Alexander Mädche

Digitalization: Opportunity and Challenge for the Business and Information Systems Engineering Community

The convergence of the so-called SMAC technologies – social, mobile, analytics, and cloud computing – has led to an unprecedented wave of digitalization that is currently fueling innovation in business and society. As digitalization is embracing all aspects of our private and professional lives, it is becoming a priority for managers and policymakers, and has made it into the headlines of newspapers, magazines, and practitioner conferences. This wave of digitalization is creating opportunities for the BISE community to engage in innovative research activities and to increase the discipline’s visibility. However, since BISE researchers have investigated the increasing exploitation and integration of digital technologies over several decades, they also naturally react with ambivalence when others claim that going digital is a new phenomenon.

How to prevent reinventing the wheel?: design principles for project knowledge management systems

Today, many companies still struggle in documenting and reusing the knowledge gained by project teams. However, knowledge only creates value if it is applied. There exists a vast amount of research in the field of knowledge management focusing on documentation, storage and exchange of knowledge, but knowledge reuse is often omitted by researchers. The presented work aims to close this gap by developing a project knowledge management system enabling project teams to apply company-internal knowledge. We followed an action design research approach to explore meta-requirements in a case company, translate these requirements into design principles and test the design principles by evaluating an artifact of a project knowledge management system. By our work, the knowledge management research field can benefit since our design theory extends the existing body of knowledge. Furthermore, our research results are instantiated in a concrete artifact which can be directly transferred into practice.

Are you a trustworthy partner in a cross-cultural virtual environment?: behavioral cultural intelligence and receptivity-based trust in virtual collaboration

Globally distributed work has been prevalent in organizations. However, cultural issues in distributed work are still challenging team performance. Cultural intelligence, defined as individuals capability to perform in cross-cultural settings, has great potential in untangling these issues. The present study examines three individual capabilities (behavioral cultural intelligence, language proficiency and technical skills) and their effects on partners receptivity-based trust and satisfaction in a cross-cultural virtual environment. We develop a theoretical model based on the extended adaptive structuration theory (EAST) and verify the model in a cross-border experiment. The result suggests that focal members behavioral cultural intelligence strongly influences their remote partners receptivity/trust. This effect is moderated by language proficiency; 57% of the variance of partners satisfaction is predicted by receptivity/trust and the focal members technical skills.

Combining Data-Driven and Semantic Approaches for Text Mining

While the amount of structured data published on the Web keeps growing (fostered in particular by the Linked Open Data initiative), the Web still comprises of mainly unstructured—in particular textual—content and is therefore a Web for human consumption. Thus, an important question is which techniques are most suitable to enable people to effectively access the large body of unstructured information available on the Web, whether it is semantic or not. While the hope is that semantic technologies can be combined with standard Information Retrieval approaches to enable more accurate retrieval, some researchers have argued against this view. They claim that only data-driven or inductive approaches are applicable to tasks requiring the organization of unstructured (mainly textual) data for retrieval purposes. We argue that the dichotomy between data-driven/inductive and semantic approaches is indeed a false one. We further argue that bottom-up or inductive approaches can be successfully combined with top-down or semantic approaches and illustrate this for a number of tasks such as Ontology Learning, Information Retrieval, Information Extraction and Text Mining.

Designing an Enterprise Social Questions and Answers Site to Enable Scalable User-to-User Support

Nowadays, the information technology infrastructure within organizations is getting more and more heterogeneous. Recent trends such as bring-your-own-device or choose-your-own-device satisfy user requests for diverse devices they already know from their private life. On the other hand, following these trends results in an increased complexity of the organizations infrastructure and a substantial rise in required effort for supporting users. In order to address this increased support demand, the establishment of a user-to-user support culture seems promising. An established concept to provide user-to-user support is the concept of social questions and answers SQA sites. SQA sites have been shown to be successful in the private context. Users can seek and provide knowledge and thereby support each other. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an enterprise SQA platform aiming to support employees in solving problems with processes or technologies. Building on already derived design principles, we discuss the design and implementation of the SQA prototype within an existing Customer Relation Management platform. The resulting system was then evaluated within five focus group sessions with professionals from various industries. The evaluation results show the validity of our design principles and the usefulness of the implemented prototype.

