CVLBA Jahrestreffen at Walldorf (27 & 28 November)

The 2012 annual CVLBA meeting  just took place at the SAP Guest House “Kalipeh” in Walldorf on 27th and 28th November. For outsiders, CVLBA stands for “Center for Very Large Business Applications”, and is a research center funded by SAP. The two CVLBA Labs are located at the Technical University of Munich and the Otto-Von-Guericke University at Magdeburg, where information systems researchers focus on a wide variety of topics that have implications for large business applications and organizations using such applications. Ten researchers, five from each university, (I being one of them) presented their current research on topics ranging from supply chain management, to cloud computing, IT outsourcing, governance.

The meeting started off with a nice dinner at Kalipeh on the first evening, which turned out to be a more than perfect setting for exchange of ideas, feedback and interesting discussions among participants from SAP and the two universities. The next day started off early with a short introduction by the two professors, which was followed by the research presentations, often resulting in a lively discussion among the participants.

For the researchers, it was a nice forum to get feedback from the three professors – Prof. Helmut Krcmar, Prof. Klaus Turowski, and Prof. Kathrin Möslein, and Dr, Stephan Fischer and Heino Schrader from SAP. In particular, Heino and Dr. Fischer had many suggestions on how to finetune the topics, what to focus on, and offered to provide facilitation and operational support to the researchers through providing contacts to relevant people within SAP. Thus, we ended on a positive note, looking forward to carrying on with what we are doing, venturing into new topics, following up new ideas and suggestions. Of course, the sumptuous lunch that followed at the end helped in enhancing the general feeling satisfaction. Finally, a lot of credit goes to Ilona Inge Kokkinidis for taking care of all the arrangements and ensuring that we all had a comfortable and fruitful stay in Walldorf!

Update (14.12.2012): Since this post, other participants of the meeting have also posted about their own presentations, or provided a different perspective on the meeting. Here are the links to some of the other posts (I will be happy to add links to any other posts related to our meeting, so please let me know if there is something that I missed!).

Markus Böhm’s post regarding his talk on IT Carve-Out Research

Manuel Wiesche presented his research on the Role of Information Systems in Supporting Exploitative and Exploratory Management Control Activities

Harald Kienegger’s post about his talk on SAP Business ByDesign Implementation

Bastian Kurbjuhn’s post summarizing the event and the various topic presented