The IT Business Partner (ITBP) role is increasingly adopted to bridge the gap between business and IT and foster strategic alignment.Even though organizations still struggle with implementing an effective collaboration between business and IT, the design of this role and the challenges it faces remain underexplored.This study is the first scientific paper to examine the ITBP.Through a case study and expert interviews, it derives eleven key tasks, with relationship management and advice at its core, and 14 required skills for effectiveness.It identifies challenges of the ITBP role, such as organizational integration, skill gaps and a lack of strategic focus.This study contributes to the field by offering a comprehensive understanding of the ITBP's design and role for business IT alignment.It provides organizations with guidance on the implementation and skill development of the ITBP role.Future research should validate findings and further explore the role's effectiveness.

The digital transformation urges organizations to become digital enterprises.Digital enterprises require the integration of business and IT to efficiently leverage digital technologies.However, there is a lack of a framework that guides organizations on what organizational capabilities are required to achieve business-IT integration.The goal of this paper is to identify these capabilities.From a single case study, we derived twelve organizational capabilities that a digital enterprise, driven by technology, should design in terms of its people, organizational structure, and tasks to establish business-IT integration.Thus, this paper provides guidance for organizations to approach business-IT integration as a foundation for their path into a digital enterprise.

Modern document management systems administer an increasing amount of data. Unfortunately traditional database technology cannot satisfy the resulting performance requirements. We report on how parallel database technology can contribute to make large and scalable document management systems work. Our discussion clearly shows that simply substituting a sequential database system for a parallel one does not necessarily lead to scalability and high performance. In contrast, detailed knowledge of the application and document management system is necessary to decide on the optimal architecture of the parallel database system, its query optimization and parallelization strategies, as well as on its data fragmentation scheme and load balancing properties. All discussions are exemplified referring to an existing document management system developed at our university that is currently migrated from a sequential database system to a parallel one.