Background. Between 2005 and 2012, annual sales of E-bikes in Switzerland increased from 1,792 to 52,941. This continuous and rapid transition from human-powered bicycles to an electric bicycle technology may indicate the increasing demand for low-cost transportation technology in combination with a healthy lifestyle. Material and Methods. In the present study, from April 2012 to September 2013, we retrospectively analysed E-bike accidents treated in the Emergency Department of our hospital by focusing on the following parameters: age, gender, time, period, and cause of the accident, as well as injury and outcome. Results. Patients were predominantly male. The mean age of injured E-cyclists was 47.5 years. The main causes of injury were self-accident. Most injuries were to the head/neck. The mean ISS was 8.48. The outcome showed that 9 patients were treated as outpatients, 9 were inpatients, and 5 patients were kept in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU). Only six patients underwent surgery (S). Discussion. This is the first attempt to evaluate E-bike injuries in Switzerland in an acute hospital setting. Since there is increasing popular preference for E-bikes as means of transportation and injuries to the head or neck are prevalent among E-cyclists, the hazard should not to be underestimated.

This paper discusses whether method construction can serve as a core approach to organizational engineering. Based on a discussion of fundamental scientific positions in general and approaches to information systems research in particular, appropriate conceptualizations of 'method' and 'method construction' are presented. These conceptualizations are then discussed regarding their capability of supporting organizational engineering.

Enterprise architecture supports organizational engineering in many ways. Service orientation is regarded as dominant operations model for service providers-within and beyond IT. As a consequence, it is important to integrate service management and service orientation into enterprise architecture. This paper proposes an enterprise architecture extension that achieves such an integration. IT service management is defined according to ITIL. Based on the integration of service management into enterprise architecture, the integration of Service Oriented Architecture is discussed as a further extension. The research is based on the Business Engineering approach and the guidelines of Method Engineering.

It is shown how the distribution-free method of Mack (1993) can be extended in order to estimate the prediction error of the Chain Ladder method for a portfolio of several correlated run-off triangles.