Steffen Schaar: The "EIM Compass" section has been an integral part of this magazine since the beginning of the first issue. Compass stands for orientation, signpost, assistance. Be our "compass" today - give us insights into your motivation over the years to have helped shape the digitization age and hopefully continue to do so. For more than a quarter of a century now, you have been an expert, advisor, opinion leader and trendsetter. May we get to know you better by you explaining the following sentence, which has nothing at all to do with IT: "The ceramics of the Hürde1 settlement at Dümmer....?"

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: (laughs) Yes, this is the title of my dissertation in the field of prehistory and early history from the 1980s. This work was also already a step for me on the way to information management, because already at the end of the 70s I learned to use and appreciate the EDP for archaeology at that time. However, my path also led me away from prehistory into information science in the 80s. From stations at the Fraunhofer Institute IIT, to various providers of document management solutions, to the founding of my own consulting company, the last 35 years have been defined by the topic of information management and digital transformation.

Steffen Schaar: Back then, you established "image processing" in archaeology, so to speak, you supported archaeologists with a database system as early as 1985, you are co-founder of VOI - Association for Organization and Information Systems, you organize congresses, you are a moderator, a seminar leader and you recently celebrated your 25th company anniversary. Congratulations also from us. Are 25 years of passion for and with IT also 25 years of transformation in your life?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: My original wish was to become an archaeologist. I was given a book about Heinrich Schiemann as a birthday present when I was seven years old...the downright classic introduction. Among other things, I studied archaeology and also carried out numerous excavations. I combined this passion very early in the 70s with scientific methods and electronic data processing. Even though I later moved away completely into information technology, I completed and published all my archaeological work beforehand. It was a relatively easy decision to move from archaeology first to the Fraunhofer Gesellschaft for Information and Data Processing. After that I was responsible for first document management projects at different companies like Nixdorf, I learned a little bit the tools of the trade at American consulting companies and then I made the product "Hyparchiv" at ACS, which is still on the market today. You mentioned the VOI: back then, at the end of the 80s, we realized that you have to get involved in order to generate visibility for a topic that ultimately benefits all market participants and the users. That was one of the reasons why I, together with like-minded people, founded the VOI Optical Information Systems Association in 1991. At that time, it was important to me to successfully place initiatives such as the one for the legal recognition of electronic archiving, from which specifications such as the GoBS, GDPdU or today's GoBD then arose. After seven years, however, I left the association for various reasons. As managing chairman of the board I had a lot of responsibility and with 150 member companies simply too much time, which I needed for my enterprise, flowed into the association. PROJECT CONSULT has contributed his part to the development of the topic in Germany. Others can do that now also times. To the last part of your question and to the occasion of the interview - I personally have carried out a transformation in these years, from a natural science-oriented archaeologist into the information science, from the research into the development of software and from there into the product-independent management consultation. We help end users to cope with the digital transformation as well.

Steffen Schaar: ...a wonderful bridge to the questions from "today", because as the saying goes " ... to shape the future, one should know the past and accept the present". Did you ever think you would grow old as a digital immigrant and help shape digitization?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Yes, even as an RDI - Retarded Digital Immigrant.

Steffen Schaar: Okay - clear answer! (grins)

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: You threw the term digitization into the ring. We've been doing digitization since the beginning of IT, haven't we? What has changed is that today we have an unprecedented acceleration of development. The term digitization has literally seeped into our everyday lives. Originally reserved for research or modern commercial enterprises, it's now a topic that affects everyone. But what does digitization originally mean? The dictionary says "the transformation of analog information into digital information" - so in short for the document management industry - scanning. What we mean by digitization today is the transformation of communication, of ways of working, of the entire support environment of man through digital media, through digital processes, digital tools, robotics and the like. Since man has existed, he has used tools, the hand axe, the steam engine, the assembly line. Man becomes a human being only through his tools. Supporting tools, however, are now beginning to develop a life of their own: Robots, Artificial Intelligence, semantic search to cyborgs. We have to accept that the software we work with in the office or in the factory is actually a colleague. This will be reinforced by the installation of electronic components in humans, as cyborgs. Calves get two chips in their ears at birth - confusion impossible! We as humans not yet. But more and more "intelligent" components are being used in replacement surgery. This merging, all-penetrating, self-learning action - that is actually the new quality of digitization.

