Management Informatics at K.U.Leuven

The Faculty of Business and Economics of Katholieke Universiteit Leuven was the first to offer courses in IT, and programs in Management Informatics in Flanders. The degrees ‘Bachelor of Science: handelsingenieur in de beleidsinformatica’, ‘Master of Science: handelsingenieur in de beleidsinformatica’ and ‘Master in/of Information Management’ all combine a profound study of business and economics with a deep understanding of the world of ICT. Over more than 30 years, the faculty has educated hundreds of students, now occupying important positions in business in general and in business informatics in particular.

LIRIS (Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems)

Research in information systems has always been an important mission of the faculty members. The Leuven Institute for Research on Information Systems (LIRIS), founded in 1987, coordinates research in the area of information technology in organizations. This research embodies: fundamental issues of information systems in organizations (dealing with concepts, models, generic methods, tools and techniques), applied research (relating general research results to specific problems and application areas), and research on the use and implications of information systems throughout society.

Important research topics are: system architecture, system modeling and system development; database and content management, extended enterprise IT-infrastructures; intelligent business, knowledge discovery and data mining; economics of information systems; computer simulation; and e-learning.

Research in Management Informatics

As stated already, research in Management Informatics (beleidsinformatica) is conducted in different, but related areas.

• The first area is Software engineering and Methods for systems development. In this domain, research is conducted on the following subjects: (1) software architectures and object-oriented and event-based business modeling as expressed in MERODE (Model-driven Existence-dependence Relationship Object Oriented Development), a project which initiated at the Departement for Applied Economics; (2) the use of events as a conceptual architectural and modeling paradigm for the coordination of components in distributed systems, as presented in the new BECO-model (Business Event-based Coordination- model); (3) the use of business rules, events, concepts and (decision) tables in order to build high quality flexible architectures where the business logic is managed, validated and altered by the business side as an on-going business activity, as embodied in the business rules approach.
• The second area is Database and Content Management. In this domain, research is conducted on the following subjects: (1) methods for constructing and implementing object-oriented and object/relational databases; (2) development of a fuzzy relational data model; (3) methods for developing data warehouse databases and repositories for supporting the use of these databases; (4) navigation possibilities in hypermedia systems; (5) component based development and web services for application and information integration.
• Research about Intelligent systems constitutes the third topic. It is aimed at modeling business knowledge and developing methods for designing knowledge-based information systems, with specific emphasis on structuring and validating knowledge, and the integration with information systems. It focuses on knowledge representation, validation and verification, knowledge discovery in databases, neural networks and support vector machines, web usage mining, and fuzzy systems.
• Also Quantitative aspects of information systems are investigated. The overall framework is the B.S.W. (Business - Service - Work) method, an integrated framework for capacity planning, performance evaluation and cost charging for information processing. Recently it has been examined how Activity Based Costing techniques can be used in interpreting measurements of performance monitors. Other themes are the behavior of systems with multiple mixed priorities, the relationship between the B.S.W. method and enterprise modeling and, finally, formal measurement of complexity of OO-models (and MERODE-based models in particular).
• The fifth area is Computer simulation, in particular the use of discrete event simulation for studying the behavior of complex systems (e.g. computer networks), and the validation of discrete event simulation models. To this purpose a new technique, based on the theory of fuzzy sets, is being developed.

An emerging research field is ‘network economics’ and ‘internet accounting’. Starting from economic models and a comprehensive framework for accounting of network services, it is investigated how accounting and pricing can be implemented in a scalable way in case of heterogeneous ‘quality of service’-requirements.

In response to the educational opportunities made available by technological innovations, we also started research and evaluation studies in the field of e-Learning.