Designing the Digital Transformation

To remain competitive, SMEs rely on technologies that automate support for their operations. Although an increasing number of SMEs use ERP systems, one of the major challenges is the selection of a software that fully meets their business needs. ERP systems generally come as standardized software packages. They are designed to fit generic rather than enterprise-specific requirements. Thus, mutual alignments of business and IT are essential to ensure an implementation project’s success. However, many organizational change efforts involving the introduction of new technologies fail due to the workforce’s resistance towards changes in their workflows, business processes, and technology they use. These so-called technochange situations require appropriate solutions that are complete and implementable. Thus, changes to business and IT must be complementary and organization-enterprise system misfits must be minimized. Following the paradigm of design science research, this contribution addresses technochange in ERP projects by assessing the organization-enterprise system fit during ERP selection. Applying a process fit perspective, organizational process models can be compared to ERP reference models using measures of business process similarity. In an experiment, we illustrate how ERP systems can be distinguished and ranked by their process features, positively influencing organizational fit and the likelihood of an ERP project’s success.

To automatically analyze and compare elements of process models, investigating the natural language contained in the labels of the process models is inevitable. Therefore, the adaption of well-established techniques from the field of natural language processing to Business Process Management has recently experienced a growth. Our work contributes to the field of natural language processing in business process models by providing a word dependency-based technique for the extraction of business objects and activities from German labeled process models. Furthermore, we evaluate our approach by implementing it in the RefMod-Miner toolset and measuring the quality of the information extraction in business process models. In three different evaluation scenarios, we show the strengths of the dependency-based approach and give an outlook on how further research could benefit from the approach.

Domain-specific process modelling has gained increased attention, since traditional modelling languages struggle to meet the demands of highly specialized businesses. However, methodological support on the development of such domain-specific languages is still scarce, which hampers the specification of adequate modelling support. To this end, the paper applies a design-oriented research approach to create an integrated framework that facilitates the development of domain-specific process modeling languages. The framework is a result of 23 consolidated requirements from relevant literature and contains essential building blocks that need to be considered during the development process. It is demonstrated that the framework satisfies the identified requirements by structuring and systematizing the development of domain-specific languages, which increases language adequacy and quality.

The massive expansion of mobile technologies is leading to a digital revolution that is reshaping health education for improved population-level health outcomes. This study investigated the analysis and design of a mobile health (mHealth) intervention for community-wide education. Hence, we employed a design science approach capable of translating health and community activities into practical design guidelines for suitable interventions to improve knowledge and skills among working adults. An mHealth artifact was developed for a Coronary Heart Disease (CHD) prevention program on awareness, knowledge, stress and lifestyle management. The effectiveness of the artifact was demonstrated through a pilot randomized, controlled trial (RCT) with 80 participants as an imperative empirical evidence. The study, therefore, contributed to the cumulative theoretical development of HCI, mobile health, and public health education. Moreover, our findings provided a number of insights for academic bodies, health practitioners, and developers of mobile health in planning educational interventions for smartphone users.

Stroke is the second highest cause of death and disability worldwide. While rehabilitation programs are intended to support stroke survivors, and promote recovery after they leave the hospital, current rehabilitation programs typically provide only static written instructions and lack the ability to keep them engaged with the program. In this design science research paper, we present an mHealth artifact that builds on behavior change theory to increase stroke survivors’ engagement in rehabilitation programs. We employed a co-design methodology to identify design requirements for the stroke rehabilitation mHealth artifact, addressing stroke survivors’ needs and incorporating expertise of healthcare providers. Guided by these requirements, we developed design principles for the artifact pertaining to visual assets that are essential in immersing users in the design. We carried out a two-stage development process by having workshops and interviews with experts. Following this, a prototype was developed and evaluated in a series of workshops with multiple stakeholders.