Steffen Schaar: Actually, it's about using the technology of the present so that we discover in society and everything that accompanies man the possibilities that are ultimately already inculcated in man's spirit of inquiry and his thirst for knowledge. My symbol for this is the "pencil": writing a novel, painting a great picture, rhyming a poem. Adding value, taking responsibility, thinking about things. All human idiosyncrasies of facing the present. Pencil, DMS, ECM, Industrie4.0 and what comes next?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: In the past, a pen was used to record something creatively. Technology today does the same thing, the same but different. Today, technology turns your pen into a magic pen. Not only does it do almost unimaginable things for you, but it also leaves a barely visible trace. Today's data traces lead to the keyword "transparent human being," which dominated the discussion a few years ago. The traces we leave behind can no longer be erased. This is the dark side of digitization. Economic and political interests are in the foreground, no longer people. I found interesting the statements of Shoshana Zuboff already at the beginning of the 1980s with her three laws: everything that can be converted into electronic information will be converted into electronic information; everything that can be automated will be automated; and thirdly, all applications that can be used for surveillance and influence or control will be used for influence and control. The present confirms all three theses. The train that we set in motion back then has been unstoppable since the 1990s. And in our topic, information management in companies, it is grossly underestimated that today we are already 100% dependent on the accuracy and availability of electronic information.

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: To some extent, people are already left out in the cold. If you think about new fintech concepts, with virtual banks and blockchain, there are no humans left in the work processes.

Steffen Schaar: Absolutely. But in between there is still the human being.

Steffen Schaar: Bitcoin, Blockchain, Artificial Intelligence. Not quite 30 years ago, no less a person than Bill Gates said that the time will come when mankind will have only one computer....

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Douglas Adams was very visionary in his book "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" when he wrote that the entire Earth will be a single computer. Bill Gates was not entirely wrong when we think of networking, IoT, interconnected cloud, mobile and the like. Humans have entered into a symbiotic relationship with software. Our self-image, our lives, our work has changed as a result. Thus, questions such as "What will be work at all in the future?" become important. What role will human work still play? What will happen to all the people without work? There are social questions attached to this, such as the unconditional basic income. Today we are talking about the progress of digital transformation. We should actually already start thinking about what we'll do when everything is digitized?

Steffen Schaar: What role did the document provider industry play in this development?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Document management as a discipline emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, when the host systems of the time were not capable of processing unstructured information such as documents. ECM Enterprise Content Management followed in the late 90s and represented an attempt to capture the developments of the Internet, the Web. Today, in 2018, this industry has done itself in.

Steffen Schaar: What went so wrong with ECM - Enterprise Content Management? Was the industry, the target group lost sight of or simply overtaken by time?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: On the one hand, the ECM system providers never really understood the vision, the purpose of enterprise content management, but only focused on their product. If you look at the beginnings of ECM, around the year 2000, the claim was much broader. It was about information management strategies and methods. At that time, I was one of the directors of the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) and in the working group that launched the vision of ECM. At that time, we tried to position the same importance as ERP, PLM, HR, CRM, CMS, etc. among decision makers by using an acronym for our topic. The trends of IT were defined by such acronyms and this is where our topic should be found. Unfortunately, this did not work properly, each vendor marched in its own direction and the so-called ECM industry is disintegrating. A large common umbrella under which the providers can find each other and which allows users to identify and compare solutions is missing today. By the way, in terms of technologies and functionality, ECM has always been middleware in approach, has always been infrastructure, services in the underground of the systems, actually barely visible at the workplace for the user. This approach would still be valid today, but the former ECM providers think they have to position themselves differently in the digital transformation.

Steffen Schaar: Was this development a necessary evil or could it perhaps have been helped to change? So we don't have to say "ashes on our heads"? After all, that would make us all more sympathetic, for all the people around us. Isn't it time to turn away from it for good?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Oh, you know, that ship has sailed. But some topics will continue to be important, even if people no longer talk about ECM. There is, for example, the mastery of information, information governance, which is becoming increasingly important in view of the flood of information and legal requirements. In the case of ECM Enterprise Content Management, this aspect has been insufficiently addressed in recent years. Another factor is that many providers have focused ECM only on unstructured content, i.e., on classic documents, scans, PDFs, Word files, images, and so on. What your company, Mr. Schaar, and also the VOI have sensibly recognized: it is about the development and management of all information, regardless of the technical format. It is about the value of the information, which is independent of the format. What we are missing here today, and where we also have no benchmarks, is to define and recognize this value of information. With regard to the too narrow version of ECM, the ignoring of data and documents as part of a higher-level information management, I am downright angry with the industry...

