August-Wilhelm Scheer Recognized for Life’s Work

Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. August-Wilhelm Scheer today received the prestigious Design Science Lifetime Achievement Award at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, in recognition of his services to design sciences and life’s work “Professor Scheer has achieved success through his happy knack of combining academic rigor and innovation with business acumen and impact, becoming a role model for a whole generation of design-oriented researchers in the process,” said Professor Robert Winter, Director of the University of St. Gallen Institute of Information Management, explaining the reasons behind the award. With the ARIS concept of Business Process Management, Scheer and his company, IDS Scheer AG, created an entirely new approach to designing business information systems, one which is deployed worldwide by numerous large and mid-sized companies.

Winter is also program committee chairman of the DESRIST 2010 conference, where the prize was awarded. The annual DESRIST (Design Science Research in Information Systems) conference was launched in 2006 in the US as a response to the explanatory method then prevalent in information systems research. After four conferences in the US, DESRIST is taking place on European soil for the first time this year, from June 3 to 5 in St. Gallen. A hundred researchers from 20 countries are attending.

Scheer, 68, lectured at the University of Saarland from 1975 to 2006, where he established one of Germany’s leading institutes for information systems. In 1984, he founded international software and consulting firm IDS Scheer AG. With a headcount of 3,000 in 2009, the company became the biggest university spin-off in Europe. In 1997, Scheer established IMC AG, whose supervisory board he chairs. IMC is now the market leader in e-learning, with 200 employees. Scheer has been president of BITKOM, the German association of IT companies, since 2007. He is also vice-president of the Federation of German Industries (BDI), a member of the senates of the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft and the German Academy of Science and Engineering (acatech), and a member of the Industry-Science Research Alliance set up by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. A passionate saxophonist, Scheer established the August Wilhelm Scheer Foundation for Science and Art in 2001, whose activities include financing the post of jazz professor at the University of Music in Germany’s Saarland region.