Aims and goals.
The Center in Management Information Systems (CEMIS) has the ambition to cover the development and valorisation of competences related to the criticism and setup of strategies, methodologies, processes and systems in Information Systems and Services Management. This Centre falls under the prospect of integrating transversally these competences to cover the stages, ethical and critical aspects of analysing and realizing the disciplines considered under the terms Information Technology (IT) and E-Business.
Fundamental and applied research.
CEMIS is devoted to the continuous development of high-level competencies and expertise in the engineering and management of information systems. For this purpose, the Centre implements a research policy favouring academic excellence and recognition through publications in top-ranking conferences and journals. CEMIS focuses its research effort on service engineering, an emerging area in information systems that is investigated by leading IT companies (e.g., IBM, HP). CEMIS is member of the FP7 Human, FP7 Selfman, and FP7 Serenoa front-end of web services and is involved in several research projects at multiple levels that benefit from significant funding. Those include:
− The scientific coordination of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) activities in the FP6 SIMILAR network of excellence (6.5 M€), for which UCL was the project coordinator and the School the coordinator of CEMIS-related activities.
− The scientific coordination of the European UsiXML (User Interface eXtensible Markup Language) project gathering 22 organizations (small and medium enterprises, large companies, research centres, and universities) from 7 European countries (i.e., Belgium, France, Germany, Greece, Portugal, Romania, and Spain). The total budget for this project for all countries sums up to 22 M€ (of which 2,2 M€ are for the Belgian part) for covering more than 120 people over 4 years in order to establish an international W3C standard for user interfaces for the Web. It successfully attracted a pool of more than 70 organizations worldwide in the UsiXML End User Club .
− A major investigation in the “Stratego” project, with the IRIS firm, in the FEDER eHealth project on information systems for HealthCare and in a Virtuoso project on information systems in mechatronics.
− A 400 k€ development of a “Service-Oriented Platform for Product Life Cycle Management Integration”.
CEMIS encourages applied research projects and educational partnerships with the corporate world (e.g., with SAP, IBM, Microsoft). The expertise of its members allows the study of organizational information systems both from a managerial perspective and from an engineering perspective. Its R&D projects involve small (e.g., Defimedia), medium (e.g., Iris), or large enterprises (e.g., IBA), at the regional (e.g., Babelway), national (e.g., Barco), European (e.g., Thalès), and international levels (e.g., IBM).
Regarding scientific papers, the group has published 11 scholarly articles published in international refereed journals in 2011. Let us stress that CEMIS frequently publishes papers in peer-reviewed international conferences rather than journals because in that field some conferences are more prestigious and selective than some journal papers.
Practice-oriented innovation activities.
CEMIS is actively involved in several pedagogical disposals in information systems, such as Eltesprom (see above), the iCampus platform, the UsiCentral repository of web services based on UsiXML. CEMIS also co-created Polymedis, a UCL Spin-off in healthcare information systems and has completed Vitality and ErgoFace, two Spin-off projects funded by the regional government (for 400 k€). CEMIS has also completed 5 First Enterprises projects on innovative products and services in information systems with SMEs (e.g., Babelway, Denali).