Criteria as a Prelude for Guiding Taxonomy Evaluation

Taxonomies are design science artifacts used by researchers and practitioners to describe and classify existing or future objects of a domain. As such, they constitute a necessary foundation for theory building. Yet despite the great interest in taxonomies, there is virtually no guidance on how to rigorously evaluate them. Based on a literature review and a sample of 446 articles, this study explores the criteria currently employed in taxonomy evaluations. Surprisingly, we find that only a minority of taxonomy building projects actually evaluate their taxonomies and that there is no consistency across the multiplicity of criteria used. Our study provides a structured overview of the taxonomy evaluation criteria used by IS researchers and proposes a set of potential guidelines to support future evaluations. The purposeful and rigorous taxonomy evaluation our study advances contributes to DSR by bridging the gap between generic evaluation criteria and concrete taxonomy evaluation criteria

How Software Promotes the Integration of Sustainability in Business Process Management

Business research and practice increasingly focus on integrating sustainability in organizations. To contribute to rising challenges related to the society and the environment, sustainability-driven concepts (e.g., environmental friendly)have to be implemented in the daily business routines, and thus, need to be considered during the design of business processes in any organization. In this study, we conceptualize the field of Green Business Process Management (BPM)and use the derived concepts to classify supporting modelling tools and concrete software features. While our study indicates a lack of realization of the ecological and social sustainability in particular and a gap in supporting users during the redesign phase, there are software features that can potentially serve as a starting point to further incorporate sustainability in the design, implementation, and controlling of business processes

Teaching Sustainable Business Models— A Modeling-Driven Approach

Purpose. This study reports on a master-level university course that teaches sustainability by conveying factual and methodological knowledge in terms of business model development. Design/methodology/approach. We designed the course based on several years of experience and knowledge obtained from previous iterations. For evaluating the course’s usefulness, we used standardized questionnaires and a focus group. Findings. We complement the body of courses on business models by presenting a master-leveled course design seeking to enhance students’ awareness for acting sustainably utilizing a business model development perspective, and a set of lessons learned and recommendations to be employed by, for example, course designers. Research limitations/implications. By focusing on business model development, we gathered promising results indicating an increased awareness to act sustainably. Thereby we open further research avenues that, for instance, may investigate the effect of specific tools on students’ awareness or behavior, explore the applicability of existing tools within a university context, or develop new tools for supporting students in gaining an understanding of sustainability via business model development. Practical implications. Course designers and lecturers in particular can apply the presented design and draw on the experiences and recommendations we obtained from performing our course to create or refine existing/new university courses. Originality/value. We provide valuable insight on how to design business model courses that empower students to contribute to sustainable development by describing a suitable structure, assignments, and content. Keywords. Business Model Development, Business Model Modeling, Software Support, Sustainability, Information Systems Education Article Classification. Case stud

Exploring Purposes of Using Taxonomies

Taxonomies are artifacts that can be used for numerous purposes, including gap spotting, decision-making, and theory building. Despite the variety of usage purposes, we can observe that designers state that their taxonomies help to ‘classify something’; leaving the full potential of taxonomies rather untapped. In order to lay attention on questions of for what taxonomies can be used, this short paper (1) raises awareness of the actual problem space and motivate the relevance of an overview of taxonomy use purposes, (2) outlines the overall project’s research design to identify and structure the set of use purposes, and (3) proposes preliminary purposes extracted from analyzing a corpus of articles that built upon—and use—previously published taxonomies. In doing this, we seek to complement available methodological guidance to make more informed decisions in terms of a taxonomy’s usage potential

Design Principles for Leveraging Sustainability in Business Modelling Tools

Sustainability has become increasingly important to business research and practice. Approaches that support fundamental changes in behaviour to act economically, ecologically and socially are required. Modelling and analysing business models can contribute to this, for example by generating new ideas and enabling innovation as well as improving and evaluating current businesses. Although, the interest in business model innovation is booming, and software tools for business model development hold great promise for supporting business model innovation, there is only limited support and guidance for a tool-support that enables a satisfactory consideration of sustainability. Furthermore, there is currently a lack of comprehensive knowledge concerning which features can contribute to this consideration, and how they can be implemented. In this article, we report on the results of design science research (DSR) study that develops a set of design principles for reflecting sustainability in business models, which are refined and evaluated in several cycles. Our findings can support practitioners in (re-)designing tools, selecting and innovating business models, and—for researchers—can serve as a step towards more advances theories regarding software tools for sustainability in business modelling as well as for creating new business model ideas

Software tools for supporting reflection in design thinking projects

In creative work such as design thinking projects, teams mostly seek to solve complex (wicked) problems as well as situations of uncertainty and value conflicts. To design solutions that cope with these aspects, teams usually start doing something, reflect on their results, and adjust their process. By actually doing something, tacit knowledge (i.e., knowing-in-action) of individuals is disclosed, which might be beneficial for an entire project team because it allows drawing on information and experiences that go beyond single individuals. Accordingly, the present study aims to investigate how tools can be designed that support collaborative reflection in creativity-driven projects. Drawing on reflection theory and several expert interviews, we derive design requirements as well as present a concrete software-based prototype as an expository instantiation

The Beauty of Messiness: A Flexible Tool for Design Principle Projects

Abstracting and formalizing knowledge collected throughout a design science research (DSR) project is important to inform the design of future artifacts. Design principles are one of the prevailing forms to capture design-relevant knowledge and guide both research and practice to build new artifacts. Although today’s DSR projects are often agile and creative, they require a minimum structure to ensure rigor. In this paper, we set out to master the tradeoff between creative messiness and fully standardized design endeavors by presenting a situational tool in the form of a card deck. We report on the building of a design tool and its demonstration via two illustrative examples. Overall, we complement the valuable body of DSR frameworks and introduce a flexible and configurable tool capable of taking into account specific project situations