Steffen Schaar: That's what I wanted to hear, Mr. Kampffmeyer, because ...?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Yes, I'm really angry because the providers have really screwed up this topic. It is no longer anywhere on the priority list of decision-makers. They talk about sub-areas such as archiving - unimportant from the decision-maker's point of view, it belongs in the basement -, content management - done by the service provider -, collaboration - that's what Share Point is for -, processes - run in the business application or in ERP -, electronic invoices - are standard and incidental, IT should take care of them for a moment -, and, and, and. We have aligned the value of information only to the medium, to the administration, but not to the value and benefit.

Steffen Schaar: Now you have just mentioned the digital keyword. In this form of all the acronyms, system solutions that are called CRM, ERP, MRS, MES, and so on. The users don't want that, they want a benefit from it. Simpler, more interesting, more efficient, faster, more agile. Knowledge is the magic word. Knowledge is data provided in the context of action. And you can derive good decisions from knowledge, but only from knowledge, not by saying that data is the gold of the 21st century. Data is garbage, data is sand. Knowledge is the gold, namely in the context of action of societies, of companies, of organizations, of people working and living together. Doesn't that hurt your consultant soul when I simply ask you, for 20 years you've been pouring water on the mills, how much power do you still have?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Counter question - did you know that 75% of all electronic information in companies is RED: Redundant, Outdated, Trivial! The decisive issue is information accessibility and information utilization. Not the technical solution is the key, but the conscious handling of information in the company. What is the significance of information in commercial applications, for example? Whether an archive, SharePoint or cloud is the technical solution is unimportant. How do I handle information, how do I protect it, how do I maintain its quality and usability. The providers and their associations such as BITKOM, VOI & Co., driven by the manufacturers, instead continue to deal with technology, functionality and systems - the actually important topics thus fall by the wayside. We have thus left the users alone, lost them along the way. We have left them in the hands of charlatans who promise to bring salvation with technology when organizational solutions are needed. This also applies to innovation in the handling of information. Innovations come from outside the traditional industry. The industry sometimes takes innovations from next door here and there and incorporates them, but independent innovations have not been around for a few years. This also has a positive aspect that should not be hidden - the solutions are mature, run stably and do what they are supposed to do. But whether the latter is still sufficient in the digital transformation is more than questionable. The crisis in the industry also stems from the fact that it has been overtaken by new topics left and right.

Steffen Schaar: You focus very clearly on the benefits, and there we are again kindred spirits. That brings me to the next question: In 2014, surprisingly for many - not for me, by the way - you coined this phrase for the first time at the DMS Expo in Stuttgart: "The CIO is not the IT director. Recently, you read in ComputerWoche that the CIO had abolished himself. And then they replaced the I with a D. And I would like to know your opinion on this. Is the Chief Information Officer the information officer and not the IT manager? Do you still stand by that today, or what do you say to the letter D in between?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Dear Mr. Schaar, rather the other way around - unfortunately, many so-called CIOs in Germany are only IT managers who take care of IT, and not information management. For the past five years, I have been involved in organizing the IT & Information Management Strategy Summit, which specifically addresses chief information officers. There, we already confronted the participants with this question at the beginning, because many of them come from a technical environment and have now been given a "C" title simply because it is modern. From the work environment, they are IT people, but less architects, strategists or visionaries. When they hear the term architecture, these managers tend to think of system architecture rather than information architecture...

Steffen Schaar: ...not organizational architecture, not enterprise architecture...