Voicing one’s opinion, especially when it is not in conjunction with the opinion of the senior management, can be difficult in organizational contexts. Thus, platform facilitators in organizational participation processes might want to grant their users a way to communicate anonymously. However, this might have adverse effects, such as hoax and foul language. In this study, we describe the rigorous design process, evaluation and instantiation of an artifact that allows the postings of opinions and issues concerning the strategic and operational decisions in a public organization without revealing the identity of the author. Building on a thorough literature review and the involvement of key stakeholder groups allowed us to design and realize an artifact that mitigates the negative effects, while supporting reticent employees and those in fear of their superiors to speak their mind. We discuss both theoretical and practical implications.

Driving a car is a high cognitive-load task requiring full attention behind the wheel. Intelligent navigation, transportation, and in-vehicle interfaces have introduced a safer and less demanding driving experience. However, there is still a gap for the existing interaction systems to satisfy the requirements of actual user experience. Hand gesture as an interaction medium, is natural and less visually demanding while driving. This paper aims to conduct a user-study with 79 participants to validate mid-air gestures for 18 major in-vehicle secondary tasks. We have demonstrated a detailed analysis on 900 mid-air gestures investigating preferences of gestures for in-vehicle tasks, their physical affordance, and driving errors. The outcomes demonstrate that employment of mid-air gestures reduces driving errors by up to 50% compared to traditional air-conditioning control. Results can be used for the development of vision-based in-vehicle gestural interfaces.

The business model has become an increasingly important concept to facilitate competitive advantages. However, due to its complexity managers face difficulties to evaluate how changes in the business model affect its performance. Existing approaches fall short to facilitate sufficient understanding of the influencing factors that drive the business models behavior. Drawing from System Dynamics, we propose a multi-step evaluation method to effectively support decision making in the context of complexity. Thereby we focus on the integration of available knowledge and data to explicate and quantify the essential cause-effect relationships inside the business model. The artifact is evaluated through multiple use cases inside the BMW Group. It reveals that System Dynamics enhances business model understanding not only for the decision maker but also for the stakeholders which enhances subsequent implementation of business model changes.

The process of Datafication gives rise to ubiquitousness of data. Data-driven approaches may create meaningful insights from the vast volumes of data available to businesses. However, coping with the great volume and variety of data requires improved data analysis methods. Many such methods are dependent on a user’s subjective domain knowledge. This dependency leads to a barrier for the use of sophisticated statistical methods, because a user would have to invest a significant amount of labor into the customization of such methods in order to incorporate domain knowledge into them. We argue that machines may efficiently support researchers and analysts even with non-quantitative data once they are equipped with the ability to develop their own subjective domain knowledge in a way that the amount of manual customization is reduced. Our contribution is a design theory – called the Division-of-Labor Framework – for generating and using Experts that can develop domain knowledge.

The high uncertainty of creating business models demands entrepreneurs to re-evaluate and continuously adapt them. Therefore, incubators offer validation services. However, systematic, and scalable information systems to enable interaction with a crowd of potential customers, investors, or other stakeholders and entrepreneurs do not exist. Our aim is thus to develop tentative design principles for crowd-based business model validation (CBMV) systems. Such systems should support entrepreneurs to reduce the uncertainty about the validity of their business model. Thus, we apply a theory-driven design approach based on knowledge drawn from literature and complemented by empirical insights. For developing such information systems, we combine the concept of crowdsourcing with findings from research on decision support systems to propose theory-grounded design principles for a CBMV system. The identified design principles describe a potential solution to a problem that previous research proved as viable.

Extant research gives rise to the notion of business-model-based management that stresses the pivotal role of the business model concept in organizational management. This role entails a shift in research from predominantly examining business model representation to the use of the business model concept in the design of management methods. In designing respective management methods, managers need to not only account for the business model concept, but also consider the characteristics of the emerging business environments in which business models are devised. To this, our study guides the design of business-model-based management methods through exploiting service-dominant logic, a theoretical lens that conceptualizes the emerging business environment. By means of design science research, this study develops four design principles for business-model-based management methods namely, ecosystem-, technology-, mobilization-, and co-creation-oriented management. This study also articulates the principles’ rationale and implications and discusses their contribution in achieving business-model-based management.

