Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

This exploratory study captures media selection practices in offshore outsourced teams. The findings are based on a survey of 114 respondents, 72 of whom have directly participated in global virtual teams.Local resource constraints and the need to be cost-effective have driven many companies tosend various business functions offshore. Several studies have reported on failed offshore outsourcing projects that annually end up costing participant organizations billions of dollars. Why do such projects fail? Among the most common reasons are the communication challenges inherent to offshoreprojects. Members of a global team face many well-documented challenges (language barriers,cultural differences, organizational differences) and choice of media in particular has an impact on team performance.The significance of media selection was particularly evident in our research in relation to conflicts within teams, which were largely attributable to less rich, low-synchronous media. A further key finding that the research identifies is a high success rate of global virtual teams and a correlationbetween use of instant messaging and team success, with instant messaging users being significantly more likely to report a very effective team and very high team satisfaction. Furthermore the researchindicates no correlation between face-to-face meetings, more effective teamwork and higher team satisfaction. This was an unexpected result, as it is contrary to the common understanding. The last section of the paper proposes avenues for further research.

Recently, development of applications for mobile phones and social networks has become a popular business model for a number of developers. Due to limited budget and time constraints, they often face problems related to organization of their group work. The most difficult phases include task distribution, plan scheduling, prototyping and modification of prototypes. In this paper a novel approach to tackle these issues using a 'patchwork' is formally described.

Das Reisen ist seit je her eine der wichtigsten Beschäftigungen, über das man gerne und häufig diskutiert und darüber berichtet. In einem nutzerzentrierten Forschungs- und Entwicklungsprozess haben wir untersucht, wie Reisekunden beim Übergang vom Reisekunden zum Reisenden (Dokumentieren ihrer Reiseerfahrung) und vom Reisenden zum Freund (Teilen derselben im sozialen Netzwerk) in ihren Nutzungsbedürfnissen unterstützt werden können. Im SmartItinerary-Prototyp wird dafür ein Reiseziel als Ort mit zeitlicher Komponente konzipiert. Eine erste Evaluation mit 16 Testnutzern ist vielversprechend hinsichtlich des Nutzens und der Nutzbarkeit von SmartItinerary.

In public advisory services, the individual’s satis-faction depends less on extrinsic factors (e.g., monetary rewards) than on their inner needs fulfillment. Cur-rently used IT-systems supporting citizen advisory serv-ices neglect these intrinsic needs of their users, hence insufficiently fostering their satisfaction. In this paper, we aim to close this gap by assessing the design requirements needed to develop value-added IT-systems for citizen advisory services. We thus refer to self-determination theory to analyze current literature perspectives on how to design adequate IT-systems fostering users’ basic needs. We follow a design science approach and implement these requirements in a software prototype, and evaluate them qualitatively in a user study with real-world advisors and citizens. Our preliminary results show that this approach promises to reveal the design requirements that matter in citizen counseling, signifying an important step toward developing a conceptual IT systems design model.