Designing a Report Recommendation Assistant: A First Design Cycle

Employees often supplement their organizations Business Intelligence BI system with individually tinkered reports. Unfortunately, these supplements bear numerous threats such as limited report reuse across all users of the BI system. Therefore, we established a design science research DSR project by exploring impediments of existing BI systems, building meta-requirements and suggesting design principles. In particular, we propose a Report Recommendation Assistant RRA for improving reuse of reports across potential users. n nIn this paper, we present our DSR project and focus on the first evaluation cycle. Our results indicate that the RRA has a positive impact on perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the BI system. Furthermore, we find that these effects are negatively moderated by users expertise in using the BI system and are not biased by the underlying BI system. Finally, we leverage results from BI expert interviews and existing literature to refine the proposed RRA.

Designing an artifact for the integration of ubiquitous information systems in an enterprise context

In the past most IT innovations were initially introduced inside organizations and it was there where individuals first came in contact with new technologies. Nowadays, also the private life has gained importance for the adoption of technologies. Not often, individuals acquire new IT innovations privately, before they realize their value for professional activities and start using them for work. Their employers, however, struggle to integrate those innovations into their already heterogeneous organizational landscapes. The result is often an overly insufficient and ineffective use of private IT in organizations. In fact, previous integration research has provided various concepts to abate such negative effects, integrating the data and functionality of a few more private systems seems not a big deal. However, if one looks closer, it becomes apparent that private IT is autonomous from organizational control, rendering many common approaches inapplicable. Our research addresses this problem. Using the scenario of self-employed insurance brokers, we identify several characteristics of private IT ecosystems, here conceptualized as ubiquitous information systems (UIS), which prevent its productive use for professional activities. Based on these findings we suggest and instantiate a solution design which solves many issues of heterogeneity, but also accounts for the autonomy and distribution of the private UIS and its sub-systems. We conclude our research with a discussion of six propositions about the expected impact of our solution on individual performance.

Biological sex vs. psychological gender-roles in online channel choices: evidence from two studies in the financial services industry

New information technologies offer customers new ways of buying products and services. It is important for companies to understand and predict consumer behavior, yet the findings of biological sex and online channel choices are mixed with contradicting results. Thereby, gender schema theory might explain these gender differences. We used psychological gender-roles to operationalize gender schema theory and we developed two different models to investigate the effect of it on online channel choices. To test these models, we conducted two studies. Results reveal that the biological sex is not effective in explaining channel choices. Instead, we suggest that psychological gender-roles have a direct effect on online channel choices. In addition, psychological gender-roles may also have a moderating effect. Our study contributes to a better understanding of gender-roles in online channel choices.

Flow-Erfassung am Arbeitsplatz: Aktueller Stand der Forschung und innovative Anwendungsszenarien

Moderne Informationstechnologien (IT), zu denen beispielsweise E-Mails, Instant Messaging und Benachrichtigungen zahlen, bilden das Fundament der heutigen Arbeitswelt und fordern die kontinuierliche Erreichbarkeit und Produktivitat der Mitarbeiter eines Unternehmens. Jedoch fuhren diese auch zu Unterbrechungen wahrend der Arbeit. Solche Unterbrechungen konnen sich negativ auf den „Flow-Zustand“ eines Mitarbeiters auswirken. Flow bezeichnet einen Zustand, in welchem eine Person vollig in einer Aufgabe aufgeht und dabei hoch fokussiert ist [1]. Durch technologischen Fortschritt und aktueller Forschung im Bereich der automatischen Erkennung eines Flow Zustandes, ergeben sich neue Moglichkeiten Unterbrechungen intelligenter zu gestalten. Ubergreifendes Ziel ist es hierbei, den Flow-Zustand eines Mitarbeiters moglichst zu erhalten oder diesen gezielt zu fordern. Der vorliegende Beitrag erarbeitet einen Uberblick des aktuellen Forschungsstands im Bereich der Flow-Erfassung in Theorie und Praxis und skizziert auf dieser Basis innovative Anwendungsszenarien. Zudem werden zukunftige Entwicklungen auf diesem Gebiet aufgezeigt.

Gamification zur Motivation von Technologienutzern

„Das ganze Leben ist ein Spiel“ – heute mehr denn je. Wo man hinschaut, kann man Punkte sammeln, sich mit anderen messen und vergleichen oder Abzeichen und Boni gewinnen. Beim Einkaufen kann man „Treuepunkte“ sammeln, fur welche man als Gegenleistung Vergunstigungen oder Produkte erhalt.