Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

The voluntary use of private device by employees without formal approval of the IT department, commonly termed Shadow IT, is an increasingly widespread phenomenon. In this paper, we study the role of private smartphones (and related applications like WhatsApp) in knowledge-intensive practices in the manufacturing domain. With an in-depth case study based on data gained from observations and interviews, we are able to empirically illustrate why workers use their private smartphones (contrary to company guidelines) and how they find significant gains of productivity by using the ‘forbidden’ applications. Our study contributes to knowledge management research by showing how private IT use can change existing knowledge management practices. At the same time, we are able to give rich insights into the rise of Shadow IT in a manufacturing context which takes place in a self-organised way without knowledge of the management. This enables us to take a step towards a knowledge management strategy perspective on Shadow IT.

Storytelling is an important but often underestimated practice in software engineering. Whereas existing research widely regards storytelling as creating a common understanding between developers and users, we argue that storytelling and prototyping are intertwined practices for innovators to persuade decision makers. Based on a two-year qualitative case study in two innovating software firms, we identify and dialectically examine practices of storytelling and prototyping. Our study implies that storytelling and prototyping should be integrated together into software engineering methods.

Over the past years the widely spread use of enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems has significantly changed the way of working. The close correlation between task fulfillment and ERP use has an essential effect on the software users and their job satisfaction. To understand job satisfaction is an important success factor for all firms because it impacts the behavior of the employees. The job characteristics model (JCM) derived by Hackman and Oldham explains job satisfaction by looking at the characteristics of the tasks. Because of the significant impact of technologies, such as ERP systems, we argue that the model has to be extended towards a user-centered view and found technology characteristics explaining job satisfaction, too. We use a qualitative approach to define these unknown constructs and derived an extended model which has to be tested and verified by further research.

In numerous industries modern technologies more and more find its application. Multiple surveys about advisory servies in the financial sector came to the conclusion that various banking institutions are still using pen and paper during an advisory service. IT-supported artefacts furthermore can't find their application in financial advisory services. In previous works a fundamental acceptance of using IT-supported artefacts in financial advisory services could be recognized on the part of customer and advisor. In comparison to a conventional advisory service an additional benefit could be recognized. Based on the analysis of a previous prototype and particular conventional advice giving, as well as interviews with customers and advisors, requirements for an optimally designed prototype were generated. The main focus of the task was on the development of the prototype. The implemented prototype was then evaluated in a focus group. The feedback of the participants confirmed the improvement of the usability and labor practices of the advisors which was a consequence of conscious adjustments and newly developed features.

Advisory service encounters change their character from expertise provision to interactive problem solving, thus increasingly relying on mutual and intensive interaction between the advisor and the advisee: they turn into interactive advisory service encounters. Simultaneously, modern collaborative IT finds its way into service encounters as a method to engineer, enrich, and standardize them. An IT system equipped with interactive features may enhance the encounter’s interactivity, but it may also limit it by capturing participants’ attention. This study explores the influence of IT on the interactivity in advisory service encounters. It arrives at the conclusion that an extensive tuning in precedes a phase of enhanced interactivity in IT-supported advisory service encounters.

The fourth industrial revolution changes the employees’ skills requirements. Production employees need increased access to interdisciplinary instead of discipline-specific knowledge. Knowledge ac-quisition “in advance” must yield for “just in time” mobile learning arrangements. Such a learning arrangement was developed and evaluated for an industrial partner to support well qualified pro-duction employees to solve problems on machines and to improve their problem-solving skills in the long-term. Even though this couldn’t be demonstrated within a small experimental setup, the solution indicates high potential to create preconditions for learning for new employees, as it might lower inhibition thresholds for active experimentation.

We present a qualitative interview study of 39 participants who describe their current practices and concerns with shaping a digital legacy, especially when they are using cloud-based storage services that unify secure file storage and password management functionalities in one service (electronic data safes). After introducing the transactional model of stress and coping as an analytical lens, we report on the users’ coping strategies with respect to shaping and giving access to their digital legacy. Pre-mortem password sharing is identified as a common problem-focused coping strategy. Moreover, emotion-focused strategies of avoidance and ignorance are discussed. Challenges associated with passing on a digital legacy, such as the lack of enculturated practices, difficulties in the appraisal and selection of information items, the preference for deletion, and implicitly transferring data stewardship duties are described and discussed to develop design implications.

