'License to VIT’ - A Design Taxonomy for Visual Inquiry Tools

Visual Inquiry Tools are valuable assets to work conjointly on an ill-structured or wicked problem and solve it creatively. With visual inquiry tools, designers can sketch the problem-space of an artifact-to-be-designed and generate solutions in a priori defined ontological elements. While there exists guidance in how visual inquiry tools should be designed content-wise, there is a lack of clarification on the design options available to design them. Subsequently, the paper proposes a taxonomy of visual inquiry tools outlining options for their design. We do this by incorporating a sample of 24 visual inquiry tools developed in the scientific literature corpus as well as 15 through empirical example

Analyzing and Evaluating today’s Power of Open Source: The Open Source Value Canvas

The drastically progressing digitalization of society and economy shines a new light on the open-source paradigm. Previously, open-source was merely a developer paradigm to share code openly and make it available to others. However, given the need for innovation and optimization, companies can leverage open-source components to use out of the box, build services on top, or replace commodifiable services. Subsequently, there is great potential to create new value in companies using open-source components. To assist companies and researchers in achieving this, the paper presents the Open Source Value Canvas for companies’ collaborative and interdisciplinary identification of open-source value. It particularly aims at analyzing and aligning the open-source potentials from the business and IT perspectives. We draw on rich insights from an ongoing research project providing tailored open-source components for the European logistics sector

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

Transformer(s) of the Logistics Industry - Enabling Logistics Companies to Excel with Digital Platforms

Platformization is a prevailing trend that changes industries at their core. The rise and dominance of platform-based companies require incumbent companies and start-ups to rethink how they approach that novel challenge and leverage its full potential. To successfully steer and initiate this digitally enabled industry transformation, even in traditional industries like logistics, the incumbent companies require IT and specific platform design support. However, designing a digital platform is a complex task riddled with design options, potential pitfalls, and complex underlying mechanisms. Consequently, research and practice require tools to leverage past design knowledge and generate digital platforms in a goal-oriented fashion. This paper addresses precisely that issue as we report on a design science research study that developed a visual inquiry tool for digital platform design. Ultimately, the visual inquiry tool provides researchers and practitioners with the means to develop digital platforms more efficiently and strategically

Data for Sustainable Development in Logistics and Supply Chains – A Systematic Literature Review

The pressure on companies to contribute to sustainable development has increased drastically due to new regulations and political and social demands. The logistics and supply chain industry is directly influenced by this pressure as it has a considerable impact on society, is accountable for a large amount of emissions, and is a major contributor to the economy. The amount of information available is multiplying, and data is an asset that has become the essence of this century’s economy. This study investigates the implications of data in sustainable development by identifying data objects and attributes for logistics in a systematic literature review. The findings highlight the importance of data to sustainable development, contributing to the UN SDGs, promoting informed decision-making, and focusing on operational optimization

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

Trust me, I’m an Intermediary! Exploring Data Intermediation Services

Data ecosystems receive considerable attention in academia and practice, as indicated by a steadily growing body of research and large-scale (industry-driven) research projects. They can leverage so-called data intermediaries, which are mediating parties that facilitate data sharing between a data provider and a data consumer. Research has uncovered many types of data intermediaries, such as data marketplaces or data trusts. However, what is missing is a ‘big picture’ of data intermediaries and the functions they fulfill. We tackle this issue by extracting data intermediation services decoupled from specific instances to give a comprehensive overview of how they work. To achieve this, we report on a systematic literature review, contributing data intermediation services