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Astract: Companies are increasingly embedded in B2B environments, where they have to collaborate in order to achieve their goals. Such collaborations lead to inter-organizational business processes that may be commonly supported through the exchange of electronic data interchange (EDI) messages (e.g., electronic purchase orders, invoices etc.). Despite the appearance of XML, traditional approaches to EDI, such as EDIFACT and ANSI X.12, still play an overwhelmingly dominant role. However, such traditional EDI standards lack a notion of process. In other words, the exchanged business documents are typically not embedded in the context of other exchanged business documents. This has two shortcomings: (1) the inability to apply proven business process management (BPM) methods, including process mining techniques, in such settings; and (2) the unavailability of systematic approaches to business intelligence (BI) using information from exchanged EDI messages. In this article, we present the EDImine Framework for enabling (1) the application of process mining techniques in the field of EDI-supported inter-organizational business processes, and (2) for supporting inter-organizational performance evaluation using business information from EDI messages, event logs and process models. As an enabling technology, we present a method for the semantic preprocessing of EDIFACT messages to exploit this potentially rich source of information by applying state of the art BPM and BI techniques. We show the applicability of our approach by means of a case study based on real-world EDI data of a German consumer goods manufacturing company.

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Astract: This textbook mainly addresses beginners and readers with a basic knowledge of object-oriented programming languages like Java or C#, but with little or no modeling or software engineering experience - thus reflecting the majority of students in introductory courses at universities. Using UML, it introduces basic modeling concepts in a highly precise manner, while refraining from the interpretation of rare special cases. After a brief explanation of why modeling is an indispensable part of software development, the authors introduce the individual diagram types of UML (the class and object diagram, the sequence diagram, the state machine diagram, the activity diagram, and the use case diagram), as well as their interrelationships, in a step-by-step manner. The topics covered include not only the syntax and the semantics of the individual language elements, but also pragmatic aspects, i.e., how to use them wisely at various stages in the software development process. To this end, the work is complemented with examples that were carefully selected for their educational and illustrative value. Overall, the book provides a solid foundation and deeper understanding of the most important object-oriented modeling concepts and their application in software development. An additional website (www.uml.ac.at) offers a complete set of slides to aid in teaching the contents of the book, exercises and further e-learning material.

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Astract: Trade transactions between companies usually require the exchange of business documents. When public administration is involved documents for certain reports have to be exchanged. In any case, these documents have to be exchange in some agreed order. Accordingly, the business document exchanges must be defined by a corresponding choreography. A choreography language for this purpose is delivered by the United Nation´s Centre for Trade Facilitation and Electronic Business (UN/CEFACT) which is an e-business standardization body known for its work on UN/EDIFACT and ebXML. The result - UN/CEFACT´s Modeling Methodology (UMM) 2.0 - is presented in this chapter.

Keywords: Variant Management, Feature Models, Conceptual Modeling, Customer Requirements
Astract: The degree of variability in modern products is steadily increasing. Markets have changed in terms of customers with individual requirements and expectations on products. This brings new challenges to the process of product development. The number of possible variants increases more and more, as well as the complexity to handle variability. Therefore, there is a need for supporting information systems, when it comes to selecting the correct variants in terms of, e.g. optimal costs or fulfillment of individual requirements. Customer requirements different than those of average users create a greater difficulty in the management of product variants. This is especially a struggle when developing or evolving products in the health care domain. Persons with disabilities often have completely different requirements on products than people without do. This thesis proposes a methodology to analyze and evaluate variable products, in consideration of specific customer requirements. Techniques from Quality Function Deployment - in particular the House of Quality - and modeling techniques from variability modeling - namely Feature Modeling - are combined. Feature Models are a common variability modeling technique. The House of Quality is a method to evaluate the level of fulfillment of customer requirements by correlating them with technical characteristics. By combining concepts from both techniques, a user centric evaluation of variable products is provided. In order to prove the feasibility and applicability of this approach, a case study within the health care domain is done as proof-of-concept. Personas with disabilities are defined as well as real product configurations. The introduced approach is able to identify the product fitting best for each of the defined personas. The final step evaluates the methodology by means of a case study. This case study also revealed areas for improvement in future work. The approach was presented to and discussed with the variability modeling community at a workshop and further investigations were done by interviews with experts on variability modeling.

Keywords: Comparison of Curricula, Business Informatics
Astract: Due to the interdisciplinarity of business informatics between business sciences and computer sciences there are a lot of topics for research and teaching enabling a multifarious scope for designing curricula. So a comparison of course contents in terms of benchmarking is obvious, not least because of the increasing university autonomy. This thesis deals with the question which course contents of the bachelor programme Business Informatics at the Vienna University of Technology diverge to which extent compared to contents of similar programmes at other selected universities. The structure and the teaching contents of the undergraduate studies were analyzed by pre-defined categories and a grading system for the similarity of content. Domain experts of the Vienna University of Technology reviewed the results per field of examination (Business Informatics, Business Sciences, Information Technology and Foundational Knowledge) and their feedback was worked into. Main findings of this master thesis are: There is no balance between the four domains of education with respect to the amount of work in ECTS: Information Technology and Business Informatics require an above-average amount of work, whereas the amount of work for Business Sciences and Foundational Knowledge are below-average. The individual selection of specialization areas is quite limited, their size is very low compared to the total amount of work in ECTS. Probably strengths of the curricula bachelor programme Business Informatics [TUWien11b] in terms of a great variety and depth of topics were found in the following modules: -Engineering of Web Applications- and -Modeling- (Business Informatics), -Algorithm and data structures- and -Programming- (Information Technology), -Statistics and probability theory- (Foundational Knowledge). On the other hand there are also identified weaknesses, as follows: Missing courses or lectures to -Accounting-, especially double-entry bookkeeping, -Introduction to Business Informatics-, -Information Management-, -Project Management-, -Computer Networks- -Network Protocols and Network Management-. These findings should be considered in further discussions about the design of the bachelor programme Business Informatics.