Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

Today’s government front offices mainly provide transaction-oriented processing services. However, in recent years citizens’ expectations have raised and are demanding more citizen-centric and individually tailored services including advisory services. Yet, front office employees, with having barely any additional training, have difficulty meeting these expanded expectations. In consequence, they frequently lack subject matter expertise as well as the necessary skills to meet the service demands. In addition, the organizational work environment, lacking necessary supportive resources, contributes strongly to the identified qualification deficiencies. This dissertation addresses the shortcomings of previous approaches from research and practice for qualifying advisory service personnel. In response, a novel approach for IS-based on-the-job qualification is introduced in order to answer the main research question, how government front office employees can be empowered to provide superior advisory service with the help of IS artifacts. In four consecutive research essays, the dissertation provides comprehensive answer to the main research question. It introduces the concept of an advisory information artifact that, when deployed in front office employees’ work environment, can effectively promote experiential learning on-the-job and ultimately empower service personnel comprehensively to act as skilled advisors. While essay I reviews previous design-oriented IS research and stresses current research approaches’ shortcomings, essay II and III introduces two essential components of an advisory information artifact, making it an effective on-the-job qualification measure: counseling affordances and service encounter thinkLets. Our research shows that providing counseling affordances can effectively promote experiential learning on-the-job and ultimately support front office employees in providing superior advisory service. Furthermore service encounter thinkLets revealed most effective to complement counseling affordances’ on-the-job support and together provide service personnel with a scaffold that enables less-trained front office employees almost immediately to act as skilled advisors and to make the advisory service an individualized co-creation experiences. Finally, our research in essay IV revealed that deploying an advisory information artifact in citizen advisory service encounters allowed, first, for comprehensively empower public employees to act as skilled advisor. Second, our research showed how IS artifacts could be designed and deployed to effectively promote transformational changes in governmental service provision, bringing front offices from providing transaction-oriented processing services to offer true citizen-centric advisory services.

Data of the 105 consultations from the pilot-project criminal-prevention in Canton Zurich has been evaluated by calculating the frequency using the statistics- and analysis-software SPSS. The sequence of the problems at the on-site inspections has been categorized and the relations between these categories and the time and place characteristics have been analyzed. In order to improve the pilot-project, a proposal for optimization has been made based on the results. One essential recommendation is focusing on improving the consistency and the completeness of the data. Moreover a closer guidance through the application can also be beneficial. With the introduction of further characteristics it would be possible to make a cluster analysis and get more differentiated results.

Companies are increasingly adopting social software to support collaboration and networking. Although increasing their employees’ connectedness is a major driver for organizations to deploy enterprise social software (ESS), the social connectedness concept itself is still not sufficiently defined and conceptualized. The study therefore provides a richer perspective on social connectedness’s role in an ESS context. The authors thus investigate (1) social connectedness’s antecedents and (2) its impact on employees’ individual performance. With a survey-based investigation among 174 employees of an international business software provider headquartered in Germany, the authors show that both reputation and a critical mass significantly influence employees’ social connectedness. The authors further find that reputation’s effect is significantly stronger than critical mass’s effect and that social connectedness influences employees’ individual performance positively. The findings are discussed in the light of psychological studies and deduce implications for theory and practice.

In cooperation with a major Swiss bank, the Department of Informatics of the University of Zurich has developed an advisory prototype in the form of a multi-touch system. This system has been documented and empirically tested during 96 advisory service encounters using traditional and IT-supported criteria (48 each). These advisory service encounters were previously analysed and evaluated in multiple ways. A further area of analysis which has yet to be researched is the comparison of content analysis between traditional and IT-supported data collected. The goal of this bachelor thesis is to demonstrate how the client needs and wishes differentiate between traditional and IT-supported advisory consultancy. The evaluation is conducted based on empirical content analysis. Thus, gathered video material is transcribed and categorized, thereby capturing information on approaches, insights, results, analyses and conclusions.

While research on organizational online networking recently increased significantly, most studies adopt quantitative research designs with a focus on the consequences of social network configurations. Very limited attention is paid to comprehensive theoretical conceptions of the complex phenomenon of organizational online networking. We address this gap by adopting a theoretical framework of the deep structure of organizational online networking with a focus on their emerging meaning for the employees. We apply and assess the framework in a qualitative case study of a large-scale implementation of a corporate social network site (SNS) in a global organization. We reveal organizational online networking as a multi-dimensional phenomenon with multiplex relationships that are unbalanced, primarily consist of weak ties and are subject to temporal change. Further, we identify discourse drivers and information retrievers as two mutually interdependent actor roles as an explanation for uneven levels of user contributions to the SNS. Based on our analysis, we elicit abstract order principles, such as topical discourses, and identify transactive memory theory as a potent explanation of the evolving interaction structures. We finally discuss how the deep structure framework can contribute to future research on organizational networks.

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The scientific focus of this paper is to examine, how an expertise sharing system affects the productivity of an industrial company. The expertise sharing system is a web-based product of Starmind International Inc. The industrial company, Baumann Springs Ltd, will be providing the study object, a data set, for the analysis. The study object consists of recorded semi-structured interviews of employees about their approach and their behavior when it comes to knowledge sharing within the company as well as an interview with a member of the management board on the subject of knowledge strategy, implementation of the Starmind tool and their own use of the Starmind tool at Baumann Springs Ltd. The interviews were analyzed using qualitative data collection. In addition, the study object includes the usage data provided by Starmind International Inc. The usage data was tested for relevant information relating to the productivity. Finally, recommendations were submitted for both companies to increase productivity in knowledge management.

