Contributions published at Information Management (Gerhard Schwabe)

The goal of this thesis is to identify the challenges which occur for Hotels during the online feedback management process. This leads to the following research question: Which challenges occur from online feedback management from the viewpoint of hotel owners and managers? A qualitative analysis was carried out to answer this research question. The qualitative analysis shows that the biggest challenges occur while drafting answers. In addition a second research question is posed: Which challenges can be addressed with AI technologies? How challenging are technical solutions to these challanges? In this thesis several solutions to the identified challenges are proposed.

- PURPOSE - By increasing the digitalization of commercial services citizens’ expect more from public services. First of all, this study will strive to identify which problems citizens encounter when they use a complex public service: preparation of an application for a building permit. In the light of the popularity of omnichannel approaches, the study then explores how omnichannel could help to address the problems which have been identified. - METHODOLOGY - We implement the first phases of an action design science research project. We collect data both from citizens and public agencies and frame them as transparency problems. These abstract problems are then addressed by an omnichannel service provision as an abstract solution. The abstract solution is then instantiated in a design in the form of a user scenario developed in collaboration with current and future public officials. - FINDINGS - The analysis uncovers multiple transparency issues: it distinguishes between process, case, language, cross-channel, and cost transparency. One root cause of the transparency issues observed is the lack of service transparency which defines the purpose and scope of a service. We therefore recommend defining a service strategy before informational and technical aspects of an omnichannel approach can be implemented. Following this strategy, omnichannel offers public administrations unique opportunities to excel in citizens’ service provision. - ORIGINALITY / VALUE - The study provides insights into how citizens view complex public services. For researchers, this study offers the conceptualization as transparency issues. Practitioners from the public administrations can also benefit from the concept and vision of omnichannel public services.

The purpose of this thesis is to design a digital tool to support patients having atherosclerosis. I first identified the patients' expectations and needs. Then, I designed the features of the tool. 3 prototypes were designed, 6 consultations were filmed and reviewed, 28 interviews with patients and physicians took place, and 4 focus groups were held throughout the project. Research shows that patients forget the information provided by their doctor. The adherence to the treatment – which is central to the control of atherosclerosis and in the prevention of its complications such as heart attack or stroke – depends on the perception of the threats from the disease and on the understanding of the physician's recommendations. The prototype aimed to provide a tool explaining the disease, the risk factors, and keeping a record of health values, in order to support patients in between consultations. The patient could learn from the app, but she would also be requested to be proactive by frequently entering data into the app, such as weight, hours of exercise per week, or blood pressure. Hence, doctors would interact during the consultations with patients who are more informed, prepared and involved. The last version of the tool was a clickable prototype. Patients and physicians were enthusiastic about it. Many participants acknowledged that this conceptual model of the app already helped them to better understand atherosclerosis and its risk factors. They would all agree and be motivated to use it. However, further research is needed to, first, implement a real application and, second, test its effects and usage in a field study in order to validate if it would positively influence adherence.

Within the past few years, public and permissionless blockchain projects (such as cryptocurrencies) have managed to change our perception of prevailing economic and organizational infrastructures. Foremostly, stakeholders of such projects are embedded in an (allegedly) decentralized governance structure. The importance of interest and incentive alignment across stakeholders within such projects is shown by academia. However, the granularity of so far elaborated frameworks is not high enough to profoundly capture these aspects. Moreover, a specific allocation of such interests and incentives to concrete stakeholders (or clusters thereof) is still missing, and a problematic oversimplification of stakeholder groups in public blockchains is present in literature. In the context of blockchain governance and a stakeholder analysis, we empirically derived a new framework, specifically tailored towards stakeholders, their interests and underlying rationale in public blockchains. We operationalized this framework (survey development) and gathered data on suitable online platforms. The data analysis allowed us to identify three main stakeholder clusters: user-investor, user-validator, and validator-investor. Using different (proprietary) analytical approaches, we profiled these clusters with comparable attributes regarding their inherent interest prioritisations and rationales (including motives and incentives). Based on these insights, we eventually derived lessons for (future) blockchain projects.