The Web can be regarded as one of the most influential inventions of recent times. The “Social Web” phenomenon especially, i.e. information exchange and socializing activities among users, has changed the way people interact with each other profoundly. This also has far-reaching consequences for the basic models by which information is distributed in our society. The “Gutenberg” model which is characterized by a commercial distribution and rather passive consumption is being increasingly replaced by a “Social Web” scenario in which users are interconnected and are cooperatively producing and consuming content. While the mechanisms of producing and assuring quality are fairly well understood in the “Gutenberg” model, we are just beginning to understand these mechanisms for “Social Web” scenarios. In this thesis, we would like to contribute to the understanding of quality in communitybased Social Web platforms. We will start by proposing a measuring framework for discourse quality in online communities. We use the term discourse quality rather than the more traditional term information quality to recognize the fact that - in addition to information exchange – socializing activities are an important part of Social Web platforms. Our measurement framework will comprise three main dimensions: discourse completeness, discourse timeliness and correctness as well as the internal discourse quality. We will conceptualize each of these dimensions and will demonstrate how they can be measured empirically. By conducting these measurements for the domain of travel-related information, we will contribute to the question how good the discourse quality of Social Web platforms is in comparison to the information quality of commercially printed books. Thereby, we are contrasting these two basic information distribution models. The results will reveal that Social Web platforms have the potential to produce a discourse quality that is as high as the information quality in commercial products. However, this does not hold for all Social Web platforms and it is, up to now, unclear which platforms are better than the traditional information distribution model and why. We will therefore undertake a number of exploratory studies that target the characteristics of the online community landscape in the travel domain as well as the assumption that community activity and community scope are crucially influencing discourse quality. These exploratory studies will lead to the proposition of a first normative theory that seeks to explain the influencing factors of discourse quality. Finally, we will use these theoretical findings to implement a Meta-Community platform that can be used to guide Web users to areas with a high discourse quality on the Social Web. Das Internet stellt eine der einflussreichsten Innovationen der letzten Zeit dar. Insbesondere das sogenannte "Social Web" Phänomen hat die Art und Weise, wie Nutzer miteinander interagieren grundlegend verändert. Diese Entwicklungen haben auch weitreichende Folgen für die Informationsdistribution in unserer Gesellschaft. Das "Gutenberg"-Modell, das durch kommerzielle Verbreitung und vergleichsweise passiven Konsum gekennzeichnet ist, wird mehr und mehr durch ein "Social Web"-Szenario ersetzt. In diesem Szenario sind Nutzer zunehmend vernetzt und kooperieren aktiv beim Erstellen und Konsumieren von Inhalten. Die grundlegenden Mechanismen der Produktion und Qualitätssicherung sind hierbei für das "Gutenberg"-Modell relativ gut verstanden. Für “Social Web”-Szenarien steht die Erforschung dieser Mechanismen gerade erst am Anfang. Die vorliegende Arbeit leistet einen Beitrag zum Verständnis von Qualität auf “Social Web”-Plattformen. Zuerst wird hierzu ein Mess-Framework für Diskursqualität in virtuellen Gemeinschaften entwickelt. Hierbei wird der Begriff Diskursqualität anstatt des üblicheren Begriffs Informationsqualität verwendet. Dies soll verdeutlichen, dass virtuelle Gemeinschaften zusätzlich zum Informationsaustausch vor allem Plattformen für soziale Interaktionen sind. Das Mess-Framework umfasst drei wesentliche Dimensionen: Die Vollständigkeit des Diskurses, die Aktualität bzw. Korrektheit des Diskurses sowie die interne Diskursqualität. Diese drei Dimensionen werden operationalisiert und es wird demonstriert wie sie empirisch gemessen werden können. Das entwickelte Mess-Framework wird daraufhin auf Informationen aus der Domäne des Tourismus in unterschiedlichen Medien angewendet. Es wird untersucht, wie hoch die Diskursqualität in virtuellen Reise-Communities im Vergleich zur Informationsqualität in herkömmlichen, kommerziellen Printprodukten ist. Die beiden oben beschriebenen Distributionsmodelle für Informationen werden somit miteinander verglichen. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass virtuelle Gemeinschaften prinzipiell gleichwertige oder teilweise sogar höherwertige Qualität im Vergleich zu kommerziellen Informationsprodukten liefern können. Es gibt jedoch beträchtliche Unterschiede zwischen verschiedenen virtuellen Gemeinschaften und die dahinterliegenden Mechanismen sind bis jetzt ungeklärt. Vor diesem Hintergrund werden daraufhin eine Reihe von explorativen Studien durchgeführt, in denen wesentliche Charakteristika der Community-Landschaft untersucht werden. Es wird in diesem Rahmen auch untersucht, welche Rolle die Aktivität der Community-Mitglieder sowie die thematische Fokussierung der Community spielt. Ausgehend von diesen explorativen Studien wird dann eine erste normative Theorie entwickelt, die wesentliche Einflussfaktoren auf die Diskursqualität in virtuellen Gemeinschaften erklären soll. Schliesslich werden diese theoretischen Erkenntnisse genutzt, um prototypisch eine Meta-Community zu implementieren, welche Nutzer zu Web-Plattformen mit hoher Diskursqualität führt.