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: ...from a business or strategic perspective, but they are actually busy keeping the existing IT running. This also affects the relationship with the so-called "business" - IT as a service provider or IT as a strategic partner of the business. The gap between business departments and IT is still there. The so-called Chief Information Officers have not succeeded in moving from the IT corner to the information corner. That's why the new role of Chief Digital Officer had to be invented, right?! The Chief Digital Officer has the task of driving the digitization process forward from a technical perspective. But there's a hitch there, too. First, you can't just replace the I with a D or split the I into technology and digitization. As a consultant, and the CIO or CDO should see himself as such, he must always be a few steps ahead of his customers, the business. Nevertheless, they must not lose their grip on the ground. New terms and trends are constantly driving companies forward - but also into madness. Take the German term Industrie 4.0, a hype topic where people tried to transfer the marketing success of 2.0 to Industrie 4.0. Emptiness in terms of content. Elsewhere, this is referred to as smart industry. This empty conceptual shell is filled with new content every year. In the reality of business, however, it has to be implemented in concrete terms. For example, the CDO is supposed to introduce Workplace 4.0, the workplace of the future, implement Industry 4.0 in the company and in the company's new products and services, and get the company's digital transformation off the ground. Traditional organizations are sheer overwhelmed. Hierarchical structures and decisions stand in the way of the necessary overarching processes and the overarching information. One hopes for the automatic development of all information as knowledge of the company. Everything should be available, but on the other hand, confidentiality and data protection should be maintained. This will not work overnight! First and foremost, digitization has to do with organization, processes and people, and not with the arbitrary use of supposedly modern technologies.

Steffen Schaar: Are we speaking too much technical jargon? Ask someone what Industry 4.0 means - 60% don't know. Do we need to rethink, more digital strategy instead of digital piecemeal?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Strategy is a necessity at the very beginning. This must be communicated to the users, without acronymology. With PROJECT CONSULT we speak since 1997 of information management as an umbrella term, because information management contains communication like the exchange and the use and development of information. Information management is characterized by human interaction and culture. The human being is the benchmark here and human behavior determines the solution approaches. Well-known here is, for example, the sender-receiver problem. With words and the underlying terms and concepts I try to convey something. The recipient, the listener, understands only part of it - or even nothing at all - if he does not know the terms and concepts. Silent mail and lack of understanding are the consequences. Communication and information management are, in this sense, also questions of understanding and culture. Incidentally, this is also an inherent problem with our acronyms and technical terms, but is generally true within any organization and human interaction. Corporate culture is often underestimated or not even considered in Digital Transformation. There is not yet a digital culture in companies because the digital world has not yet really arrived. We had already addressed this in the value of information - what is the value of information in the company, what does the company do with information, what is the value of information in relation to the values of the company. Banal things like "How should employees use information wisely?" There is no awareness of the fundamental problems in sight here, in fact, it's getting worse....

Steffen Schaar: ... because companies and their value creation have also changed rapidly. Industries are falling away, technology change and agility are "HighPerformers" and globalization is crying out for digitization, isn't it?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: A few more keywords. The changes are consequences of certain social conditions and of economic models. Both society and the economy are changing rapidly. For example, social consensus is threatened by globalization, by non-reflective consumers, by a purely take-it-or-leave-it mentality. This is particularly evident in the case of the Internet. The Internet is a basic need like electricity from a wall socket, must be accessible at all times and everywhere, and everything on the Internet must be free of charge. Our social system currently lacks the standards for dealing with globalization and the unlimited availability of information. In addition, there are justified and unjustified fears. In view of robotics, automation and artificial intelligence, the fear of losing one's job, one's paid work, one's livelihood is very real. In addition, the limits to growth are becoming visible, as are the differences between the super-rich and the poor. Digitization plays a special role here, because on the one hand it is a promise for the better, but on the other hand it drives intransparency, manipulation and dependence. Digitization and information are the decisive competitive factors for companies in the future. People have to subordinate themselves to this - many think. Twenty years ago, it was still necessary to argue with company managers that information is the fifth pillar of the company. Today, this is taken for granted and information is becoming more important to companies than the traditional product. Only the role of the employees and also the consumers is increasingly being neglected in this context.

Steffen Schaar: One of your last lectures was "ECM - what comes next...". Why don't you turn it around, take your cumulative experience, add your emotions and passion and speak freely from the heart without courting the DMS or ECM industry?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer (laughs): Wow - courting the ECM industry. Incidentally, we already established earlier that the DMS/ECM industry per se no longer exists. I think when I listen to the vendors like this, I'm the one who always acts as a pessimistic admonisher, always poking at the wounds. Lobbying for the suppliers, manufacturers and associations of this - no longer existing? - Industry, no, that is not my topic. However, I am part of this industry, or let's say scene today, and when the industry is doing well, there are many projects and much need for consulting. It's a matter of making the importance of the subject clear to decision-makers and future users together. In the interest of all. I am happy to make my experience available, if you think, also passionately, emotionally committed.

