A flagship of digitization: Opening ceremony for the FIM Research Institute for Information Management

A world in which digital innovations are used responsibly both for individuals and for the economy and society as a whole – this is the goal and mission statement of the FIM Research Institute for Information Management, the opening ceremony for which was held at the University of Bayreuth on 7 July 2023.

The University of Bayreuth and the Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg have now become the responsible bodies for the research institute, as they recently signed in a joint cooperation agreement in Bayreuth. Thus, the history of the core research centre Finance & Information Management (FIM), founded in 2002, will now be continued on a new basis and brought forward into the future.

The FIM Research Institute for Information Management is a cross-university network whose members combine their expertise to create innovative and attractive offers for researchers, lecturers and students. The focus is on the scientifically sound and at the same time practice-oriented training of experts and future managers in future fields of digitization. Currently, FIM has a total of 12 professors and more than 100 doctoral students. The broad spectrum of research work includes both publicly funded consortium research and numerous applied company-specific projects. The opening ceremony of FIM was therefore also attended by representatives of well-known companies from various industries, all of whom expressed a strong interest in the competencies and fields of work of the newly founded institute.

"The FIM Research Institute for Information Management will be a flagship for innovative solutions in central areas of information management. Excellent professional competences, interdisciplinarity at the interface of computer science and business administration as well as close and trustful cooperation with further partners from science, economy and society are a guarantee for successfully bridging research and practice", says Prof. Dr. Stefan Leible, President of the University of Bayreuth, on the occasion of the official opening of the FIM.

"In recent years, the Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg and the University of Bayreuth have developed an increasingly intensive cooperation in the field of business and information systems engineering. Our recently signed cooperation agreement now forms the basis for a structural networking of our core competencies that we intend to incorporate into FIM’s responsible bodies. We attach great importance to the transfer of innovative research into study programmes that open up outstanding opportunities for our students in future professional fields," explains Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Gordon T. Rohrmair, President of the Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg.

The latest future technologies will shape FIM's future activities in research, teaching and knowledge transfer: Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, the Internet of Things, Process Mining and Automation. These fields of competence are to be further expanded under the FIM umbrella.

Prof. Dr. Björn Häckel, Managing Director of FIM at the Technical University of Applied Sciences Augsburg, emphasizes the interconnection of scientific methods used in research and development work: "FIM has very broad methodological expertise, including digital innovation management, strategic IT management and value-oriented process management, as well as the latest developments and trends in customer and user analysis or work and organizational design. The systematic networking of methods, which are too often only considered in isolation, is one of the particular strengths of FIM, which distinguishes our institute from numerous other research locations in Germany."

The range of research fields in which FIM is active is equally broad. "Digitalization is penetrating ever further into all areas of life. At FIM, we want to play an active role in shaping this revolutionary development, which no one could have imagined two decades ago – not only from a technological perspective, but also with regard to ethical, social and cultural demands. This applies to all our projects and initiatives, for example in the areas of work and life, health and sports, governance and society, or sustainability and decarbonization," says Prof. Dr. Maximilian Röglinger, Managing Director of FIM at the University of Bayreuth.

"The FIM is very well positioned in terms of content and personnel to deal with important application questions of digitization in a competent and future-oriented manner in the relevant dimensions. The dovetailing of research and teaching with the practical experience gained from the challenges that companies and public administration face on a daily basis is of central importance. The FIM team is characterized in particular by its partnership-based cooperation," says Tino Kühnel, Managing Director of byte (Bayerische Agentur für Digitales), who gave a keynote speech on practical experience at the opening of the FIM.

During the opening ceremony on the campus of the University of Bayreuth, the great merits of Prof. Dr. Hans Ulrich Buhl, a business & information systems engineering scientist from Augsburg, were honoured several times. On 6 July 2023, he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Faculty of Law, Business & Economics at the University of Bayreuth. For two decades, as a full professor at the University of Augsburg, he headed the core competence centre Finance & Information Management (FIM), which was established by the Bavarian State Chancellery in 2002 and in which the University of Bayreuth participated at an early stage. FIM will continue the tradition of this highly successful centre, with which the State of Bavaria positioned itself as a pioneer of digitization back in the early 2000s, into the future under a new name and with new structures.