Alexander Benlian

Drivers of SaaS-Adoption – An Empirical Study of Different Application Types

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is said to become an important cornerstone of the Internet of Services. However, while some market research and IT provider firms fervently support this point of view, others already conjure up the failure of this on-demand sourcing option. Oftentimes based on weak empirical data and shaky reasoning, these inconsistent perspectives lack scientific rigor and neglect to present a more differentiated picture of SaaS-adoption. This study seeks to deepen the understanding of factors driving the adoption of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS). Grounded in transaction cost theory, the resource-based view, and the theory of planned behavior, we develop a research model to assess SaaS-adoption at the application level. Survey data of 297 firms in Germany with 374 valid response items across different industries were collected to test the theoretical model. Our analysis revealed that patterns on the decision on SaaS-adoption differ across application types. Social influence, attitude toward SaaS-adoption, adoption uncertainty, and strategic value turned out to be the strongest and most consistent drivers across all application types. Furthermore, we found that firm size does not matter in SaaS-adoption, since large enterprises and small- and medium-sized companies had similar adoption rates. Overall, this study provides relevant findings that IT vendors can use to better appeal to potential companies that consider adopting SaaS.

Service Quality in Software-as-a-Service: Developing the SaaS-Qual Measure and Examining Its Role in Usage Continuance

Despite the need to better understand how customers of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions perceive the quality of these software services and how these perceptions influence SaaS adoption and use, there is no extant measure that comprehensively captures service quality evaluations in SaaS. Based on previous SERVQUAL and SaaS literature, field interviews and focus groups, a card-sorting exercise, and two surveys of SaaS using companies, we develop, refine, and test SaaS-Qual, a zones-of-tolerance (ZOT)-based service quality measurement instrument specifically for SaaS solutions. Besides validating already established service quality dimensions (i.e., rapport, responsiveness, reliability, and features), we identify two new factors (i.e., security and flexibility) that are essential for the evaluation of service quality of SaaS solutions. SaaS-Qual demonstrates strong psychometric properties and shows high nomological validity within a framework that predicts the continued use of SaaS solutions by existing customers. In addition to developing a validated instrument that provides a fine-grained measurement of SaaS service quality, we also enrich existing research models on information systems continuance. Moreover, the SaaS-Qual instrument can be used as a diagnostic tool by SaaS providers and users alike to spot strengths and weaknesses in the service delivery of SaaS solutions.

Business Models: An Information Systems Research Agenda

The business model concept, although a relatively new topic for research, has garnered growing attention over the past decade. Whilst it has been robustly defined, the concept has so far attracted very little substantive research. In the context of the wide-spread digitization of businesses and society at large, the logic inherent in a business model has become critical for business success and, hence, a focus for academic inquiry. The business model concept is identified as the missing link between business strategy, processes, and Information Technology (IT). The authors argue that the BISE community offers distinct and unique competencies (e.g., translating business strategies into IT systems, managing business and IT processes, etc.) that can be harnessed for significant research contributions to this field. Within this research gap three distinct streams are delineated, namely, business models in IT industries, IT enabled or digital business models, and IT support for developing and managing business models. For these streams, the current state of the art, suggest critical research questions, and suitable research methodologies are outlined.

Digital Transformation Strategies

In recent years, firms in almost all industries have conducted a number of initiatives to explore new digital technologies and to exploit their benefits. This frequently involves transformations of key business operations and affects products and processes, as well as organizational structures and management concepts. Companies need to establish management practices to govern these complex transformations. An important approach is to formulate a digital transformation strategy that serves as a central concept to integrate the entire coordination, prioritization, and implementation of digital transformations within a firm. The exploitation and integration of digital technologies often affect large parts of companies and even go beyond their borders, by impacting products, business processes, sales channels, and supply chains. Potential benefits of digitization are manifold and include increases in sales or productivity, innovations in value creation, as well as novel forms of interaction with customers, among others. As a result, entire business models can be reshaped or replaced (Downes and Nunes 2013). Owing to this wide scope and the far-reaching consequences, digital transformation strategies seek to coordinate and prioritize the many independent threads of digital transformation. To account for their company-spanning characteristics, digital transformation strategies cut across other business strategies and should be aligned with them (Fig. 1). While there are various concepts of IT strategies (Teubner 2013), these mostly define the current and the future operational activities, the necessary application systems and infrastructures, and the adequate organizational and financial framework for providing IT to carry out business operations within a company. Hence, IT strategies usually focus on the management of the IT infrastructure within a firm, with rather limited impact on driving innovations in business development. To some degree, this restricts the product-centric and customer-centric opportunities that arise from new digital technologies, which often cross firms’ borders. Further, IT strategies present systemcentric road maps to the future uses of technologies in a firm, but they do not necessarily account for the transformation of products, processes, and structural aspects that go along with the integration of technologies. Digital transformation strategies take on a different perspective and pursue different goals. Coming from a business-centric perspective, these strategies focus on the transformation of products, processes, and organizational aspects owing to new technologies. Their scope is more broadly designed and explicitly includes digital activities at the interface with or fully on the side of customers, such as Accepted after one revision by Prof. Dr. Sinz.