Steffen Schaar: I respect you for sticking it out.

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: There are providers who support this commitment, who also spend money on my giving talks, moderating discussions or writing white papers for them. Ultimately, events - such as this interview - provide me with a platform for presenting my ideas and assessments of future developments. This benefits both users and suppliers. And ultimately also my company as a service provider for the users.

Steffen Schaar: ... and of course it is also a personal recognition.

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Yes, this also reflects a certain recognition of my role. Even if you can't always fulfill it yourself to the extent you would like, e.g. a directorship with an international umbrella organization, managing a European association or an extraordinary professorship. Here, the economic capacity and relevance of a very small consultancy is very limited.

Steffen Schaar: Hand on heart, Mr. Kampffmeyer, how long will it be before digital piecemeal becomes strategy? Can we speed that up? Can you contribute something with visions? Or are we too far away? What will become of the strategic approaches, the visions?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: PROJECT CONSULT does not belong to the big strategic management consultancies which go in and out on the C-level, like the KPMGs, Bergers, E&Ys, BCGs etc.. We act rather in the middle building and on concrete projects related. Our influence on information management strategies is thus unfortunately very limited. Predefined goals do not always support more far-reaching visions. You can now say "whoever has a vision should go to the doctor" or "companies that don't have a vision won't be around much longer." This means that if there is no digital strategy from the top, then something larger, continuous, integrating can never emerge at the bottom in the projects. This is certainly your own experience with TQG when you're on the road as an integrator. An entry point for more comprehensive solutions is the combination of information governance and information management. Some people also refer to this as EIM Enterprise Information Management. When it comes to legal requirements, management has a hard time getting out of it. For example, electronic retention and archiving will always be an issue, an ongoing issue. It is considered a dusty topic, but it is always gaining in relevance, for example, when it comes to preserving the usability of information through migration or when new technological approaches are involved. So you can even get a blockchain solution with sensible archiving concepts from the last millennium.

Steffen Schaar: Now you've given me two nice keywords, blockchain and enterprise information management.

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: That was bound to happen (laughs).

Steffen Schaar: (grins)... it took us almost 1.5 hours to get here.

Steffen Schaar: But they garnished it with the topic of blockchain, wonderful. They also said, the topic EIM will not be dropped and it will be with us for a long time. I would add the platform topic to both of them, so we can really get out of the nitty gritty of IT. EIM, blockchain, platform - how do they see it?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: For me, EIM Enterprise Information Management was a bridge for the industry to bring the end users of enterprise content management to something more meaningful, to get away from the notion of content in ECM, the limitation to unstructured information - without giving up enterprise content management, which is still useful, valuable and good. That was my attempt to replace the "C" with the more inclusive "I." My view of EIM has not caught on in the marketplace. Even if companies like OpenText or the VOI talk about EIM Enterprise Information Management, my basic idea has been lost in the process. My basic principle is that ECM lives on functionally as a core component within EIM. This core is supplemented by further functions and by an environment, an ecosystem as the Americans say. Actually, however, we do not need the term enterprise at all. Enterprise can be interpreted very differently in German: for the company, in the company, of the company. The adoption of the term enterprise for information management was only an auxiliary construction. It refers to all information, whether it is located inside the company or outside in portals, social media, the public cloud or elsewhere. Maybe we should just talk about information management after all. Nevertheless, EIM Enterprise Information Management will also live on as a term for a while and perhaps also provide users with content orientation at some point. Second part of your question - Blockchain. Blockchain is a very interesting technology with a very high level of security against falsification. This meets the need for tamper-proofness and completeness in electronic archiving. However, one must urgently distinguish between the procedures of the Public Blockchain, as with Bitcoin and Ether, and such procedures that one uses in-house. Public Blockchain technology does not allow deletion within a chain. If a company wants to dispose of data according to retention periods or even the requirements of data protection, the DSGVO will soon apply, require deletion, then Public Blockchain is unsuitable. Seen in this light, Blockchain is once again a hype topic that is simply thrown into the debates by providers, the press and consultants. As a consultant, in many cases you have to bring users back down to earth here, because blockchain is not the universal solution for records management or archiving. However, you had thrown a third term at me....