Investment advisory encounters are strained by information, knowledge and interest asymmetries between client and advisor. These are detrimental to advisory quality and client satisfaction, leading to an unfavorable client perception of investment advisory services. This situation is disadvantageous for both clients and financial service providers. Clients increasingly turn to other information sources and fail to reap advisory services’ potential benefits for their investment decisions; financial service providers fail to exploit personalized advisory services as one the most promising differentiation strategies against competitors and struggle with low client satisfaction and retention. This dissertation suggests a novel approach for these issues: addressing asymmetries in investment advisory encounters with transparent, shared IT artifacts. Hence, it is based on the following thesis: Shared collaborative IT artifacts are a feasible and useful means to improve transparency of investment advisory encounters and, thus, to increase client satisfaction. The dissertation supports this thesis along three research essays: Essay I provides an empirical investigation of the status quo of Swiss investment advisory services. It suggests that investment advisory encounters are asymmetric and affected by a lack of transparency regarding the process and its information, leading to poor advisory quality and low client satisfaction. To overcome these issues, the dissertation introduces the solution approach of shared collaborative IT artifacts. While Essay I presents the basic building blocks of such an approach, Essay II and III demonstrate the feasibility of addressing process, information and cost transparency with such artifacts, presenting their underlying design considerations as well as their prototypical implementations. Furthermore, they provide experimental evidence of such artifacts’ usefulness – results show that the constructed shared collaborative IT artifacts indeed are useful means to improve transparency in investment a Gespräche zur Anlageberatung zwischen Beratern und Kunden sind durch Asymmetrien geprägt, welche sich in Unterschieden der Akteure bezüglich der verfügbaren Informationen, vorhandenem Wissen und verfolgten Interessen zeigen. Diese Ungleichheiten können zu einer unvorteilhaften Kundenwahrnehmung der Beratungsdienstleistung führen, welche sich insbesondere in gering wahrgenommener Transparenz über Beratungsabläufe und –informationen äußert. Dies wiederum kann sich negativ auf die empfundene Beratungsqualität und Kundenzufriedenheit auswirken. Es zeigt sich, dass diese Situation für Kunden wie Finanzdienstleister nachteilig ist: während erstere sich zur Informationsbeschaffung vermehrt anderen Informationsquellen zuwenden, lassen Finanzdienstleister das Potential ungenutzt, sich über qualitativ hochwertigere Beratungsleistungen gegenüber den Mitbewerbern zu differenzieren. Die vorliegende Arbeit untersucht den neuartigen Ansatz, Probleme der Asymmetrie in Anlageberatungsgesprächen mit transparenter, geteilter Informationstechnologie (IT) zu begegnen. Sie stützt sich dabei auf folgende These: Geteilte, kooperative IT-Systeme sind praktikabel und nützlich, die Transparenz von Anlageberatungsgesprächen zu verbessern und dadurch die Kundenzufriedenheit zu erhöhen. Diese These wird entlang dreier Essays gestützt: Das erste Essay untersucht mit empirischen Mitteln den Status quo Schweizer Anlageberatungsdienstleistungen. Aus den Erhebungen wird abgeleitet, dass Anlageberatungsgespräche eine geringe Transparenz bezüglich des Beratungsprozesses und der ausgetauschten Informationen aufweisen; dies kann die Beratungsqualität und die Kundenzufriedenheit beeinträchtigen. Um diese Probleme zu adressieren, präsentiert die Arbeit einen Lösungsansatz basierend auf geteilten, kooperativen IT- Systemen. Während Essay I die Bausteine des Ansatzes skizziert, zeigen Essay II und III die Praktikabilität solcher Systeme anhand prototypischer Entwicklungen, welche die Transparenz des Beratungsprozesses und der ausgetauschten Informationen – insbesondere auch bezüglich Kosten – adressieren. Die Essays präsentieren dabei auch experimentelle Nachweise der Nützlichkeit solcher Systeme. Die Resultate zeigen, dass geteilte, kooperative Systeme in der Tat nützliche Mittel darstellen, die Transparenz in Anlageberatungsgesprächen zu erhöhen; ebenfalls legen die Evaluationsergebnisse dar, dass die Nutzung solcher Systeme die Kundenzufriedenheit im Vergleich zu traditionellen Anlageberatungssituationen erhöhen kann.