As the design science research (DSR) paradigm has evolved, several frameworks and taxonomies have been proposed to aid researchers in understanding and applying DSR principles and practices to evaluate the knowledge produced. This paper attempts to integrate two such efforts, the evaluation methods taxonomy and the genres of inquiry framework, in an attempt to derive a more complete evaluation standard. The integration is based on various knowledge types, using mapping and merging techniques. Doing so results in three artifacts. The first is the integrated framework which refines the genres of inquiry framework with six recognized knowledge types (definitional, descriptive, prescriptive, explanatory, predictive, and explanatory and predictive). Evaluation criteria for each knowledge type emerge from the integration. The second contribution is a guidance scheme that helps in determining relevant evaluation criteria, based upon the type of DSR contribution and the role of the evaluator (DSR researcher, author, reader, or reviewer). Finally, the approach to the integration, including the integration algorithm, is adaptable to other contexts where criteria to evaluate different knowledge types need to be integrated.

Even though many types of Design Science Research (DSR) frameworks and methods exist, little effort has been made to examine and little attention has been paid to investigate objectives identification in DSR. We believe that it is worthwhile to draw attention to the role that DSR objectives play in building and evaluating designed artifacts. Thus, this study developed a framework to answer two research questions: (1) What kinds of objective dimensions can be identified and used for different information technology (IT) artifacts? (2) How can these objectives be linked to the process of building and evaluating IT artifacts? The framework was demonstrated and evaluated by a case study and expert interviews. Our aim was to assist current and future Design Science researchers in the information systems (IS) discipline in identifying research/project objectives.

Reading literature is important, but problematic. In Quora and other PhD forums, students moan about their frustrating reading and literature review experiences. Strategic reading might help. This term is coined to conceive of reading as a process of constructing meaning by interacting with text in a targeted way. The fact that strategic reading is purpose-driven suggests that the purpose might qualify the reading. If this purpose is Design Science Research (DSR), what would be the strategy for reading? Traditionally, students are encouraged to annotate while reading. Digital annotations are expected to be useful for supporting comprehension and interpretation. Our belief is that strategic reading can be more effective if annotation is conducted in direct relationship to a main DS activity: root-cause analysis (RCA). RCA can provide the questions whose answers should be sought in the literature. Unfortunately, this process is not supported by current tools. When reading papers, researchers might not be all aware of the issues being raised during RCA. And the other way around, when it comes to RCA, evidences found in the literature might not be promptly accessible. This paper reports on research to develop a technical solution to this problem: a plug-in for Google Chrome that provides seamless integration between the RCA platform (i.e. MindMeister) and the reading platforms (i.e. Mendeley). The aim: improving RCA awareness while reading so that annotations can be traced back to the RCA issues. First evaluations are positive as for improving reading focus and facilitating reference recoverability.

The identification of a problem, its causes and its consequences are integral parts of designing useful solutions in Design Science Research (DSR). Many problems addressed in DSR are of a socio-technical nature, and they are collaboratively solved in multidisciplinary teams. Accordingly, analysis techniques are needed which integrate diverse perspectives of problem analysis. Colored Cognitive Mapping for DSR (CCM4DSR) is such a technique. By applying CCM4DSR to an exemplary socio-technical problem, this paper reports on observed challenges and offers four extensions to CCM4DSR. These extensions provide guidance in adequately stating the problem, considering path dependencies, explicating different stakeholder perspectives, and integrating different perspectives through a comprehensive process.

Significant recent developments in the domain of big data analytics provide the basis for leveraging predictive procurement insights in the procurement process. Following the path of other business domains, B2B business networks now have the potential to fill the gap of providing sufficient data for predictive technologies to be applied to the procurement domain, opening the door for significant efficiency gains. Based on the conceptual framework of the procurement process the methodology of design science research is applied to analyze prototype dashboards that leverage available data from B2B business networks.

