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Die diesjährige Summer School CuriousU der Universität Twente (UT) wird vom 12. bis zum 21. August 2018 stattfinden. Da die UT strategischer Partner der WWU ist und eine langjährige enge Verbindung besteht, wären wir Ihnen sehr dankbar, wenn Sie Ihre Studierenden auf die Summer School hinweisen könnten. Auch in diesem Jahr werden wieder bis zu vier WWU-Studierende kostenfrei an CuriousU teilnehmen können. Lediglich Reisekosten, Versicherungen oder andere persönliche Kosten müssen selbst getragen werden.

The use of IT to drive organizational changes has gained momentum in both profit and non-profit organizations. It is currently culminating in the discussion on Digital Transformation, which assumes that the ability to manage IT-enabled change is key to survival for organizations in the Digital Age. While researchers are just beginning to study this new phenomenon, practitioners are urgently seeking for guidance on how to manage such change and transformation. Professional bodies such as the PMI and OGC have addressed the practitioners’ needs with an approach called Programme Management (PgM). These bodies have issued best practice standards for PgM that they claim to be customizable to different kinds of initiatives and situations. However, we know little about their application to IT-based change initiatives as academic research on PgM is sparse. Taking this as a motivation, we conducted a comparative analysis of five IT-based change initiatives that were managed as programmes. We studied the specific characteristics of these “IT programmes”, the PgM challenges involved, and the measures taken to deal with them. Our findings suggest that IT programmes are distinct from both, other technology-heavy programmes and from organizational change programmes without a technical core. Hence, in order to characterize IT programmes more precisely, we compiled a set of common IT programme characteristics from our five cases. We also identified a set of typical issues in managing IT programmes as well as measures that can be taken to deal with them. These issues include a lack of architectural overview, scope creeps and changes, conflicting interests of stakeholders and other groups involved, diverse professional and cultural backgrounds as well as ill-defined PgM responsibilities and missing competencies.

Today, marketing managers face the challenge to allocate their budget across a plethora of marketing channels to build their brands and generate revenue. Allocating marketing budgets requires a solid knowledge about the different channel’s effectiveness. Moreover, a good understanding of how campaigns should be executed in the different channels is critical.
Literature that compares the effectiveness of multiple marketing channels is scarce, and the findings are mixed. We contribute to the literature by examining the relative effectiveness of traditional advertising, a firm’s activities on Facebook, consumer‐to‐consumer (C2C) messages on Twitter and
web forums for brand‐building and customer acquisition efforts. We use a vector autoregressive model to a unique data set from a European telecom firm. This modeling approach allows to consider the interrelations among traditional advertising, Facebook, and C2C messages. The results show that
traditional advertising is most effective for both brand building and customer acquisition. A firm’s Facebook activities complement traditional advertising efforts. Thus, thoroughly orchestrating traditional advertising and a firm’s social media activities may improve a firm’s performance with
respect to building the brand and encouraging customer acquisition. Moreover, firms can stimulate C2C messages through traditional advertising that in turn influences brand building and acquisition.
The study has several limitations providing fruitful avenues for future research that will be discussed in more detail during the presentation. Therefore, in this talk, I am going to present earlier research projects and provide an outlook into future research activities.