Future used car markets may use personal data to reduce information asymmetries between car sellers and buyers, e. g. on past driving behavior. Reducing information asymmetries is attractive for used car platforms as they can move from pure information provision to orchestrating transactions. However, car sellers and buyers have to agree to sharing personal data. What kind of data is interesting for them? Under what circumstances are they willing to share this data? What should a platform do to support data sharing? We explore those research questions as part of the Cardossier project by conducting experiments with the Car-Market Game, simulating a future car market. The results indicate that there is no market for pure personal data (e. g. photographs of sellers), but there is a market for car usage data. From future used car platforms the participants expect disclosure control and disclosure transparency in an environment free of interpersonal trust.

Client data is a key resource in financial service encounters. You need to understand your clients, their goals, needs and life situation, to offer personalized products or services. Therefore, advisors use a majority of their financial advisory sessions to focus on information collection. A previous study explored the use of an IT supported need-analysis prior to the first advisory session. This thesis builds upon that approach and studies where and when to ask for which information and how to incorporate the collected information into advice giving. For this purpose, a tool was designed that would support an advisor to verify and validate client information, present relevant and comprehensible advice and provide a personalised offer to the client. This tool was evaluated in a focus group study. This thesis then discusses the benefits of IT supporting financial service encounters and the associated challenges. The results of the study show that by overcoming these challenges, IT can motivate clients, support the knowledge transfer, and increase client satisfaction and transparency in financial service encounters.

The recent interest in conversational agents in the service sector has led to many papers and articles being published. Often, they focus on small aspects but are not connected to the larger context. This paper therefore examines conversational agents in services by comparing public and scientific literature with the aim of finding and linking dominant themes. Suggestions for successful integration into the service sector emerge from the analysis. In identifying and reflecting on commonalities and differences between the public and scientific discourses, it was found that while there are many commonalities between the two discourses, there are also some discrepancies in what they consider important. Therefore, it was concluded that a better exchange of needs and research topics should be established.

Digital assistants (DAs) are a promising technology for usage in an advisory context. They are often designed anthropomorphically to improve usability. However, the relationship between anthropomorphic design and user preferences in an advisory context is poorly studied. In this paper, we summarise the results of a quantitative survey in which participants (N=77) rated three different anthropomorphically designed DAs in an advisory context. No systematic relationship between the degree of anthropomorphism of the DA and user preferences was found. This paper investigates anthropomorphic design of DAs in an advisory context and thus contributes to the current state of knowledge on user-oriented design of DAs.

For decades, an agile approach to the business market has been primarily applied for delivering services to customers. Agility is an umbrella term, and it has been used in different realms. This thesis emphasizes strategic agility. Although scholarly interest in agility is immense, guidance towards adopting strategic agility is lacking. This study aims to research the existing gap by conducting qualitative research in the form of a case study. The purpose is to design an artifact to help organizations adopt strategic agility. It was drawn from the academic literature, interviews, and analysis of the data. In order to adopt strategic agility, organizations need to create and manage their dynamic capabilities by balancing flexible and stable elements within the organization. This master contributes to better understanding strategic agility and dynamic capabilities that an agile organization holds.

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Blockchain systems continue to attract significant interest from both practitioners and researchers. What is more, blockchain systems come in various types, such as cryptocurrencies or as inter-organizational systems in business networks. As an example of a cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, one of the most prominent blockchain systems to date and born at the time of a major financial crisis, spearheaded the promise of relying on code and computation instead of a central governing entity. Proponents would argue that Bitcoin stood the test of time, as Bitcoin continues to operate to date for over a decade. However, these proponents overlook the never-ending, heated debates “behind the scenes” caused by diverging goals of central actors, which led to numerous alternative systems (forks) of Bitcoin. To accommodate these actors’ interests in the pursuit of their common goal is a tightrope act, and this is where this dissertation commences: blockchain governance. Based on the empirical examples of various types and application domains of blockchain systems, it is the goal of this dissertation to 1) uncover governance patterns by showing, how blockchain systems are governed, 2) derive governance challenges faced or caused by blockchain systems, and, consequently, to 3) contribute to a better understanding to what blockchain governance is. This dissertation includes four parts, each of these covering different thematical areas: In the first part, this dissertation focuses on obtaining a better understanding of blockchain governance’s context of reference by studying blockchain systems from various application domains and system types, for example, led by inter-organizational networks, states, or an independent group of actors. The second part, then, focuses on a blockchain as an inter-organizational system called “cardossier”, a project I was involved in, and its governance as a frame of reference. Hereupon, for one, I report on learnings from my project involvement in the form of managerial guidelines, and, for two, I report on structural problems within cardossier, and problems caused by membership growth and how they can be resolved. The third part focuses on a wider study of blockchains as inter-organizational systems, where I summarize findings of an analysis of 19 blockchain consortia. The findings, for one, answer the question of why blockchain consortia adopt blockchain technology, and, for two, show internal and external challenges these systems faced to derive managerial recommendations. The fourth and last part studies blockchain governance’s evolution and contributes an analysis of blockchain’s governance features and its contrast to established modes of governance. These four parts, altogether, have scientific value as they increase our understanding on blockchain governance. Consequently, this dissertation contributes to the body of knowledge on modes of governance, distributed system governance, and blockchain governance in general. I do so, by grounding the concept of blockchain governance in empirical detail, showing how these systems are governed on various application domains and system types, and by studying empirical challenges faced or caused by these systems. This approach is relevant and necessary, as blockchain systems in general, but particularly outside of cryptocurrencies, mostly still are in pursuit of a sustainable blockchain governance. As blockchains can be expected to continue to mature, the upcoming years offer very fruitful ground for empirical research along the empirical insights and theoretical lines shown in this dissertation.

