Integrating the Personal IT Ecosystem in an Organizational Environment - A Design Science Project

The work force within companies is subject to constant changes. More dynamic working time models go along with greater social trends, such as the demographic change. While the generation of baby boomers has finally reached retirement age, the number of members of newer generations has been constantly increasing. Members of these new generations have grown up with modern technology and have made it an important part of their private, as well as professional life. Their technological requirements are significantly different from those of the generations before (Burke and Hiltbrand, 2011). Younger generations apply an extensive personal IT ecosystem, comprising a variety of personal systems (e.g., social networks, messaging services and apps) and devices (e.g., tablets, laptops and smart phones), to conduct their private as well as professional activities. Current research refers to this phenomenon as “the individuation of IT” (Baskerville, 2011). Many organizations however struggle to integrate these personal IT ecosystems into their enterprise system landscapes. The effects are manifold, but often negative. A poorly integrated personal IT ecosystem, for example, may lead to a decreased individual performance since the maintenance of several systems and devices is error-prone and leads to time consuming redundancies. In addition, also organizational performance suffers when important information is forgotten on personal devices and therefore never made available to other members of the organization. One negative example is organizational knowledge management (compare Alavi, 2011): on the one hand, knowledge-management is widely perceived as a possible solution to ease the effects of the demographic change by preventing the leak of expertise companies experience when older employees leave. On the other hand, current solutions seem ill prepared to integrate the personal IT ecosystem of especially younger employees into organizational knowledge-management, hindering a seamless flow of information back and forth (Hansen and von Oetinger, 2001). One obvious cause is the lack of a comprehensive understanding of the individual needs and preferences, e.g., tendency to hide information regarding the integration of the personal IT ecosystem into the enterprise system landscape. Furthermore, these individual needs and preferences must be aligned with organizational requirements, such as legal regulations or existing security policies. Further issues arise from the employed technology itself. The increasing diversity of available end-user devices and software services, but also increasing complex enterprise systems, asks for new approaches to establish an integrated IT landscape. The proposed research addresse

Assessing cloud development platforms - What Platform as a Service offers and what not

Cloud computing has rapidly become a computing paradigm of great interest to the research and practitioner community. In addition to the provisioning of cloud-based software services, a plethora of solutions for the development of these services in the cloud have emerged. Cloud-based development platforms, also known as Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) include a broad spectrum of elaborated application-level services. Architects and developers willing to exploit the advantages of this new technology for the software development process are confronted with a complex decision problem. Which PaaS characteristics are of specific importance for cloud-based development? What are major limitations negatively influencing the development process? In order to address these questions, we carried out a comprehensive case study. Nineteen developer groups comprising three master student developers each were asked to develop a cloud-based talent management software service. Each group was presented the same set of requirements, and randomly assigned one out of three pre-selected PaaS products. The groups were asked to record every development step during the four month project in a developer diary and also write a comprehensive project report. Within the developer diary as well as the final report particular topics had to be addressed, e.g. the time needed for the development of each requirement, helpful characteristics of the platform which supported efficient development of particular features, but also hindering characteristics or missing functionalities. The collected data was analyzed and a set of key characteristics for PaaS solutions was identified. Twelve functional and non-functional characteristics of PaaS solutions which were perceived as either helpful or hindering during the development project were extracted. For example, reusable platform objects were perceived as an important functional characteristic positively influencing the development process in the cloud. In contrast, limited DBMS functionalities were identified as a hindering characteristic by the developers. Our research is of specific relevance for practitioners dealing with development in the cloud; we provide guidelines for PaaS vendors and help architects and developers in the selection process for an appropriate PaaS solution

Design Science Research in Action - Anatomy of Success Critical Activities for Rigor and Relevance

Design Science Research (DSR) has reached a significant impact on scholar’s research work around the globe in the information systems domain. DSR is an important IS research paradigm for creating descriptive and prescriptive knowledge concerning the artificial construction of today’s reality in the interrelation between the social and the technological sub-system. Various prior research has decisively defined and structured DSR in order to derive rigorously relevant contributions in terms of frameworks and methodologies. This paper contributes to this discourse from a research in action point of view by investigating critical activities within the design science phases and when passing from one to the next DSR cycle. For that purpose we elaborate critical DSR activities and demonstrate their effective execution along four DSR in action examples to provide guidance and best practices for design science projects seeking for rigor and relevance

Conceptualizing Individualization in Information Systems – A Literature Review

Driven by advances in information and communication technology, end users nowadays operate extensive information systems to support all kinds of private and professional activities. Previous IS research has coined various terms to refer to this rather new phenomenon. Some scholars call it individualization in IS; others refer to it as consumerization of IT. While scholars still struggle to agree on a common conceptualization and terminology, it is clear that particular aspects of this new phenomenon have already been addressed by previous work on technology acceptance, satisfaction, or technology diffusion. However, these previous findings do not form a distinct and integrated body of knowledge because no one has yet associated them with the phenomenon of individualization. To address this gap, we suggest an integrated, yet generic, conceptualization of individualization in form of a meta-theory. Based on the key entities and relations of the meta-theory, we conduct a structured literature review to identify pre-existing IS contributions to the individualization phenomenon, which help explain the phenomenon of individualization in IS. Furthermore, we analyze the identified literature for gaps in understanding the phenomenon and outline future research opportunities

