IS Design Principles for Empowering Domain Experts in Innovation: Findings From Three Case Studies

Today a significant part of innovation activities in firms is carried out within innovation networks of cooperating enterprises. In such networks, one key challenge is to provide software that enables to systematically share and adaptively integrate knowledge between the partners’ domains of expertise. One potential answer is to apply application software that allows for end-user or domain expert configuration. We provide preliminary empiric evidence from a field test of an expert-configurable collaborative information system in three innovation networks. In a three-year qualitative study, we have identified challenges to software support originating from knowledge, methodical and relational diversity in the networks. We formulate design challenges and design principles relevant for developing and applying domain expert-configurable software. We provide insights into the significance of related user roles in cooperative innovation projects, and offer the role of ‘facilitators’ as mediating agents in application configuration

An Ontology-based Approach for Software Architecture Recommendations

The design and development of sustainable software systems require software architects to consider a variety of architectural solutions and their trade-offs. With the frequent introduction of new architectural methods and software solutions, as well as, due to time-to-market constraints faced by software architects, considering even a subset of alternative architectural solutions during the decision-making process is a challenge. In this paper, we propose a recommendation system that automatically annotates architectural elements in software architecture documents and then proposes a) alternative architectural solutions for the annotated elements and b) concrete software solutions to realize an architectural design decision. These annotations and recommendations are derived from the knowledge captured in a publicly available cross-domain ontology. The evaluation of the recommendation system indicates that our approach can effectively support software architects to consider alternative architectural solutions while making architectural design decisions