The purpose of this study was to develop a method to seek information for organization of civilian society to monitor public budgeting. To this end, a methodological approach based on Design Science Research through the building of artifacts was used, making theoretical and practical contributions to the field. The research question that guided the study was: how can a civil society organization monitor the achievement of public policy goals using information available on transparency websites? The objects of the study were the National Education Plan (NEP), which sets the goals for the development of education in Brazil, and the public budget of the federal government. By constructing the method, it was possible to deduce some aspects regarding the implications of transparency for the monitoring and projection of public policies. In the context in question, budget transparency was scarce on the websites. When monitoring is possible, society is interested in using budget transparency to project the enactment of a public policy rather than only monitor the past. A generalized method was proposed for monitoring public policies that enables this projection in the Brazilian context.

With the rise of digitalization and knowledge work, the relevance of e-collaboration in and among enterprises continues to increase. However, in the discrete manufacturing industry, whose product costing requires ample communication, coordination, and information exchange, we detected a particular lack of collaboration support in product costing. In response, we established the concept of Business Domain-Specific e-Collaboration, which focuses on integrating e-collaboration into the core process of product costing. In this paper, we present how we developed and evaluated that concept from the perspective of design science.

The telecommunications industry is currently going through a major transformation. In this context, the enhanced Telecom Operations Map (eTOM) is a domain-specific process reference model that is offered by the industry organization TM Forum. In practice, eTOM is well accepted and confirmed as de facto standard. It provides process definitions and process flows on different levels of detail. This article discusses the reference modeling of eTOM, i.e., the design, the resulting artifact, and its evaluation based on three project cases. The application of eTOM in three projects illustrates the design approach and concrete models on strategic and operational levels. The article follows the Design Science Research (DSR) paradigm. It contributes with concrete design artifacts to the transformational needs of the telecommunications industry and offers lessons-learned from a general DSR perspective.

The development of novel software applications on digital platforms differs from traditional software development and provides unique challenges to software development managers and teams. Platform-based applications must achieve application-platform match, application-market match, value propositions exceeding platform’s core value propositions, and novelty. These desired properties support a new vision of the software development team as entrepreneurs with a goal of developing novel applications on digital platforms. In this research study, we look for evidence on an open-source software development project – Apache Cordova – that development teams use effectual thinking. Over one thousand user stories are analyzed for the use of constructs from a proposed effectual software development research model. The findings provide an initial confirmation that effectual development methods hold promise for the definition of new process models that better support application development on digital platforms. We conclude with a discussion on the implications of our results, research contributions, and future directions.

Energy is a scarce commodity. Diffusion of responsibility, forgetfulness, lack of knowledge and motivation are reasons for families’ electricity waste. GreenCrowd is a smartphone application and IoT system to help families to decrease their electricity consumption. GreenCrowd incorporates educational, motivational and supportive features. The IoT device (smart LED lamp) reports previous consumption with a comparison to each family baseline. The smart LED lamp works as a notification tool that targets all house members. The current study presents preliminary results for electricity reduction during an intervention experiment. Also, it presents result about the effectiveness of the smart LED lamp as a notification tool.

The pervasive infiltration of digital technology into physical products fundamentally changes the requirements regarding the design of physical products and their potential for service innovation. To effectively leverage the generative capacity of digitized industrial products in future smart service offerings, proper design decisions must be made when designing today’s products. The purpose of this paper is to report on a 2.5-year action design research project with an industrial forklift manufacturer, a software company, and an IoT consultancy. I elicit meta-requirements of digitized products arising from the industrial service business and derive design principles for digitized industrial products. This work empowers researchers to better understand the importance of generative product design to enable opportunities to innovative services. For managers, this work provides a blueprint for the design of digitized industrial products and raises awareness for generative product design in the digital age.

Information systems (IS) education is concerned with design and management of information systems. To be prepared to work as an IS practitioner, there is a need for training in design issues during education. This paper investigates what a design science approach would imply for IS education. Such an IS education approach is elaborated and synthesized in eight principles: (1) Exploit resonance between IS research and IS development, (2) conduct theory-informed design-exercises, (3) conduct practice-inspired design-exercises, (4) alternate between the concrete and the abstract, (5) reflect based on experiences for own design-theoretical synthesis, (6) evaluate design processes and design products, (7) archive design reflections in a knowledge diary, (8) compile design artifacts into a portfolio. One key characteristic of design science (DS) is the integration of research and design. A DS approach to IS education means an integration of design and learning. This education approach is theoretically grounded in IS design science literature and also broader in literature of design inquiry (Dewey), experiential learning theory (Kolb) and education of the reflective practitioner (Schön).

