Testing Technical Feasibility in CPS Development Projects

Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) are service systems that connect a product’s physical and computational elements through telecommunication networks. Typically, the processes in CPSs are executed on this physical and computational infrastructure. As the developing of new CPS is costly, testing and validating a CPS’s design at an early stage of development is desirable to avoid bad investments. The high development and potentially high hardware costs, however, make it difficult to create a full CPS prototype only for testing. This work uses Trkman’s critical success factors of business process management (BPM) as a theoretical lens and identifies “technical-feasibility fit” as an additional complementary success factor. Based on these factors, we develop a method for creating CPS testbeds that allow testing of CPSs at lower costs at an early stage of the development. We demonstrate the method’s application by a case in which we develop a testbed for an electric vehicle charging service

One Plug at a Time - Designing a Peer-to-Peer Sharing Service for Charging Electric Vehicles

The widespread diffusion of electric vehicles (EVs) suffers from the lack of a well-developed public charging infrastructure, which currently is une-conomical to develop for investors. Many owners of EVs have private charging stations at their premises, which yield unlockable potential due to high idling times. In line with sharing platforms for other goods like accommodations and cars, we present the design, prototypical implementation, and evaluation setting of CrowdStrom, a peer-to-peer sharing service for charging EVs that networks individuals, their charging stations, and charging service customers

Reasons for Failures of Sharing Economy Businesses

The rapid growth of successful sharing economy businesses like Airbnb and Uber poses a threat to traditional value chains. However, many lesser-known sharing platforms have faced serious setbacks and ceased to operate. We have compiled a profile of failed sharing businesses so that others can learn from their mistakes. Our research identified seven common reasons for the failures and four significant differences between failed and successful sharing businesses. Our findings will help managers of aspiring sharing businesses to mitigate the risks of entering the sharing market.Click here for free presentation slides (pdf

A Method for Measuring User Preferences in Information Systems Design Choices

Information System Design (ISD) applies information technology to achieve desired ends in organizations and implies many technology choices to be made. A successful design of information systems addresses the different views of all its stakeholders in these decisions. If we consider that sub-part of an IS that is intended to assist in customer processes, a purposeful assessment of the preferences of this anonymous mass is needed. Methods of Human-Centered ISD are not sufficient in that case for that they require too close integration of the subjects; and state of the art preference measurement techniques are likely to be too time-consuming and cognitively challenging if the number of alternatives is large. Building on the Q-Methodology, originally developed to reveal subjectivity in psychology, we suggest a novel method for user preference measurement. We report on a case in which we failed by applying standard techniques for user measurement, but succeeded with Q-Sort. By means of an experiment we subsequently compare the mentioned methods and identify root causes for failure and success we experienced in the case, which for Q-Sort include short execution time, measuring many design choices at one time, satisfaction of the interviewees, and an effective IT support

New Service Development Through Action Design Research in Joint Research Projects

Information systems research on smart services receives numerous contributions that result from joint research projects. Such projects bring together researchers from academia and industry; both conducting applied research while developing marketable services. This paper contributes a conceptual meta- framework, which represents and describes joint research projects in service research based on the integration of previous conceptualizations. It combines the service marketing perspective of new service development (NSD) with the industry-academic collaboration perspective of action design research (ADR). The framework provides the entire IS community with a better understanding how joint research projects are conducted. Researchers that work in such projects can adopt the framework concepts and organize their projects accordingly. To demonstrate the framework’s application, we use the case of the development of a smart service in electric vehicle domain