Social media is an incredible success story of the Internet. Higher education in the United States already relies on social media to promote and retain their students. In this thesis a thorough investigation into the status of social media in universities in Switzerland will be made. This will serve as basis for establishing a social media concept for the Information Management Research Group. An application to support the social media concept will be developed based on requirements set forth by stakeholders of the IMRG. The results of the evaluation show that this application helps overcome inhibitions of using social media.

Investment advisory services of financial service providers (FSPs) exhibit several characteristics that are detrimental to advisory quality. The interaction of advisor and client is strained by a lack of transparency regarding the advisory process (what activities are performed and why) and the information used therein (what information is used for what purpose and with what effect), as well as regarding the precise costs of the service and the recommended products. In prior research, we suggested that process and information transparency issues may be appropriately addressed with collaborative information technology (IT) artifacts. In this paper, we argue that collaborative, transparent artifacts may also be a premise of enabling cost transparency. To this end, we describe a complete research cycle of designing, implementing and evaluating a shared cost-transparent IT artifact to support client-advisor interaction in investment advisory encounters. Evaluation results suggest the efficacy of our design in improving the clients’ perceived cost transparency as well as increase their satisfaction and their willingness to pay for the received investment advice. These findings may also challenge the common belief of FSPs that transparent, fee-based advisory services would neither be accepted by clients nor be economically viable. Practical implications of these findings for designing advisory encounters with supportive IT are discussed.

In sales-oriented service encounters like financial advice, the client may perceive information and interest asymmetries as a lack of transparency regarding the advisor’s activities. In this article, we will discuss two design iterations of a supportive tabletop application that we built to increase process and information transparency as compared to the traditional pen and paper encounters. While the first iteration’s design was “enforcing” transparency and therefore proved to be a failure [Nussbaumer et al. 2011], we built the second iteration on design rationales enabling more “casual” transparency. Experimental evaluations show that the redesigned system significantly increases the client’s perceived transparency, her perceived control of the encounter and improves her perceived trustworthiness of and satisfaction with the encounter. With these findings, we contribute to (1) insight into the role of transparency advisory encounter design; (2) design solutions for establishing particular facets of transparency and their potential instantiations in tabletop systems; and (3) insight into the process of designing for transparency with socio-technical artifacts that are emergent as a result of design activities.

Social Media are becoming increasingly popular. People present themselves in the networks and start building relationships. Retail banks have not yet discovered this trend. They use Social Media applications still very hesitatingly. Too huge are the barriers, for example the bank secret or the not measurable benefit. This master thesis shows how Swiss retail banks use Social Media applications today, where the barriers and the possibilities for the future are. The study involves interviews with Social Media responsible persons from 16 Swiss banks. The focus lies on retail banks. The result shows concrete approaches for relevant contents, best Practices and recommendations for the future.

Das "CSCL-Kompendium" führt umfassend in das "Computer Supported Collaborative Learning" CSCL ein. Ausgehend von den Grundlagen des CSCL werden die beiden Hauptkomponenten bei der Umsetzung von CSCL behandelt: die CSCL-Umgebungen und die Didaktik des CSCL. Neben der praktischen Umsetzung von CSCL werden die Wirkungen und Potentiale von CSCL in den Bereichen Schule, Präsenzhochschule, Fernstudium, Ausbildung, betriebliche Weiterbildung und Förderung von Lernbehinderten und Hochbegabten beleuchtet.