Bestrebungen im Bereich Industrie 4.0 verändern die Rolle des Menschen in der Produktion nachhaltig. Dadurch verändern sich auch die Anforderungen an die Kompetenzen bei den Mitarbeitern. An hand des konkreten Fallbeispiels eines Unternehmens im Wandel (Segment Automobilzulieferer), zeigen wir Probleme der Personalentwicklung auf und erstellen konkrete Zielvorgaben an das Kompetenzmanagement. Eine besondere Herausforderung stellt die Transformation von fachspezifischen hin zu fachübergreifenden Aufgabenfeldern dar, ohne dabei langfristig Expertenwissen zu verlieren. Als möglichen Lösungsweg schlagen wir mobile Lernarrangements vor, welche dieses Wissen kapseln und individuell, dezentral und bedarfsgerecht zur Weiterbildung anbieten. Neu erarbeitetes, situatives Wissen erweitert diese Lernumgebung dabei sukzessiv. Der Artikel konkretisiert die Anforderungen an den Kompetenzaufbau im „Industrie 4.0“-Umfeld und leistet auch einen Beitrag zur praktischen Umsetzung.

The popularity of design thinking as an innovation paradigm grows continuously. More and more schools and firms implement innovation processes inspired by design thinking, but they lack easy and nonintrusive methods for monitoring the progress of teams following those processes. Consequently, interventions from coaches, teachers, or supervisors tend to rely on intuition or require intensive and intrusive examination of team dynamics. This study uses by-products from the design process and proposes automated assessment of lexical diversity as a monitoring method in process-driven design thinking projects. Thereby, it contributes to the research on the relation between text production and creativity in design projects. To the practical end, it suggests how digitalized by-products of design activities such as notes and documentation, can be leveraged to support the teams as well as coaches, teachers, and supervisors.

Ongoing digital transformation in organizations results in steadily growing tech-nostress for employees. Studies which investigate such phenomena focus primar-ily on surveys. This thesis promotes an additional perspective and examines to which extent measures of electrodermal activity ñ a well-established parameter within the field of stress research - can be used to explain perceived technostress. Therefore, a practical experiment was conducted and stress-data obtained via survey on one hand, and on the other hand via measurement of the electrodermal activity. Results show no significant correlation between the two measurers. This findings are discussed within the context of related research and engage to look at psychological and physiological measures not in terms of alternatives, but ra-ther as complements.

Client data is key to provide personalized services and products. Therefore, banks go through great efforts to profile their clients during financial advisory service encounters. Since traditional pen-and-paper profiling does not satisfy the banks’ needs, they strive to digitalize this activity. This paper offers joint profiling as a solution: The advisor and the client jointly create a client’s profile using a shared display. However, test clients provided a mixed response to a first joint profiling prototype. They wondered, why the bank needs all this information. In a second iteration, joint profiling was augmented by task awareness, i.e., linking all profiled information to the client's goal. This task aware joint profiling was far better accepted by the clients. This paper offers research insights on the role of profiling in face-to-face advisory service encounters, on its acceptance by the clients, and on design principles for digital profiling in financial service encounters.

The project “Crime Prevention Advisory Service” supports safety advisors from police departments in Switzerland and Germany with a tablet app. During the consultation the clients’ needs play an important role. Safety advisors use various techniques to elicit those needs. This paper examines what techniques the safety advisors use and how they apply them. Furthermore, the needs elicitation aspect of the app has been investigated. For this purpose interviews with police officers and log-files from the app were analyzed. The initial design with six different need category choices showed potential for improvement. Based on the criticism according to which two or three choices should be enough, a new proposal to improve the tablet app is given.

In this paper, an image analysis on artefacts from home security advisory sessions with tablets (SmartProtector) is conducted. The focus of the analysis being what kind of practices emerged for dealing with the tension between problem and solution while annotating photographs. Generally, the annotations are rather simple and the majority of them depicts problems, which is easier to illustrate. The author identifies color and shape of annotations as crucial parts in recognizing, whether a practice focused on showing problems, or one focused on showing solutions is used. Using these findings, some adjustments for the SmartProtectors are proposed.

