Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

The present thesis is concerned with the question of whether it is efficient for small and medium-sized enterprises to implement selected elements of IT Governance in order to achieve a reduction of problems and risks resulting from the use of information technology. Based on a survey conducted in Swiss industrial companies the thesis analyzes different elements of IT Governance with regard to their effect. The treatise concludes by proposing a concrete growth path for companies that wish to benefit from the high efficiency of the appropriate implementation of IT Governance.

Despite increasing popularity of collaborative information technologies (CIT) in supporting virtual teams, we know little about the impacts brought about by their use. Based upon a review of existing literature, a framework highlighting several impacts of CIT use in virtual teams is presented for empirical validation.

Swiss banks have returned to their roots and pay an increasing amount of attention to differentiating themselves from others through good financial advisory services. This has led to a loudly publicized standardization of IT-advisory processes, but not to an increasing use of supporting IT tools. This paper uses interviews with Swiss advisors, sales managers and IT managers, as well as focus groups of users and a survey with users to identify reasons for non-usage. The analysis is based on a framework combining principal-agent theory, IT-business alignment, technology acceptance and information behaviour. We provide evidence that the key problem explanation is the incentive system of the advisors and that poor usability of the software and lack of engagement by sales managers also contribute to the non-usage of most tools.

As organizations increase their offshore software development efforts, they must develop new methods and models for handling the vast amount of knowledge involved in these projects. Successful knowledge management and transfer is considered key to the success of contemporary organizations. When transferring knowledge to other operating units of a multi national company, the overall goal is to successfully implement the knowledge sent to the receiver. Cultural differences however, can interfere with successful knowledge management intentions. This paper investigates storytelling as a tool to transfer knowledge between global corporate units. A case study on how this instrument is used to communicate knowledge between a German and an Indian IT company gives first insights into factors that influence implementation success.

Even though the emergence or respectively the construction of online communities is of great interest for scientists and community engineers, only few empirical data has been presented on community growth. This article starts with a reflection on possible growth curves of virtual communities. It contrasts a network externality perspective that produces clear winners and losers in a market with a long tail perspective that also allows small niche products to be successful. These considerations are empirically tested with a sample of 74 travel communities whose numbers of registered members were recorded at two measure points. The results show that online travel communities develop into an archetypical long tail. A very small number of communities with exceedingly high numbers of members are accompanied by a vast amount of communities with only few members. An analysis of the long tail, however, reveals that the community tail is not dead but is populated by a large number of especially regional communities that show considerable growth rates.

Tag clouds are visual representations of metadata which is composed of a set of words or ìtagsî. For retrieval purposes users assign tags to objects. Their ability to glance over an information repository makes tag clouds suitable for navigation therein. To give evidence to this assumption, this study conducts an initial user survey which gives rise to a new concept for tag cloud navigation. A prototype is built following this conceptual work. The result is a novel tag cloud which shows tags as word lists, separated by navigation categories. An evaluation conducted with 16 users shows that information gets retrieved significantly faster by using less clicks. Application areas where quick information retrieval is crucial could benefit from these results.

The travel industry has been subject to change in the past few years because of the develop- ment of the internet. As part of the study ""The travel agency of the future""we look for new possibilities to make the phone consultancy more attractive using a groupware system. In this work we are going to illustrate the fundamentals for designing such a system. By means of stakeholder interviews, literature research and the analysis of existing systemswewill gather the requirements for such a system. The focus of our work is a co-browsing system, which allows the collaborative and visual support of a counseling interview. In order to test the user acceptance, we test the requirements based on a developed prototype in several stages.

In light of the financial crisis, it has become even more critical for financial service providers to remain competitive. This paper discusses new perspectives on the problems of today’s advisory services, including the customer's dissatisfaction with personalization and individualization. Thereby we draw on research in human information behavior, particularly Wilson's model, which provides a promising framework to better understand the information behavior of clients and in turn helps us understand some of the IT-enablers of individualized financial services. Our findings are supported by data collected from mystery shopping episodes and focus group discussions.

Over the past few years IT Offshoring has become one of the most important corporate strategies in the software industry. Along with the advantages it offers, it also poses numerous challenges. One of the important challenges faced is with respect to efficient knowledge transfer between client and vendor as they are geographically distant, in differing time zones and of disparate cultural backgrounds. While considering offshore software process, the transition phase is one of the most critical and involves an immense communication effort. During an offshore software development project there is a lot of integration and collaboration that happens between client and vendor. The paper offers an explorative, in-depth case study to analyse the challenges of knowledge transfer. The analysis leads to a description of the effects and benefits storytelling as a tool provides at the beginning of the knowledge transfer process, in transferring tacit knowledge, bridging cultural differences and building trusting relationships in offshore software projects.

Increased globalization and the consequent dispersion of IT activities across the world have driven the growth of global IT outsourcing. The share of offshore software development (OSD) in the high-cost countries has grown tremendously in the past years and this trend will continue in the coming years. Software development projects continue to experience poor performance problems because of their inherent complexities and the uncertainties involved from the start. Although OSD projects offer cost advantages, the unique risks related to cultural, linguistic and geographic differences, knowledge transfer and project management make OSD more vulnerable to failure than domestically outsourced projects. This paper explores the early warning signs (EWS) of failures in OSD projects, a concept that can be employed as an early warning system to avoid failures. Using the Delphi survey method, we intend to find out the most important EWSs specific to OSD projects. Our panelists include 23 experts primarily from the offshore client and vendor companies in Switzerland and India. We discuss four offshore-relevant EWS categories and the preliminary results of this ongoing research from the third survey phase.

