About

Roland M. Mueller designs information systems, and researches how to design them well. He has always worked at the boundaries: between data and design, theory and code, research and practice. He builds artefacts, from ontologies and language-model pipelines to decision support for critical infrastructure, and develops the design science methods to evaluate them: which claims about an artefact are valid, and what a contribution makes possible next. His focus is human-centred AI: systems that make their reasoning explicit, carry their uncertainty, and leave the decision with people. Methodologically, he combines design science, conceptual, quantitative and computational research; his contributions range from theories and methods to software and patented innovations.

Since 2010 he has been Professor of Information Systems, in particular Business Intelligence and Analytics, at the Berlin School of Economics and Law (HWR Berlin). Before that, four years as Assistant Professor at the University of Twente took him to the Netherlands. He still holds a visiting professorship there and speaks passable Dutch.

At HWR Berlin he designed the international Master’s programme Business Intelligence & Process Management, which he has directed since 2014 and which today attracts around 400 applicants from 49 countries for 24 places. He co-founded the Institute for Data-Driven Digital Transformation (D-CUBE) and contributes to academic self-governance as programme director, member of the faculty council and the examination board, and repeatedly as chair of appointment committees.

Research

Organisations increasingly base decisions on quantities that are never measured directly: employee strain, customer trust, the strength of evidence behind a causal claim, the state of a crisis. Such quantities are inferred from text, often by large language models, and the validity of these inferences is seldom established. Roland’s research develops methods that turn such inferences into measurements that are grounded in theory, validated and explicit about uncertainty. His work spans three connected lines: LLM-based measurement of latent constructs, knowledge and causal-claim extraction, and validity and uncertainty of data-science claims.

His record comprises 118 publications, including articles in MIS Quarterly and Information Systems Research. Validity in Design Science (MIS Quarterly, 2025) builds on a paper that received the Herbert A. Simon Award at DESRIST. He chairs the HICSS minitrack on Data-driven Organizations (2025–2027). He has served as Transparency Editor of MIS Quarterly and as associate editor for ICIS, ECIS and WI.

Roots

Roland studied economics with a focus on Information Systems at Freie Universität Berlin (diploma 1999, top 1% of the year) and completed his doctorate there in 2005 with summa cum laude, supervised by the statistician Hans-J. Lenz. His dissertation on electronic knowledge markets was nominated for the GI Dissertation Award. His early work on fuzzy equation systems, data quality and uncertainty still informs his research on computational measurement and valid inference today.

Practice

Alongside research and teaching, Roland advises start-ups as well as medium-sized and global companies such as SAP, Daimler, Siemens, Bundesdruckerei, BMW and Deutsche Bahn on data analytics and digital innovation. From 2010 to 2016 he was a Design Thinking coach at the HPI School of Design Thinking in Potsdam. He mentored the start-ups Distimo (acquired by App Annie) and Smart Pricer, and since 2026 he has been Scientific Advisor of PsyProxy, which derives interpretable psychological measurements from text.

Research and teaching stays have taken him to Victoria University of Wellington, the University of Colorado Boulder, the San Diego Supercomputer Center, the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, Baruch College (CUNY), TU Delft, the University of Curaçao and ZHAW, among others.

Full CV →