In this paper, we problematize a relative absence of established ways to develop and communicate knowledge contributions (KC) from Design-oriented research (DOR) within information systems. This is problematic since it hinders the potential for knowledge accumulation within the field. Thus, for communicating KC, we propose a framework, dubbed PDSA (Prescriptive, Descriptive, Situated, and Abstract). To develop KC especially from empirical data, we suggest the use of qualitative process methods. The framework is illustrated by revisiting a published DOR study. Finally, we show how the PDSA framework serves as a template to establish firm KC in DOR. In addition, we explore contributions generated from empirical data and suggest possibilities to use qualitative process methods as means to increase transparency and rigor of KC development and communication.

Building on two previous papers that focused on the concept of Practitioner Design Science Research [1, 2], this paper: (i) presents the Practitioners Design Science Research (PDSR) Canvas, a visual guide for practitioners undertaking DSR, and (ii) utilises it as a lens to analyse the insights of 48 practitioners on their DSR journey. Data is primarily gathered from 48 practitioners, of which, 34 have completed a 12-month Design Science Research study, with the other 14 in the final stages of their journey. This unique practitioner perspective further develops the novel concept of PDSR which enables practitioners to engage with the academic community and not the other way around. Key findings show that practitioners have challenges with the practical (relevance) aspects of DSR as well as the research (rigour) aspects. Nonetheless, the analysis indicates that with a clear depiction of DSR, the gap between practice and research may not be as difficult to bridge as previously thought. However, this requires the IS community to rethink their definition of engaged scholarship from one that solely focuses on the academic as the researcher to one that also includes the practitioner.

Concentration on core competencies in logistics requires collaboration between logistics service providers in order to fulfill complex customer demands. The increasing demand for flexibility in logistics is facing the heterogeneity of the providers. This creates a challenging field for planning complex supply chains. Logistics integrators are meeting this challenge. One main issue is the retrieval of the services available in the logistics network and their combination for planning complex supply chains. The prototype presented in this paper supports the retrieval by providing a customizable domain-specific dimension concept for structuring services. With the help of the dimensions and a customizable domain-specific template scheme, a dynamic matrix is created in order to facilitate the retrieval of services matching the selected dimensions. After retrieval, the services can be combined on a canvas via drag and drop in order to plan complex services and simultaneously create both their BPMN diagram and corresponding XML file.

In today’s business environment, organizations are challenged with changing customer demands andQuery expectations, competitor pressures, regulatory environments, and increasingly sophisticated outside threats at a faster rate than in years past.

Learning and conducting Design Science Research (DSR) are complex undertakings, for which there is little assistance other than publications describing how to do them. They include many activities which must be mastered and coordinated, sometimes when doing them for the first time. This paper describes a new tool, DScaffolding, developed to support novice DSR researchers in learning DSR while conducting DSR research projects. DSR activities are supported within an existing mind-mapping tool (MindMeister), through the use of features such as (1) integrating MindMeister with literature management and annotation tools, (2) prompting for needed inputs, (3) tracking incomplete tasks, and (4) automatically piping information from one activity to another activity and ensuring consistency of information. An initial version of DScaffolding was evaluated formatively. The prototype is available as a plugin for Google Chrome at the Chrome’s Web Store.