A design theory for individual information systems in a professional context

Computing for many individuals has evolved from the stand-alone personal computer of the early 80s to a network of multiple desktop and mobile devices in 2014. Together with the software applications that leverage these devices, individuals nowadays maintain vast ecosystems of many different hardware and software components. For a long time, such ecosystems were restricted by their capabilities in terms of computing powers, memory capacity and storage space. Not surprisingly, their main application laid in the private domain where they were used for less challenging computing tasks in the home environment. The most cutting-edge devices, on the other hand, were found in the professional domain where they supported complex professional tasks. Constant advances in computing power, memory capacity and storage capacity, however, have narrowed the performance gap between cheap consumer IT and expensive organizational IT. Not surprisingly, individuals recognized the increasing capabilities of their private ecosystems and started to use them together with organizational IT also for professional tasks. The resulting mix of private and professional hardware and software components has been coined individual IS (IIS) in previous research. So far, scholars are ambivalent whether the use of an IIS in the professional domain leads to actual benefits. Recent work lists several potential benefits, most importantly increased individual productivity because employees work with more familiar and more carefully selected devices. IIS, however, also show characteristics, which are considered inhibiting for productivity. First, IIS suffer from a high degree of heterogeneity because the ecosystem contains components, which were not designed or selected with respect to each other and are poorly integrated with organizational information systems. The software and hardware components of the IIS are also distributed over the professional and private domain, including locations such as the private home, car or company office. Former research in IS and computer science (CS) has made great progress to conceptualize and implement technical solutions which resolve the issues of heterogeneous and distributed systems. These approaches however share a common weakness: they usually focus on technical problems, such as integration, and fade out social factors, such as self-determination or skills and knowledge of a user. These social factors are however equally relevant, because they determine if a particular technical approach is feasible for a given context and also influence if the approach increases business relevant figures, such as individual productivity. The research objective of this thesis is to approach the problem of IIS in a professional context holistically. It strives to develop a technical solution, which (1) increases individual productivity in professional tasks by resolving the negative effects of a heterogeneous and distributed IIS, but also (2) accounts for the private origin, in particular the consequence that users select, maintain and control functionality and data available on the IIS autonomously. Following a Design Science approach to IS, this research develops a design theory as a blueprint for the creation of a particular class of artifacts. The design theory outlines an IT architecture of a software component, which is installed on the IIS. The component allows the deployment of additional functionality to support professional tasks. The design ensures a particular degree of integration between the deployed functionalities, pre-existing components of the IIS, and related organizational information systems involved in professional tasks. The proposed design eases potential ramifications of heterogeneity and distribution regarding individual productivity. In addition, the design accounts for the requirements and constraints resulting from the autonomy of the user. The design theory builds on prescriptive knowledge in form of selected design principles for IT architectures. The selection, adjustment and adoption of such knowledge is informed and justified by descriptive knowledge in the form of formal and mid-range theories from IS research. These theories establish the link to the social sub-system of the IIS, defined by idiosyncratic factors, task characteristics and context, and furthermore allow predictions about the impact of the design on individual productivity. The design theory is instantiated in the domain of insurance brokers, resulting in a platform-centric ecosystem of different mobile apps, which support insurance brokers in conducting their daily business. In order to verify whether the principles postulated by the design theory have the anticipated effects, the ecosystem is tested for its impact on productivity in a large-scale laboratory experiment. The results are then discussed in the light of the research objective, and finally generalized to establish transferability to other business domains

Teaching the Ttransformation from classical on-premise towards on-demand enterprise systems

Enterprise Systems, specifically integrated information systems such as Enterprise Resource Planning, are heavily used in practice. However, teaching concepts for these system areas haven’t been established and standardized yet. When it comes to the practical perspective of enterprise systems, there is a lack of adequate business scenarios and detailed use cases

Enabling End-user-driven Data Interoperability - A Design Science Research Project

Today, end-users have many opportunities to consume Internet-based services relevant for their private and professional life.However, the easy consumption of new services is not reflected on the data side. The availability of new services potentiallyincreases pre-existing data interoperability issues since the same data is scattered over even more locations. Looking at thesimple example of basic personal contact data, users need to manually re-enter again and again this data to be able to registerand consume services. The research described in this paper is the preliminary result of an ongoing design science researchproject addressing the topic of end-user-driven interoperability. We present a software artifact and the results of anexperiment evaluating contact data interoperability within multiple Internet-based services