This thesis analyses the kind of appropriation of a tool for the citizen advisory service and the compliance with the basic concept of a cooperative advisory service is analysed. The tool used for this analysis is the «Citizen Explorer», which was implemented for the citizen advisory service in Mannheim, Germany. The analysis of the kind of appropriation and the analysis of the compliance with the basic concept of a cooperative advisory service serve to compile a pattern of act for each advisory service. Based on this pattern of act, types of citizen advisory counselors are developed. Additional to that, the general type of citizen advisory counselor called «Neubürgerberater» is developed.

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Energy consultants offer competent advise to house owners about the current energetic situation of their building and possible measures to improve the energy efficiency. The consultation session usually take place at the client’s side and often the energy consultant has a very limited time span available. In order to offer a high quality service despite the short time, efficient tools are absolutely necessary. In this thesis a concept for IT support for energy consulting sessions is created. A corresponding prototype was developed and tested. The goal is to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the energy consultant. To achieve this the information gathering process and documentation was improved and additionally a visualization of the results for the clients is offered.

Innovation is crucial for companies in today's dynamic software industry. Innovations are no longer exclusively developed by R&D departments: Every employee can be an innovator at any time. These intrapreneurs need the support of advocates within their companies in order for their ideas to be realized. Literature suggests that both the feasibility and the value of an idea should be proven in order to persuade such advocates. In this bachelor thesis, the interviews of 30 employees of a Swiss IT company are analyzed in order to come up with advice for the intrapreneur on how to persuade different kinds of advocates as well as recommendations for organizations on how to foster advocacy in general.

How can employees be qualified to provide sound customer advisory services? How can they be empowered to deliver the value of public sector modernization to customers? In this paper, we offer a novel approach to qualify service personnel on-the-job using “facilitation affordances”. In this approach, artifacts, providing appropriately designed facilitation affordances, are introduced into service personnel’s work practices. These facilitation artifacts invite them to start experiential learning, and, hence, to improve their advice giving behavior. To develop our approach, we followed a design research approach, here we developed a set of design requirements and, ultimately, five design principles for facilitation artifacts. We tested our approach in the context of citizens’ advice services in public administrations. We implemented a prototype facilitation artifact and conducted a user study with six real-world advisors and twelve clients. Our preliminary results show that the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach promises to enhance the service personnel’s skills that matter in modern public administrations. Furthermore, with the proposed qualification approach and the design principles for facilitation artifacts, we seek to deepen the knowledge on the importance of affordances for learning and, concurrently, provide practitioners with useful guidelines to implement the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach in their organizations.

Fostering innovation is an essential task for companies, particularly in the dynamic and constantly changing software industry. Whereas it is widely acknowledged that the innovative capacity of a company depends crucially on how well it supports employees in realizing ideas, there is a lack of explicit, practitioner-oriented guidance on how these can communicate their ideas purposefully. We contribute to this field with an exploratory field study, in which we interviewed 32 experienced innovators at a major Swiss banking software provider, and collected objects through which they communicated ideas. We analyzed the collected data applying three types of causal analysis – creative causation, active causation, and passive causation. The outcome of this research is a nascent design theory that provides structured prescriptions on how to communicate ideas through what we term “innovation artifacts”. In brief terms, our study shows that innovation artifacts should enable innovators to persuade and collaborate with relevant stakeholders.

This thesis presents use cases of Social Software in public sector based on case studies from several European municipal administrations. The results reveal, that Social Software is an enabler both for collaboration and knowledge management. Use cases include document sharing, co-authoring, citizen participation, fix-my-street applications and external collaboration. However, in comparison to private companies, social software like Enterprise Social Networking is still in its infancy within government organizations. The results reveal, that lively discussions based on personal opinions are still absent. The thesis analysis legal aspects, business drivers and introduction of social software in the public sector. The results are then discussed and put into relation with existing research. Finally, appropriation of social software is explained with an approach based on Sociomateriality.

In the banking sector, the lines dividing competing firms are becoming increasingly indistinct, particularly in the era of Internet technologies, social media and mobile banking thus rebooting traditional banking [King, 2014]. It is, therefore, extremely difficult for banks to acquire differentiation advantage on the basis of their products/services since the new startups can easily provide low cost alternatives. Increasingly, competitive advantage lies in the ability to provide services that are tailored to the unique requirements of clients in a timely fashion [Yusif, 2012] using innovations in services channels, technology and supporting processes [Berger, 2006]. In this situation traditional banks have to innovate to stay in the race. This case study on innovation in Credit Suisse, Switzerland tries to establish how innovation is fostered in this international bank. This case study is done by studying the Innovation Factory at the bank, that has been implementing innovative projects for the last three years. The innovative projects implementation process and stages are studied in detail. Various interviews with these stakeholders in Business, IT, management and external stakeholders are conducted. These results of the empirical data are then mapped to the known research, and theories are established to understand how the process is working.

At the moment Personal Finance Management (PFM) is one of the big trends in Swiss Banking. PFM provides a good chance for the banks to increase the loyalty of their consumers and give the consumers an easy view over there finance. Additional the banks have more information about their customers which give them the chance to offer their customer a more specified product. The banks which will offer its customers a good PFM solution in the next couple months, can themselves differentiate from their concurrency and give them a competitive advantage. Because of this the most Swiss Banks will deal with this topic in the near future. In this thesis is shown how a possible PFM solution could look. For that it is analysed what kind of PFM solution are still on market, worldwide and special focused in Switzerland. A next step is to discover what the wishes from the customers are and which advantage it gives for the banks. After these steps it will work out some use-cases with these informations and designed the front-end of a possible PFM solution.