Persuasion is a powerful tool. It can change the personal attitudes, intentions and behavior of people (Fogg 2002; Verbeek 2009). As a matter of fact, persuasion is so important to advice-giving that researchers who examine advice-giving list it as a key competence of advisors (Handler 2007). The importance of persuasion is additionally emphasized by the communication sciences, whereby they recommend training advisors to become persuasive conversation partners (Ross 1986). The reason for this is that advisees accept and implement the advice of advisors only when they are persuaded, regardless of whether or not the advice would be helpful to them in the future (Soll und Mannes 2011; Tzioti 2010). However, advisors are rarely trained in the ability to argue persuasively. In most cases, advice-giving jobs are occupied by people who have gained a good reputation through their expertise, but who cannot necessarily pass on this knowledge. In such circumstances, it is often the case that advisees overestimate their own judgment and discount the advice of advisors. The advice literature defines this deviating attitude of advisees as "advice discounting" (Tzioti 2010). Moreover, if the advisory service encounters take place on-site at advisees’ known locations and run in a mobile environment because of distributed locations, then the obstructive effect of "advice discounting" is intensified. This is because, in a familiar environment, advisees are more confident than the advisors, which in turn reinforces their ego and thus their own overestimations. On the other hand, advisors are restricted in a mobile environment when using tools. They are often left with only their communication skills as means of persuasion. This dissertation proposes a new, design-oriented approach to increase the persuasiveness of advisors in mobile advice-giving situations. This new approach is based primarily on the ideas and concepts of persuasive technology and the behavioral model of Fogg (2009), which is widely accepted in the field. Information technology serves here as a support to persuade people, without pressure, to accept given advice (Fogg 2002). The advisors are supported with the help of a newly developed mobile, persuasive-support-system, which empowers and motivates the advisees to implement the given advice. Persuasion support is achieved by more transparent information and processes, optimized data processing, as well as an emotional influence on advisees. These support approaches were derived either from the literature or field analysis. They were transferred into design principles, which in turn formed the basic framework for a new mobile persuasive-support-system. The system itself has been developed and iteratively improved within several design science studies. The studies therefore followed a rigorous approach, inspired by the design science research framework (Hevner et al. 2004). By means of several evaluations in the application domain of home security advice-giving, this dissertation shows that advisors in home security advice-giving can significantly increase their persuasiveness when supported by the newly developed mobile persuasive-support-system. The feedback of the advisees who participated in evaluation tests confirm that the advisors were more persuasive, and that the digitally generated advisory report was better in quality and more useful in the subsequent implementation than conventional advice-giving. This dissertation contributes to the existing knowledge base of persuasive technology and advisory research through the demonstrated use of a persuasive-support-system for mobile advice-giving and a nascent design theory. In addition, the work is helpful for the practice of advice-giving, by providing insights to design mobile advisory services.

Fostering innovation is essential to thrive and survive in the software industry. While the existing scientific literature widely assumes that companies can foster innovation by means of a centrally planned, top-down specified innovation process, little is known about the actual practices of innovative employees. This dissertation offers a distinct, practice-based perspective on digital innovation that emphasizes its bottom-up emerging character. Understanding digital innovation as a practice implies a paradigm shift from managing and controlling innovation processes to enabling and facilitating employee-driven innovation practices. The practice-based perspective is grounded in empirical insights from an in-depth qualitative case study at two software companies. By analyzing the important role of artifacts and social interaction in parallel, this dissertation contributes to a better understanding of digital innovation practices. Moreover, it presents tools to enable digital innovation practices by providing starting points to support employee-driven innovation with information systems.

Paper is a persistent element of financial advisory encounters, despite the increasing digitisation of the financial industry. We seek to understand the reasons behind the resilience of paper-based encounters and advisors’ resistance to change by understanding the paper’s roles in financial advisory encounters. While applying multimodal analysis to a set of field and experimental data, we point to a range of prevalent advisory practices that rely on the use of paper documents and hand-written notes. We focus on the choreography of paper and how this intersects with the participants’ institutional identities and goals. Specifically, we show how advisors’ paper-oriented actions seek to convey a positive impression about the advisor and about the bank to the client, i.e. how they engage in seemingly mundane practices to impress their clients. Paper is far more than a medium for saving and presenting information: it is an interaction resource, a semiotic resource and an institutional resource; all these aspects of paper come into play during a financial advisory encounter. The manuscript concludes with suggestions on the design of technologies that may potentially replace the paper in financial advisory encounters and assesses the likelihood of this in light of the results.

The concept of value co-creation and the service encounter as locus of this value co-creation gained much academic interest, notably in marketing research and service sciences. While the current research discourse mainly follows conceptual perspectives, there has been little research on the practical implications on service agents' enabling co-creation of value in the information technology (IT)-supported service encounters with clients. In this paper, we seek to bridge this gap and first use the example of IT-supported citizen advisory services to show the fundamental deficiencies in current service agents regarding the implementation of value co-creation work practices. We introduce the concept of service encounter thinklets, adapted from collaboration engineering, to overcome these deficiencies and to empower service agents to put value co-creation into practice. We show how service encounter thinklets can complement existing advisory support measures to enable service agents to transform the IT-supported customer service encounter into a collaborative work environment, bringing together themselves, customers and supporting information systems to co-create the advisory's value. A test with employees in a public administration's front office has provided first evidence that service encounter thinklets can effectively empower service agents on the job to adapt their work practices and to bring value co-creation into practice.

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In private households, once received paper-based documents are increasingly substituted by electronic documents. In order to “get organized”, an individual nowadays needs to oversee a plethora of digital and physical information items stored at various locations. As a technological solution, cloud-based storage services such as an Electronic Data Safe (EDS) emerge as a home for all digital valuables. In this paper, we analyze how such an EDS fits into an individual’s information ecology by drawing upon the results of a qualitative interview study with 39 users of three different EDS services. We develop a typology of the content that is kept safe in an EDS, reflect upon the motivations and upon an EDS’s role with respect to other cloud-based storage services individuals are using. The challenges of maintaining a digital, personal archive are depicted and “data value zones” are introduced as a sensitizing concept to reflect upon problematic areas.