BREAKING DOWN THE BLOCKCHAIN HYPE – TOWARDS A BLOCKCHAIN MARKET ENGINEERING APPROACH

The blockchain has reached the tip of a global hype across a variety of industries. The potential of this technology, inter alia building the fundament of Bitcoin, is assumed to be immense and disruptive – particularly for the financial industry. FinTech start-ups as well as established players however are just about to explore the true potential of blockchain technology as the fundament of (financial) markets. Before this backdrop, Information Systems research is making valuable contributions to the field by integrating the technical view on blockchain with interdisciplinary research approaches. Our contribution to the growing body of Information Systems literature in the context of the blockchain is twofold: First, we conduct a comprehensive literature review of the most relevant and recent IS research on blockchain. Second, based on the findings of our review, we build on existing research and propose a Blockchain Market Engineering Framework, which can support researchers as well as practitioners in analyzing and designing the elements of blockchain-based markets on an individual and global level. In addition, we go beyond a purely analytical perspective and provide a toolbox to support the active construction of blockchain-based ecosystems and infrastructures. In doing so we pave the way for future research that will help to break down the blockchain hype

A SURVEY OF FAILURES IN THE SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT PROCESS

Software development is one of the most important worldwide industries and continues to grow. To deal with this challenge, organizations are adopting ever more tools and methodologies. However, software development projects are still failing in meeting time, budget and functional requirements. This study provides insights on the failures faced by software development organizations regarding their processes, the reasons leading to these failures, and initiatives taken to cope with them. A research methodology was used to gather and compare results from a literature review and semi-structured interviews. We learnt that there are more failures in Management activities, although they were not often reported, while failures in Requirements Engineering and Software Testing are less in number but more frequently reported. Lack of communication, lack of time for improvements and appropriate testing, and poor requirements and functionalities specification were the mostly reported failures. Furthermore, we learnt that organizations are not implementing any initiative to address these failures, although they suggested solutions

A DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEM DESIGN TO OVERCOME RESISTANCE TOWARDS SUSTAINABLE INNOVATIONS

The concept of sustainability has been acknowledged as one of the central and most important issues of our time. However, technological innovations which provide a more sustainable way of living, for instance electric cars, are not always welcomed with open arms by consumers but often resisted at the beginning. As such, human resistance behavior can be explained as an interplay of different personality traits that favour the status quo. In this study, a decision support system design is introduced which bases on the concept of digital nudging that addresses innovation resistance on an individual’s cognitive level by de-biasing innovation trial decision-making. An experimental pre-study is conducted to test the influence of different DSS modifications on the selection of electric cars in an online rental car booking scenario. First results show that DSS which set sustainable innovations as default option have a significantly positive effect on their trial probability while priming consumers towards electric car trial has no significant effect

DETECTING PANIC POTENTIAL IN SOCIAL MEDIA TWEETS

A high degree of real-time interconnectedness can aid information transmission, particularly in disaster situations. However, it can have substantial negative consequences when information is emotionally laden and transmits these emotions, particularly the emotion of panic, to the individual across social media in an already grave situation. Prior research has shown that information laden with emotion spreads through social network faster than otherwise. Hence, we highlight the need to understand and curtail potentially panic-causing information, without compromising on good quality information from being available for effective crisis communication and management. With this research, we present the necessity of detecting the panic potential of social media messages, and aim to address two research questions: What are the features, and metrics necessary, to compute and evaluate the panic potential of a social media message (respectively)? Our planned analysis takes the case of the Munich shooting incident, 2016, based on user tweets immediately after the incident. Different features and evaluation metrics are proposed and discussed. The work aims to detect panic potential of messages in social media networks during disasters

HOW CAN SCRUM BE SUCCESFUL? COMPETENCES OF THE SCRUM PRODUCT OWNER

For decades a structured development process was followed when developing software. However, the suggested predictability of such an approach has long been proofed erroneous and in its place, more flexible methods have been suggested. Such agile methods are less structured and trust in the creativity of the development team in countering unpredicted events and realizing a solution. Currently one of the most popular agile methodologies is Scrum. There are only three roles in Scrum: the development team, the Scrum master and the product owner. As the product owner is responsible for maximizing the value of the product and the work of the development team, this role is key in the success of Scrum. However, the competences needed by the product owner are unclear. Based on this the research question underlying this study is: Which competences of the Scrum product owner are related to team effectiveness and stakeholder satisfaction? In order to answer this question empirical data was collected from 141 employees in organizations in the Netherlands. To analyse the data, we have conducted correlation analyses, t-tests and regression analyses. The most important findings are that the competences ‘Relationship management’ and ‘User support’ are the main predictor for both Team effectiveness as Stakeholder satisfaction

LEVERAGING TEXT MINING FOR THE DESIGN OF A LEGAL KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM

In today’s globalized world, companies are faced with numerous and continuously changing legal requirements. To ensure that these companies are compliant with legal regulations, law and consulting firms use open legal data published by governments worldwide. With this data pool growing rapidly, the complexity of legal research is strongly increasing. Despite this fact, only few research papers consider the application of information systems in the legal domain. Against this backdrop, we pro-pose a knowledge management (KM) system that aims at supporting legal research processes. To this end, we leverage the potentials of text mining techniques to extract valuable information from legal documents. This information is stored in a graph database, which enables us to capture the relation-ships between these documents and users of the system. These relationships and the information from the documents are then fed into a recommendation system which aims at facilitating knowledge transfer within companies. The prototypical implementation of the proposed KM system is based on 20,000 legal documents and is currently evaluated in cooperation with a Big 4 accounting company

A SOCIO-TECHNICAL APPROACH TO SUSTAINABILITY IN ORGANIZATIONS: AN EXPLORATORY STUDY

Research has shown that sustainability is a critical issue for organizations. There are many dimensions to this concept, notably economic, social and environmental sustainability. When considering development of Information Systems, it is necessary to take these factors into account. However, although developers wish to deliver a package of sustainable benefits, the values that these benefits represent to different stakeholder groups will vary. Approaches will be needed that can provide support to resolve divergent and conflicting requirements within a transformation process, and help to surface contextual understandings of sustainable performance. Poorly-designed systems lead to work activity that is less than optimal, and thus fails to achieve a level of excellence in performance that is a significant prerequisite for competitiveness and economic sustainability. This paper introduces an investigation into understanding of a socio-technical systems framework that could function as a trigger for sustainability development where a suitable agenda already exists within an organization. Preliminary results, and their limitations, are discussed and a tentative agenda for further research is presented

WORKLOAD PREDICTION MODEL OF A PRIMARY HEALTH CENTRE

Managing the growing demand for care due to long-term conditions (LTCs) is a big challenge for primary care providers across the globe. We argue that population-level care for LTC patients registered at a primary health centre (PHC) is possible through workload prediction using care plans. In this paper, we try to answer two research questions: i) How can the future demand for care of the patients with LTCs be predicted? and ii) How is the future demand for care affected by changes? We present a rule-based simulation model that, given the patient details, will predict the number of LTC patients who will be visiting the primary health centre for the next year. Knowing this workload would help the medical practice to meet the upcoming demand for care effectively. Our approach also allows simulation of the effects of changes to practice and resourcing to foresee how these changes may impact the practice. Following the design science research approach, our prediction results have been shared with an expert and the feedback guides us to refine our model