How do Practitioners Understand External Platforms and Services? A Grounded Theory Investigation

In this article, we investigate how practitioners understand external platforms, whose core offering is shared and utilized by a number of heterogeneous and interconnected organizations in an ecosystem. We especially look into situations where organizations wish to extend their own capability instead of building services that extend the functionality of the platform. Such dependencies to external platforms can be envisioned as the contemporary evolution from traditional outsourcing service models. We interviewed twenty-four practitioners from eight IT organizations and discovered a considerable ambiguity in understanding of what are the external platforms utilized by the organizations. We further elaborate that the diversified meanings that various stakeholders give to the concept of external platforms, can hinder efficient communication and may have implications on important strategic decision making

Love and Hate Relationships in a Platform Ecosystem: A case of Finnish Electronic Identity Management

There has been a substantial interest among scholars in digital platforms and their governance. This paper proposes a different perspective on the phenomenon, by providing observations on non-focal firms’ dependencies to external platforms. Using the case study results of Finnish firms’ utilization of a monopolistic BankID authentication platform, we describe the platform ecosystem and its transformation on organizational and technology aspects. We show how legislation can transform the roles and relations between ecosystem participants and lead to the long-time dominant legacy platform weakening. Our study extends existing research on platforms and contributes new knowledge about the enforced adoption of the platform by heterogeneous organizations. These findings have important managerial implications, as they inform how non-focal firms can understand the use of existing and coming digital platforms

How do software development teams manage technical debt? – An empirical study

Technical debt (TD) is a metaphor for taking shortcuts or workarounds in technical decisions to gain short-term benefit in time-to-market and earlier software release. In this study, one large software development organization is investigated to gather empirical evidence related to the concept of technical debt management (TDM). We used the exploratory case study method to collect and analyze empirical data in the case organization by interviewing a total of 25 persons in eight software development teams. We were able to identify teams where the current strategy for TDM was only to fix TD when necessary, when it started to cause too much trouble for development. We also identified teams where the management had a systematic strategy to identify, measure and monitor TD during the development process. It seems that TDM can be associated with a similar maturity concept as software development in general. Development teams may raise their maturity by increasing their awareness and applying more advanced processes, techniques and tools in TDM. TDM is an essential part of sustainable software development, and companies have to find right approaches to deal with TD to produce healthy software that can be developed and maintained in the future.Peer reviewe

From platform dominance to weakened ownership

Background: There is substantial interest among scholars in digital platforms and the ecosystems around them. Digital platforms are open, continuously evolving, sociotechnical structures that can be sensitive to various changes. Aim: We take one-step further and investigate the post-dominance phase of platforms. The electronic identification (eID) ecosystem in Finland provides a good example of ecosystem transformation due to external changes from EU and national regulation. Method: We engage in an extensive case study of a nation-wide monopolistic eID platform. We first take a retrospective view to understand the historical context and then examine in detail how an external driver leads to changes in the ecosystem. Results: We explicate the platform evolution process, from a phase of dominance with centralized control structures to a more federated governance approach. We find that the introduction of intermediaries between the platform and its users contributes to a weakening of the dominant platform owners. Conclusion: This finding that platforms can transform into industry infrastructures has an important implication for our understanding of the dynamics underlying digital platforms.Peer reviewe

Towards stakeholder governance on large e-government platforms:a case of Suomi.fi

Abstract E-government evolves towards large-scale software platforms that integrate access to and information exchange among public services. Governance of large-scale e-government platforms is challenging because of the large number of stakeholders with diverging needs, agendas, and changing service portfolios. This paper presents a revelatory case, the e-government platform Suomi.fi, its stakeholders and stakeholder interactions related to development and governance of the platform. Our stakeholder analysis of Suomi.fi identified 15 stakeholder interaction types and related issues regarded as important for governance of large-scale e-government platforms. The results contribute by addressing the importance of stakeholder identification and continuing governance beyond individual development and implementation projects. Such a large-scale platform involved additional stakeholder types of external influencers (including media, other countries, the European Union, third party software integrators) and other external platforms, compared to the project-centric stakeholder models. Hence, we argue for extended stakeholder governance models and practices for large-scale e-government platforms

Where Is Current Research on Blockchain Technology? - A Systematic Review

Blockchain is a decentralized transaction and data management technology developed first for Bitcoin cryptocurrency. The interest in Blockchain technology has been increasing since the idea was coined in 2008. The reason for the interest in Blockchain is its central attributes that provide security, anonymity and data integrity without any third party organization in control of the transactions, and therefore it creates interesting research areas, especially from the perspective of technical challenges and limitations. In this research, we have conducted a systematic mapping study with the goal of collecting all relevant research on Blockchain technology. Our objective is to understand the current research topics, challenges and future directions regarding Blockchain technology from the technical perspective. We have extracted 41 primary papers from scientific databases. The results show that focus in over 80% of the papers is on Bitcoin system and less than 20% deals with other Blockchain applications including e.g. smart contracts and licensing. The majority of research is focusing on revealing and improving limitations of Blockchain from privacy and security perspectives, but many of the proposed solutions lack concrete evaluation on their effectiveness. Many other Blockchain scalability related challenges including throughput and latency have been left unstudied. On the basis of this study, recommendations on future research directions are provided for researchers.Peer reviewe

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