gnade der Community angewiesen; ein mittlerweile existierendes Dienstleistungsökosystem kann Service-Ansprüche auch von Unternehmen zufriedenstellen.

NoSQL and especially graph databases are constantly gaining popularity among developers as they promise to deliver superior performance when handling highly interconnected data compared to relational databases. Apache Shindig is the reference implementation for OpenSocial with a highly interconnected data model. However, it had a relational database as back-end. In this paper we describe our experiences with the graph database Neo4j as back-end and compare Cypher, Gremlin and Java as alternatives for querying data with MySQL. We consider performance as well as usability from a developer's perspective. Our results show that Cypher is a good query language in terms of code readability and has a moderate overhead for most queries (20–200%). However, it has to be supplemented with “stored procedures” to make up for some performance deficits in pattern matching queries (>1000%). The RESTful API is unusable slow, whereas our WebSocket connection performs significantly better (>650%).

In the present mobile climate, both companies as well as their consumers are able to execute various processes at any time in any location using a myriad of wireless technologies. Organizational trends demonstrate that mobile devices are being utilized exponentially more to solve problems from the strategic planning level to the operational level through various departments. This propensity was recently confirmed for Germany in a neoteric IDC study [1]. Utilizing that analysis, this article will evaluate and inspect the scope of such modeling. We will endeavor to define the term "mobile modeling", and our final desideratum will be to present results from an empirical investigation of its requirements and benefits. Finally, we will discuss the future technical implications and conclusions of the model.

The paper presents results from an empirical study about the use of a single sign-on (SSO) system in an integrated open source system landscape for supporting team collaboration. A portal solution, enterprise content man-agement system, groupware, business process management and enterprise search engine are used. The investigation shows that although it is easy to achieve SSO with the Web-based user interfaces of the information systems used, none of the systems was prepared to pass authentication tokens to the API of an integrated system or accept SSO tokens instead of username / password pairs for authentication against the API respectively. Different al-ternatives for achieving the desired functionality are presented and a recom-mendation for improvement of the affected information systems is derived.

Usually, knowledge workers are said to not benefit from business process management (BPM) systems, since their main tasks are weakly structured and not representable by a workflow. However, not all of their tasks are equally weak structured, and with adaptive case management (ACM) solutions, a new category of tools came up to support those processes, even if they are weakly structured. This paper introduces an approach to support the creation of cases for ACM engines by mining activities from an activity stream and suggesting tasks that a knowledge worker can use to create a case. Furthermore, the approach supports maturing of the case towards a workflow by detecting repeating sequences in the execution of tasks and suggesting sub processes for the case which is possible with the case management model and notation (CMMN) together with the business process model and notation (BPMN). To allow for further enhancement of the cases, the ACM solution is extended with social collaboration features, so that people working on the case can comment and rate single tasks. The goal is to show that it is possible to establish ties from social activities and Web 2.0 to ACM and BPM. The presented solution uses a graph database as a basis for activity mining.

This paper presents a concept for integrating social media functionality into existing collaboration systems and using this functionality to also integrate the collaboration systems themselves. Social media functionality is used in the areas contents, contacts and communication to support knowledge sharing and knowledge maturing. Using a micro-service architecture, our concept allows for social media functionality in every collaboration system. Users benefit from a better overview due to a central activity stream with entries of all systems, as well as a consistent UI. They don’t have to chose a certain tool but can use the desired functionality like rating, tagging or commenting everywhere. We further provide information about a technical implementation of the concept with popular open source software like Liferay and OpenXchange.

After the human-oriented, technology-oriented (documents), process-oriented and social KM phases, KM support now needs integration of those beneficial technologies instead of hyping one and neglecting the other. This paper proposes a highly modular yet integrated approach to support KM instruments and shows how this approach is implemented based on open source collaboration systems in the SCHub project which represents an enterprise knowledge infrastructure (EKI). The applicability is shown with three KM instruments in the areas people, contents and processes. Social media and search functionality serve as an integration factor for the EKI.

Docker provides a good basis to run composite applications in the cloud, especially if those are not cloud- aware, or cloud-native. However, Docker concentrates on managing containers on one host, but SaaS provi- ders need a container management solution for multiple hosts. Therefore, a number of tools emerged that claim to solve the problem. This paper classifies the solutions, maps them to requirements from a case study and identifies gaps and integration requirements. We conclude that the Docker ecosystem could help moving from IaaS and PaaS solutions towards a runtime environment for SaaS applications, but needs consolidation.

In this paper, we report about benchmark experiments and results from optimizing database connectivity for querying social networking data from Apache Shindig in a Neo4j database. We built on our experiments from [1] and tried to improve performance of the current RESTful http connection in comparison to JDBC in order to fully utilize performance benefits of the graph database compared to relational database management systems. We implemented a database driver based on WebSockets. We found that BSON is a better data transfer format than JSON and compression increases performance in some settings while decreasing it in others. Multiple WebSocket connections are needed to scale to a high number of client requests and fully utilize database performance. Multi-threading is another key factor for scalability. Implementing a kind of stored procedure, we were able to further increase throughput and decrease response times.

Knowledge management represents a key issue for both information systems’ academics and practitioners, including those who have become disillusioned by actual results that fail to deliver on exaggerated promises and idealistic visions. Social software, a tremendous global success story, has prompted similarly high expectations regarding the ways in which organizations can improve their knowledge handling. But can these expectations be met, whether in academic research or the real world? This article seeks to identify current research trends and gaps, with a focus on social knowledge environments. The proposed research agenda features four focal challenges: semi-permeable organizations, social software in professional work settings, crowd knowledge, and cross-border knowledge management. Three solutions emerge as likely methods to address these challenges: design-oriented solutions, analytical solutions, and interdisciplinary dialogue.

In this paper we describe our experiences with setting up a single signon enabled intranet with open source software and then making it accessible over the internet using a reverse proxy. During this process, we encounter several issues. We describe those, discuss possible solutions and present our final setup.