Steffen Schaar: Platform

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: Platform, thank you. Platform was to be expected and is also being stressed a lot in the current discussion. In our thematic environment, for example, in the discussion about content services, which was brought up by the analysts Forrester and Gartner. Completely superfluous, because Content Services is only about functionality and technology. Here, Gartner combines Content Services with Platform. Content Services Platforms are the providers and solutions we used to know under ECM, infrastructure and services for systems. Gladly combined with other technological terms such as Cloud with SaaS, IT architecture and other modern hype terms, which every company must of course have immediately - according to the providers and the analysts. However, much of this is just repackaged, new terms, new acronyms. This is also where Digital Transformation will hit. What does the IT manager do when the company is in the cloud? What comes after the cloud - perhaps Douglas Adams' Computer Planet? And there will be life after the cloud, perhaps the information universe. Platform seems so banal here, you get off the platform onto the train and leave it behind. Enough. f we consider the information itself, then we have the chance to take the term platform out of the hype. If the provision and development of information is itself a platform, then the term takes on a different meaning. This is what the term information management is supposed to encompass, or, as far as I'm concerned, enterprise information management.

Steffen Schaar: We have developed the topic of EIM further and link it to the claim of a businessApp platform. Business needs digitization. App is a modern architecture for being mobile and agile. Platform stands for cross-departmental access to values, information and data for legal, compliance and audit security. Collaboration (processes) through quality-conscious communication in enterprise-wide organizational processes. Is this a further development of EIM ... a little bit...? (laughs)?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: business-app platform - also a nice buzzword, beyond my remarks, where information itself is the platform for action. That's where two hearts beat in my chest. It makes sense what they're doing when they're looking at end-to-end processes and business cases in business. Previous technologies around ECM such as archiving, DMS, ECM or EIM have always included an important aspect of these processes, namely information governance, the control and mastery of information. New silos, islands of information must be prevented. And that's where it's essential, especially for a new platform and BusinessApp approach, to get a grip on all information across the board. If I get stuck even organizationally with your new BusinessApps, if I don't achieve consistency, this leads to new islands. And in companies, we truly don't find a green field in terms of business processes. And this automatically brings us to the problem of how to deal with compliance, traceability and clarity of information. For your approach with BusinessApps, we need a completely different architecture, a completely different infrastructure and a completely different software landscape. With previous solutions, the large monoliths in the ERP environment, we address the problems of traditional companies. Even with your new approach, we are in danger of working around with small detailed solutions again. Especially if the company lacks the big vision for the digital future and the readiness for radical change. These fundamental problems have not changed in recent years and continue to be the biggest risks for traditional companies. Actually, all I have to do here is dig out my old lectures again maybe replace one or the other term, one or the other acronym. When you talk about platform, dear Mr. Schaar, then it must also be the one, continuous platform not only in the company itself but also in the corporate landscape with customers, suppliers, business partners and others. It is essential to seize the opportunities of digital transformation here.

Steffen Schaar: I like to look at your posted lectures on these topics - also your last one again with your examples, where you then show again how two people exchange with each other, excellent. You have to conclude again with your own personal opinion and stand by your conviction. That was an entertaining two hours. I say thank you very much! But before we say goodbye to you, we would like to ask you for a value slogan that you would like to pass on to our readers?

Dr. Ulrich Kampffmeyer: "Strategy before organization, organization and people before technology." There's nothing about digital in there, because we like to make the mistake of always thinking in only one dimension when it comes to digitization. The analog world lives on. As humans, we remain analog thinking, feeling beings. The completely "digitized" human being has so far only appeared in novels and films like the replicants from Blade Runner.

Steffen Schaar: Thank you very much. I am very pleased that you have opened up your wealth of experience to us, in the truest sense of the word. I am sure, according to your remarks, that the topic of EIM will continue to be discussed and developed controversially in this openness as a fixed component as a target orientation. "EIM lives and EIM will live for a long time" - you just said in one sentence. We are all challenged to recognize opportunities in it, to reflect on it again and again, to question it and, if necessary, to exchange the letters.