Klassische Publikationsmodelle für wissenschaftliche Fachinformationen werden zunehmend durch unterschiedliche Formen des digitalen Publizierens ergänzt bzw. teilweise verdrängt. Vor dem Hintergrund dieser Entwicklung ist insbesondere die Idee des Open Access von grosser Bedeutung. Dieser Beitrag liefert einen Überblick über den aktuellen Stand und geplante Aktivitäten im Bereich von Institutional Repositories bei Hochschul- und Forschungseinrichtungen in der Schweiz.

The paper introduces a theoretically-grounded conceptual framework for the design of collaborative systems which support expert-mediated interactive value creation involving end-users as active participants in the creation of products and services in principal-agent settings. We show how the problems of information asymmetry and burden of choice in interactive value creation can be addressed by integrating the principal-agent perspective with CSCW models of collaboration between heterogeneous actors. Results of a preliminary application and evaluation through the design of a concrete system for cooperative travel advisory in a real-world setting suggest its usefulness and illustrate how it can inform design practice.

Der mExplorer ist ein an der Universität Zürich entwickeltes mobiles Lernspiel, welches Erstsemestrigen den Campus einer Universität auf spielerische Art und Weise näher bringen soll. In diesem Beitrag wird gezeigt, wie das Spiel für das Eventmarketing eingesetzt werden kann und welche Wirkungen es dabei hat. Bei einem Feldtest wird gezeigt, dass ähnliche Probleme wie beim mobilen Lernen auftreten, aber auch ähnliche emotionale Wirkungen erzielt werden. Aus den unübersehbaren Ähnlichkeiten zwischen mobilem Lernen und Eventmarketing schliessen wir auf eine Konvergenz unterschiedlicher Lebensbereiche durch mobile Anwendungen.

It is a fact --already confirmed by several scientific studies-- that financial services providers offer investment advice, which from the customer's point of view, is far away from being satisfactory. This paper examines all well-known problems and, suggests a whole new concept for improving the services and to increase the customer satisfaction. It will improve transparency and will help to increase the customer's confidence with respect to the financial services providers. This concept will be implemented as a prototype, then evaluated, to find out whether customer's satisfaction and acceptance can be increased.

For banks the quality of advice is one of the most crucial distinguishing features in a fiercely contested market. Individual advice plays an important role in the assessment of quality. Yet in their attempts to individualise the advice process, banks repeatedly come up against their limitations. The main difficulty in individual advice in this regard ñ due to the informational asymmetry between customer and adviser ñ lies in the relaying of information. Based on a survey of private customers, this study examines both the problems and opportunities for improvement in the advice process and what factors influence the quality of advice as experienced by customers. In particular, light is shed on the role of customersí information behaviour when assessing the quality of the advice as well as the extent to which adequate information mediation contributes to the improvement of advice quality. In addition, the scope for optimising the advice process by means of IT support with respect to individualised information mediation is analysed.

In traditional financial advice the clientís lack of confidence in the advisor results in dissatisfac-tion. The traditional financial advice that is provided by financial service providers can be consi-dered as information system. This leads to the question in what way online communities that can serve as information system as well, are able to support traditional financial advice. Online communities are common and a broadly accepted part of the World Wide Web. Online communities serve as message board or discussion forum and allow to take care of our friends all over the world. But they can also be used for information seeking purposes. Online communities can be analyzed in terms of their use as information system. This thesis provides a structured research and gathering of online communities. The benefits of using online communities can be shown with the agency theory. Based on these results, a framework is developed that provides a basis for evaluating the weaknesses of traditional financial advice.

It is a well-known problem that the architecture of IT systems erodes over time. A systematic enterprise architecture management is the solution for the problem of architectural erosion. This thesis discusses the question of how the effectiveness of enterprise architecture management in a company can be verified. In a case study, the enterprise architecture management at Credit Suisse for an application landscape of about 800 applications and its effectiveness is being analysed. The enterprise architecture management at Credit Suisse follows a strategy called ìManaged Evolutionî. Its goal is to increase the architectural quality o the IT system and the efficiency of software development projects regarding cost and time to market. In order to verify the effectiveness of enterprise architecture management, 21 interviews were conducted and quantitative data was analysed. Architectural quality is being measured using an Architecture Scorecard, the efficiency of projects using a data set of 152 projects over a time period of 7 years.

After an analysis of two large Swiss banking institutes and their perception of their clients it is revealed, that clients today are mostly characterized by their risk tolerance and risk behavior. The goals that clients pursuit with their investments are largely ignored by the current advisory processes. Analyzing established and modern portfolio and investment theories, we look for possibilities to support customer confidence in banking institutions and provide for a more customer centric advisory process. Life cycle and psychological categorizations are shown to support the disclosure of information about the fundamental needs of the customer. Summarizing the findings, suggestions for changes in current advisory processes and supporting IT are presented.

Mobile Communities are a rather new research area and are not established jet. At the beginning of these paper the differences between virtual and mobile communities are discussed and the resulting challenged for mobile communities. Personalisation in the mobile setting has to consider the location too, not only the factors known from the internet. In the second part a field study in the old town of Zurich showes that tourist videos can support a visit. The travellers said that the videos did not disturb from the sights, actually the videos supported the experience. Not all footages were rated as helpful, there were differences between the people and personalisation is needed. The results of the study point to a promising future for video based traveller guides.