The deployment of mixed reality systems in professional settings demands adaptation of the physical environment and practices. However, technology-driven changes to the environment are problematic in some contexts. Specifically, face-to-face advisory services rely on scripted material routines using specific tools. This manuscript explores challenges encountered during the development of LivePaper, a mixed-reality system for supporting financial advisory services. First, the article presents a range of design requirements derived from existing literature and multiple years of research experience concerning advisory services and physical collaborative environments. Second, it discusses technical and design challenges that emerged when building LivePaper along with those requirements. Third, the article describes a range of technical solutions and new design ideas implemented in a working system to mitigate the encountered problems. It explores potential alternative solutions and delivers empirical or conceptual arguments for the choices made. The manuscript concludes with implications for the advisory services, the systems used to support such encounters, and specific technical guidance for the developers of mixed reality solutions in institutional settings. Overall, the article advances the discourse on the application of technology in advisory services, the use of mixed-reality systems in professional environments, and the physical nature of collaboration.

While both information systems and machine learning are not neutral, the identification of discrimination is more difficult if a system learns from data and discrimination can be introduced at several stages. Therefore, this article investigates if IS Research has taken up with this topic. A literature analysis is conducted and its discussion shows that technology, organization, and human aspects have to be considered, making it a topic not only for data scientist or computer scientist, but for information systems researchers as well.

In this digital age, manufacturing companies generate large volumes of machine data that can be used to make data driven decisions using computerized algorithms. It is well-known that the productivity of any production line is constrained by throughput bottlenecks. These bottlenecks if detected at the right time can allow maintenance engineers to proactively plan resources to eectively mitigate such bottlenecks and achieve a higher throughput across the production line. In order to provide support to such an exercise, this masters thesis dealt with building a bottleneck detection model using real-world production data, implementing a working formulation of the detection model on a real production line, further analysing the nature of the observed bottlenecks, and using machine learning algorithms to predict future bottlenecks in the production line. A detection mechanism was build to compare the dierence between consecutive products arriving at all machines with their takt time (threshold time). Through a practical demonstration, the said framework was used to detect not just the bottlenecks but also its severity. For predicting future bottlenecks on production machines, a threshold mechanism was developed to predict if the next time step will be a bottleneck or not. In order to do this, four machine learning algorithms were used to learn their distribution, both on single-step and multi-step (auto-regressive) frameworks for all machines. All models were implemented on a validation set and the model with the lowest MSE score was used for prediction on the test data at each machine respectively. On the single-step framework, we observed an overall accuracy score of 76.7%, while an accuracy of 90.4% was observed on the multi-step framework.

In Germany, several initiatives in the form of local online marketplaces have emerged as a measure against the economic stagnation of stationary retail and the increase of online commerce. Seven local online marketplaces have been implemented within a tender offer made by the state of Baden- Württemberg. This master thesis focuses on the evaluation of how the platforms meet the requirements of the following stakeholders: citizens, vendors, and municipalities. Interviews were conducted with the respective platform providers, and quantitative data was collected. The aim was to compare the platforms with each other. The goal was to define how these seven online marketplaces differ and what advantages and disadvantages arise from these differences. The main difference are to be found in the functional scope of the platforms, as well as in their orientation: it depends whether their focus is mostly on shopping or if their intention is also to provide local information. This orientation influences the expectations that customers and sellers may have of a local marketplace. It was also discovered, that apart from their financial support municipalities are usually not involved in these platforms.

