Invited Speakers
Speaker: Prof. Dr. Markus Westner
Affiliations: OTH Regensburg, Germany
Prof. Dr. Markus Westner
Biography: Markus Westner is a professor of Business Informatics at the Faculty of Informatics and Mathematics of OTH Regensburg. His teaching and research focuses lie in the areas of IT strategy, IT governance, and IT sourcing. He is the co-editor of several scientific journals and the author of numerous scientific articles in the field of IT management. He also serves as a reviewer for numerous scientific journals and conferences. Before his academic career, he worked as a business consultant in a project manager position at Bain & Company, one of the largest business consulting firms in the world, in the Munich office. In this position, he advised clients from the fields of financial services, telecommunications, and high-tech on strategy, organization, and efficiency improvement.
Speech Information
Abstract:Multiple mini case studies (MMCS) are an increasingly visible variant of case study research in Information Systems. In this approach, researchers purposefully trade depth for breadth by studying a high number of cases (often >10) while drawing on limited sources of evidence per case—sometimes a single interview. While this pragmatic design is attractive for studying emerging technologies or time-critical phenomena, it is frequently criticized as "marginal" because limited triangulation and thin contextualization can undermine validity. Building on recent research published in Information Systems and e-Business Management, this talk introduces MMCS as a distinct, rigorous research design. The presentation is grounded in a review of 50 IS MMCS publications, which revealed significant gaps in current rigor: for instance, replication logic was not justified in 64% of the analyzed studies, and a full chain of evidence was reported in only 36%. In this session, I will translate core rigor criteria into a "methodological recipe" for MMCS. We will cover specific tactics to ensure validity, such as complementing primary evidence with accessible supplementary data and triangulating findings across groups of replicated cases rather than individual cases. Participants will leave with a clear understanding of the "do’s and don’ts" required to distinguish rigorous MMCS from truly marginal research.