Open Access

Currently, there is a global problem of an increasing need of energy. There will be less fossil fuel, which will be more expensive in the future. The regenerative energies are getting more and more important. The subject deals with the problem of economical feasibility of geothermal energy systems. Its goal is to analyze nessesary conditions and aspects for realizing geothermal energy systems in comparison to and competition with traditional energy sources. The geothermal energy recovery is economically advantageous if the investment costs, esp. the drilling costs, could be reduced significantly. It only seems possible to open up a big opportunity for realizing geothermal energy systems by using a rock melt drilling technology, to reduce the investment costs significantly.

Mergers and acquisitions take place all over the world and in many industries, typically motivated by corporate politics. While IT management is often not involved in the decision-making, it has to solve a wide range of problems in the post-merger phase. Indeed, merging two or more companies implies not only merging their core businesses, but also creating a new and efficiently integrated IT organisation from the individual ones, since persistence of the current IT organisations usually does not make sense. In addition, corporate management frequently imposes constraints, e.g., cost reductions, on the IT infrastructure. The principal critical success factor when merging IT organisations is the uninterrupted operation of the IT business, because a service gap is neither acceptable for in-house functional departments nor for external customers. Therefore, the IT rebuilding phase has to focus on IT services that facilitate the processes of functional departments, support processes, and processes of customers and suppliers, so that any transformation work is transparent to internal and external customers. In this article we describe a real-world but anonymous case study. Our goals are to highlight the points important for merging IT organisations, and to help decision-makers, particularly in the areas of IT organisation and IT personnel. We focus on the arising organisational and non-technical issues from a management perspective, i.e., the CIO's view, and provide checklists intended to help IT managers to address the most pressing issues. To assist CIOs surviving in the post merger phase, we give check lists for merging IT organisations, check lists for merging IT human resources, check lists for IT budgets and reporting, and assess activities in a merger scenario. IT hardware, software and IT infrastructure as well as running IT projects are not considered in this paper.

In this paper, we present the results of a controlled human experiment where students in a business process modelling course had to model a business process from a case study as part of their coursework. One group could take advantage of the continuous validation feature that is implemented in the bflow modelling tool, i.e. they were provided with alerts about modelling errors. A control group had to create a model for the same case study without using continuous validation. The results of the experiment indicate that the presence of continuous validation indeed has had a positive effect on the number of syntactic errors in business process models.

The central thesis of this chapter is that mathematical economics can provide a novel approach to the examination of offshoring business decisions and provide an impetus for future research in the area. A growing body of research indicates that projected cost savings from IT offshoring projects are not being met. Furthermore, evidence suggests that decision-making processes have been more emotional than rational, and that many offshoring arrangements have been rushed into without adequate analysis of the true costs involved. Building on the concept of mindfulness and mindlessness introduced to the IS literature by Swanson and Ramiller, a cost equation is developed using “deductive reasoning rather than inductive study” in the tradition of mathematical economics. The model endeavours to capture a wide range of both the quantitative and qualitative parameters. Although the economic model is illustrated against the background of a European scenario, the theoretical framework is generic and applicable to organisations in any global location.