Blockchain based smart contracts with applications in the real world need external data for their execution. This connection to external component is provided by the so called oracles. Such an oracle solution had already been started to be built by the Blockchain Presence project team in February 2019. This project team comprised of Marketing, Accounting, Taxes and Legal (ATL), Strategy and Development subteams which had already developed a prototype of a secure, cost-efficient Ethereum based platform solution. In the Spring of 2020 the team was able to launch a marketable product on the Ropsten testnet. While most of the functionalities of the website are largely developed, there is still lack of a professional frontend application.This thesis describes the systematic approach to develop a professional frontend application that takes care of a smooth user experience. Futhermore, it delves into the reliability issue of blockchain oracles, known as oracle problemand finds some solutions to the web development issues in connection with Ethereum network.sues in connection with Ethereum network.

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In recent years, scholarly interest research on blockchain technology steadily increased. While the underlying technology matures, observed problems in the field show questions of governance to remain crucial, even though scarcely studied empirically. One approach of solving these problems can be seen in decentralized autonomous organizations, which describes a new type of organizing that is grounded on consensus-based, distributed autonomy. The governance peculiarities of DAOs is fairly unexplored, and this is where this research commences. In an exploratory multiple case study consisting of three popular DAOs Aragon, Tezos, and DFINITY, their governance peculiarities are worked out by analyzing grey literature to understand stakeholder interests, incentivization, control, and coordination mechanisms, technical considerations, and external influences from off-chain entities. In the context of an on-and-off-chain continuum, it appears that DAOs provide mechanisms that might enable autonomous decision-making but, at the same time, find themselves strongly influenced by the interests of various stakeholders.

The use of AI has already been well researched. However, the interest of financial institutions in using this technology has only just begun. Financial advisors face a high-dimensional work environment and must deal with an immense cognitive workload. The fast-developing world of investment advisory has heightened the need for research in advisory support research as well. In the style of the scenario-based framework by Rosson and Carrollu, we create a solution scenario called Strategizer which solves current problems, enhances the overall advisory experience, and supports advisors, customers, and the banks. We identify tasks to support, acceptance criteria to fulfil, and further requirements to design a value-generating digital agent. We evaluate our work at different stages by conducting interviews and holding expert workshops. The Strategizer reduces the cognitive burden of advisors during an encounter and their workload before and after. It supports the bank's and the advisor's ability to deal with the fast-changing and elaborate bank advisory scenery of regulations, products, and technological possibilities. Banks do not only seem to be a dynamic and highly-digitalized partner, but they are. They increase the quality of their advisory session with the same pace as the complexity of their high-dimensional environment does. This work is a contribution to the research of advisory service support and AI-supported assistants embedding in expert-layperson interaction. Software architects, engineers, and designer can profit from the practical requirements we elaborate.

Case and knowledge management systems are spread at the frontline across public agencies. However, such systems are dedicated for the collaboration within the agency rather than for the face-to-face interaction with the clients. If used as a collaborative resource at the frontline, case and knowledge management systems might disturb the service provision by displaying unfiltered internal information, disclosing private data of other clients, or revealing the limits of frontline employees’ competence (if they cannot explain something) or their authority (if they cannot override something). Observation in the German Public Employment Agency shows that employment consultants make use of various coping strategies during face-to-face consultations to extend existing boundaries set by the case and knowledge management systems and by the rules considering their usage. The analysis of these coping strategies unveils the forces that shape the conduct of employment consultants during their contacts with clients: the consultants’ own understanding of work, the actual and the perceived needs of the clients, and the political mission as well as the internal rules of the employment agency. The findings form a twofold contribution: First, they contribute to the discourse on work in employment agencies by illustrating how the complexities of social welfare apparatus demonstrate themselves in singular behavioural patterns. Second, they contribute to the discourse on screen-level bureaucracy by depicting the consultants as active and conscious mediators rather than passive interfaces between the system and the client.