After double master's degrees in computer science and business administration at the University of Hamburg, Germany, he received his doctorate in operations research there in 1980.

[1] From January 2000, he additionally became executive director of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology FIT in Sankt Augustin near Bonn, Germany.

With a budget of over €220 million and over 3,300 employees, Fraunhofer ICT Group is one of the largest applied research organizations in information and communication technology in Europe.

He served as a member of the coordination team of the "RWTH-2020 Future Initiative" at RWTH Aachen University, an excellence program of the German federal government, and as deputy coordinator of the DFG-funded Excellence Cluster on Ultra High-speed Mobile Information and Communication UMIC.

Jarke authored or edited over twenty books and more than 300 refereed publications,[1] was chief editor of the Elsevier journal "Information Systems" for ten years, and program chair of almost all leading international conferences in the database and information systems field.