In exploratory design science research, research questions emerge as the design process progresses. Researchers are faced with the complex task of reconstructing design rationale, i.e. retrospectively scrutinizing certain aspects of the design process. While such a task may be challenging due to social and technical complexities, we present a software prototype to support design process exploration. The software produces visualizations and facilitates exploration by scanning design process data from source code repositories and document collections. We tentatively assess the software by accounting for its use in two design science research projects. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

The representation and processing of semantic information can today be accomplished using a wide range of formalisms. Rule-based approaches are not only a well-known but also easy to use technique. Most approaches rely on a textual specification of rules that can be processed by an according rule engine. For simplifying the specification and understanding of rules by domain experts, we present a visual model editor for rules based on the W3C SWRL recommendation. The goal of this approach is to provide a means for a visual interaction with rule-based systems, while at the same time preserving full expressiveness. The visual language for SWRL rules has been implemented on the SeMFIS platform. In addition, serialization and de-serialization mechanisms have been added for OWLXML and SWRLXML formats. As there are currently no official conformance tests available for SWRL, the approach has been evaluated using W3C sample set for SWRL rules.

In order to generate valuable innovations, it is important to come up with potential beneficial ideas. A well-known method for collective idea generation is Brainstorming and with Electronic Brainstorming, individuals can virtually brainstorm. However, an effective Brainstorming facilitation always needs a moderator. In our research, we designed and implemented a virtual moderator that can automatically facilitate a Brainstorming session. We used various artificial intelligence functions, like natural language processing, machine learning and reasoning and created a comprehensive Intelligent Moderator (IMO) for virtual Brainstorming.

Many university students struggle with motivational problems, and gamification has the potential to address these problems. However, gamification is hardly used in education, because current approaches to gamification require instructors to engage in the time-consuming preparation of their course contents for use in quizzes, mini-games and the like. Drawing on research on limited attention and present bias, we propose a “lean” approach to gamification, which relies on gamifying learning activities (rather than learning contents) and increasing their salience. In this paper, we present the app StudyNow that implements such a lean gamification approach. With this app, we aim to enable more students and instructors to benefit from the advantages of gamification.

The FAZ.NET-Orakel is a crowd forecasting tool, made available to readers of the German-based Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. Its main component is a prediction market used for forecasting economic indices as well as current political events. A shortcoming of prediction markets is their inability to exchange qualitative information. Therefore, we elaborate the combination of prediction markets with the Real-time Delphi method. We argue that several synergy effects may be achieved by this approach: First, prediction markets can be used to select experts for the Delphi survey. Second, valuable information and debates, which may be of interest, can be collected qualitatively. Third, the gamified approach of the prediction markets can raise commitment to the survey.

As an infrastructure for economic systems, blockchain technology challenges the role of traditional intermediaries and enables the creation of novel market designs and value chains. We utilize this potential and design a decentralized market framework that allows users to trade complex financial assets, such as stocks, in an intermediary-free setup. Overall, our prototype implements the basic software structure of this market framework, illustrates the feasibility of decentralized market mechanisms, and highlights potential use cases as well as limitations.

Digital collaboration of individuals has increased in diverse areas such as gaming, learning and product innovation. Across scenarios, adequate intra- and interpersonal emotion management is increasingly acknowledged to be beneficial to cognitive and affective interaction outcomes. Unfortunately, individuals differ notably in their emotion management abilities. Additionally, many types of computer mediated collaboration lack the richness of affective cues traditionally found in face-to-face interaction. We envision psychophysiology-based emotion feedback as an automated tool to improve emotion management, and therefore group performance and satisfaction. The presented prototype presents a first iteration of this idea, centered around information on emotional arousal derived from peripheral nervous system measures.

The open source platform MobileCoach (mobile-coach.eu) has been used for various behavioral health interventions in the public health context. However, so far, MobileCoach is limited to text message-based interactions. That is, participants use error-prone and laborious text-input fields and have to bear the SMS costs. Moreover, MobileCoach does not provide a dedicated chat channel for individual requests beyond the processing capabilities of its chatbot. Intervention designers are also limited to text-based self-report data. In this paper, we thus present a mobile chat app with pre-defined answer options, a dedicated chat channel for patients and health professionals and sensor data integration for the MobileCoach platform. Results of a pretest (N = 11) and preliminary findings of a randomized controlled clinical trial (N = 14) with young patients, who participate in an intervention for the treatment of obesity, are promising with respect to the utility of the chat app.