How Open is this Platform? The Meaning and Measurement of Platform Openness from the Complementors’ Perspective

Software platforms’ success largely depends on complementors’ willingness to repeatedly invest their time and effort to the development of platform applications that attract users and increase the platform’s installed base. But how can platform providers encourage desirable behaviours by complementors (i.e., application developers) in the absence of formal roles and hierarchical control structures? Although previous studies of software-based platforms have identified openness as critical instrument at the macro (i.e., platform) level and have provided initial attempts to measure the construct, no research has been dedicated to comprehensively conceptualize and operationalize platform openness at the micro level from the perspective of application developers. To go beyond these preliminary findings and to theorize about the nature and effects of platform openness as perceived by application developers, we develop a construct called perceived platform openness (PPO). Drawing on recently advanced scale development methodologies, we conceptualize PPO as a multidimensional construct and empirically validate it with important consequent variables linked to developers’ continuous platform contributions. Empirical evidence from several rounds of qualitative and quantitative steps supports the conceptual validity of the construct and empirical relevance of the scale across different smartphone platform contexts (i.e., Apple iOS and Google Android). Researchers will benefit from the study’s systematic and comprehensive conceptualization of PPO, how it is measured, and how it relates to critical application developer beliefs and attitudes. Platform managers may use our results to target the underlying facets of PPO most likely to contribute to the platform’s long-term goals.

Pricing of Content Services – An Empirical Investigation of Music as a Service

In the last years new concepts of digital music distribution have been developed. One of them is Music as a Service, which provides music streaming over the internet as a service - without transferring ownership for the content. This differentiates Music as a Service from Download to Own, which is used by music download platforms predominantly and is the most widely studied concept in academic research. The aim of this paper is to receive first research implications about customers’ attitudes towards MaaS.

Converting freemium customers from free to premium - The role of the perceived premium fit in the case of music as a service

Freemium seems to be a promising solution for content providers to earn money now that Web 2.0 users feel entitled to free services and content services like Spotify generally accept this concept. Providers using freemium offer their service in free basic and paid premium versions. To prompt users to pay, a free version has fewer functions. However, no studies have yet investigated whether limiting features is the best strategy for converting users into paying customers, and, if so, how many functional differences there should be between free and premium versions. Therefore, our study aims to measure whether a free service’s limitations impact the evaluation of free and premium versions. Drawing on the Dual Mediation Hypothesis and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we examined 317 freemium users’ survey responses. Our results indicate that companies providing freemium services can increase the probability of user conversion by providing a strong functional fit between their free and premium services.

Is traditional, open-source, or on-demand first choice? Developing an AHP-based framework for the comparison of different software models in office suites selection

Until recently, organizations planning to acquire application software (AS) have had no choice but to adopt proprietary, on-premises software. With the advent of open-source and on-demand solutions, new models for developing and distributing software have entered the stage providing IS managers with more options in AS selection. On the basis of an Analytic Hierarchy Process model, we propose a framework including software package and implementation attributes on different hierarchy levels to examine how IS managers evaluate the relative fulfilment of key selection criteria by traditional, open-source, and on-demand office suites. By testing the framework with a random sample of 254 IS managers of 166 smaller and 88 mid-sized/larger firms, we validate its validity and usefulness in evaluating different software delivery models. Our empirical results show that open-source office suites were consistently perceived to be superior in meeting ease of customization (i.e., extensibility and adaptability) and cost criteria (i.e., acquisition and maintenance cost), whereas traditional software models were superior in fulfilling functionality, ease of use, and support requirements. On-demand office suites excelled in the fulfilment of time-to-value and data recoverability. We discuss further results of the comparison of the three software models, and derive practical and research implications for office suite selection.

The Advertising Effect of Free -- Do Free Basic Versions Promote Premium Versions within the Freemium Business Model of Music Services?

Freemium seems a promising solution for content providers to earn money in times of the free mentality of Web 2.0 users. Freemium services can be used both for free or with a paid subscription to obtain premium content. Nevertheless, freemiums success is limited. Especially Music as a Service (MaaS) providers, that provide music via streaming over the internet as a service, still make no profits, because earnings from advertisements and premium users are not sufficient to finance the free basic version of music listening. However, this free basic version is necessary to convert non-paying users into paying ones. This study tests whether the basic, free version of a freemium service is recognized as advertisement for the premium version and could therefore lead to conversion. Using a structural equation model based on the Dual Mediation Hypothesis, we developed a survey with 71 participants and found that there is no advertising effect.

Effects of Social Interaction Dynamics on Platforms

Abstract Despite the increasing relevance of online social interactions on platforms, there is still little research on the temporal interaction dynamics between electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM, a form of opinion-based social interaction), popularity information (a form of action-based social interaction), and consumer decision making. Drawing on a panel data set of more than 23,300 crowdfunding campaigns from Indiegogo, we investigate the dynamic effects of these social interactions on consumers’ funding decisions using the panel vector autoregressive methodology. Our analysis shows that both eWOM and popularity information are critical influencing mechanisms in crowdfunding. However, our overarching finding is that eWOM surrounding crowdfunding campaigns on Indiegogo or Facebook has a significant yet substantially weaker predictive power than popularity information. We also find that whereas popularity information has a more immediate effect on consumers’ funding behavior, its effectiveness decays rather quickly, while the impact of eWOM recedes more slowly. This study contributes to the extant literature by (1) providing a more nuanced understanding of the dynamic effects of opinion-based and action-based social interactions, (2) unraveling both within-platform and cross-platform dynamics, and (3) showing that social interactions are perceived as quality indicators on crowdfunding platforms that help consumers reduce risks associated with their investment decisions. These results can help platform providers and complementors to stimulate contribution behavior and increase the prosperity of a platform.