Offshore-outsourced software development (OOSD) projects involvemultifaceted risks throughout the project execution, as they are handed over tothird-party organizations and thus are exposed to more risks than in domesticoutsourcing or captive offshoring. We concentrate on failed OOSD projects inthis paper and analyze the unique aspects of such projects at the team level thatlead to failures. Using the grounded theory approach, we conducted semistructuredinterviews with 19 project managers involved in OOSD projectfailures from the vendor and client sides, who are based in India or Switzerland.We developed a set of propositions regarding multiple teams in the OOSDproject context to explain failures. Integration of inter-organizational offshoreand onshore teams from the vendor and client sides was found to beindispensable in avoiding project failures. Six categories of unique aspects thatlead to OOSD project failures were identified and discussed in this exploratorywork.

In this paper, we report on a study to establish process transparency in service encounters of financial advisors and their clients. To support their interaction, we implemented a cooperative software system for tabletops, building on transparency patterns suggested by the literature. In evaluations, however, we found that our design did not improve the perceived transparency and comprehensibility. Introducing the IT artifact into advisory failed to enhance the client?s overall experience and even seemed to negatively influence the client?s perception of the advisory process. Using the representational guidance of depicting the process and its activities as a navigable, interactive map made clients believe that interactions with their advisor were restricted to the system?s functionality, thus expecting that what they see is all they can get.

Public administrations offer a number of citizen services on their governmental online portals ranging from simple information provision to whole transactions. This integrated service provision is not visible in co-located citizen-administrator encounters. Public administrators fail to adopt the available IT-resources and other media suitably in their task of providing on-site advisory services. Combined with the advancing diffusion of IT in governmental departments, these missing advisors’ skills lead to perceivable decreasing service quality, namely, the individual’s competencies in giving sound advice and being media literate, which have been well discussed in the research literature. However, considering the low quality that citizens attribute to governmental services, the transfer of these findings into the practice of citizen advisory services does not happen.To bridge this gap, we emphasise the interrelations between the advisors’ basic competencies and their media literacy. We identify the prerequisite competencies which public administrators require to provide co-created citizen advisory service while integrating the available media into their advisory activities. We propose a didactical concept of training, divided into a qualification stage and a learning-on-the-job construct to empower advisors to perform IT-supported, value co-created citizen advisory services. We base our work empirically on a qualitative approach: We conducted ten mystery shopping episodes and interviewed nine advisors and 26 citizens in eight municipalities in Germany and one in Switzerland.

Today's Web users are faced with a large number of available online communities for every domain. While there are rules-of-thumb for the choice of a specific community, the validity of these heuristics has hardly been tested empirically. Furthermore, there is a lack of well-founded measures that allow for a systematic comparison of different online forum communities. In this contribution, we propose the concept of discourse quality as a means to this end. This measure is conceptualized from a user perspective and combines quantitative as well as qualitative parts, including a codebook for content analysis. To show the applicability and the usefulness of this measure, we systematically compare 34 online forums with varying degrees of membership size. We are able to show that the forums with the most members online consistently show high discourse quality. Finally, we discuss the potential of benchmark measures for future online community research.

Research into customer satisfaction of advisory services provided by financial service providers (FSPs) indicates a history of problems that originated well before the current financial crisis. As part of a research program into the design of advisory processes and supporting IT tools, we conducted a survey of affluent Swiss investors that was focused on their information search behavior when preparing to make an investment decision. Results show that advisory services are used at a later stage in the investment decision process, after Internet-based professional sources, media and personal contacts. In order for advisory services to become a preferred information source amongst customers, FSPs need to increase their accessibility, raise their level of perceived trust, and enhance the customer’s access to a diverse range of trusted information sources in the advisory process.