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Since the publication of the enterprise data model by Scheer, in the end of the eighties the interdependence between organizational setup, data and process models, and the information technology infrastructure gained in importance. Today, this interdependence is commonly accepted and the influence of each of the areas onto the other two is used for driving the success of an enterprise. This is why the design and implementation of integrated system landscapes in corporations and beyond their borders is an essential task for both, the Business discipline and the Information Systems discipline.
In 2011, the Centers for Very Large Business Applications (CVLBA) in Magdeburg and Munich continued and increased their successful involvement in this area. With regard to research, the centers were able to expand their leading position in the field of integrating business transactions into increasingly large business applications.
Very Large Business Applications (VLBA) have been a focal point in research at the Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg and Technische Universität München also before 2006, when the two CVLBAs were founded at the two universities. Within the centers the combined experience of various faculties from a broad variety of disciplines including computer science, business administration, economics, psychology, library sciences, and law is now bundled.
The definition of a VLBA builds upon the definition of business applications, which are applications implementing processes for value creation in organizations, but exhibits the following specific characteristics:
- VLBAs have no geographical, organizational, cultural or technical limitations.
- VLBAs may be implemented as business application(s) as well as whole systems and system landscapes.
- VLBAs are of strategic importance to the organization because a change in the VLBA leads to high financial, personnel, and organizational costs.
VLBAs support different departments of organizations independent of their size. Enterprise-Resource-Planning (ERP), Supply-Chain-Management (SCM), and Customer-Relationship-Management (CRM) systems are examples of VLBAs. The centers' objectives are the integrated study of very large business applications and their underlying technologies - their design, their implementation, their management but also their impact on the economy and on society as a whole. An interdisciplinary approach is essential in this context, to improve the efficiency and quality of business information systems development and the business processes they support. Expected benefits of the CVLBAs' research output comprise improvements in the management of the deployment process, increased user satisfaction and the delivery of more functionality to the market concerning software and related products.
