Christian Sonnenberg

Evaluations in the science of the artificial --- reconsidering the build-evaluate pattern in design science research

The central outcome of design science research (DSR) is prescriptive knowledge in the form of IT artifacts and recommendations. However, prescriptive knowledge is considered to have no truth value in itself. Given this assumption, the validity of DSR outcomes can only be assessed by means of descriptive knowledge to be obtained at the conclusion of a DSR process. This is reflected in the build-evaluate pattern of current DSR methodologies. Recognizing the emergent nature of IT artifacts this build-evaluate pattern, however, poses unfavorable implications regarding the achievement of rigor within a DSR project. While it is vital in DSR to prove the usefulness of an artifact a rigorous DSR process also requires justifying and validating the artifact design itself even before it has been put into use. This paper proposes three principles for evaluating DSR artifacts which not only address the evaluation of an artifacts usefulness but also the evaluation of design decisions made to build an artifact. In particular, it is argued that by following these principles the prescriptive knowledge produced in DSR can be considered to have a truth-like value.

Evaluation Patterns for Design Science Research Artefacts

Artefact evaluation is regarded as being crucial for Design Science Research (DSR) in order to rigorously proof an artefact’s relevance for practice. The availability of guidelines for structuring DSR processes notwithstanding, the current body of knowledge provides only rudimentary means for a design researcher to select and justify appropriate artefact evaluation strategies in a given situation. This paper proposes patterns that could be used to articulate and justify artefact evaluation strategies within DSR projects. These patterns have been synthesised from prior DSR literature concerned with evaluation strategies. They distinguish both ex ante as well as ex post evaluations and reflect current DSR approaches and evaluation criteria.

Value-oriented Information Systems Design: The Concept of Potentials Modeling and its Application to Service-oriented Architectures

Companies are increasingly confronted with the question of whether or not the adoption of information technologies (IT) turns out to be a profitable venture. Thus, there is a great need for methods which allow for both the analysis and evaluation of the economic value of IT investments. In this paper we introduce the concept of potentials modeling which integrates a value-oriented perspective into information modeling. More specifically, we set out to explore the economic value of service-oriented architectures (SOA). The practicability of our approach is illustrated on the basis of a simplified application example. It is hoped that this paper will make a contribution to the ongoing discussion of IT value and stimulates further research in the field of value-oriented information systems (IS).

The rea-DSL: a domain specific modeling language for business models

In the discipline of accounting, the resource-event-agent (REA) ontology is a well accepted conceptual accounting framework to analyze the economic phenomena within and across enterprises. Accordingly, it seems to be appropriate to use REA in the requirements elicitation to develop an information architecture of accounting and enterprise information systems. However, REA has received comparatively less attention in the field of business informatics and computer science. Some of the reasons may be that the REA ontology despite of its well grounded core concepts is (1) sometimes vague in the definition of the relationships between these core concepts, (2) misses a precise language to describe the models, and (3) does not come with an easy to understand graphical notation. Accordingly, we have started developing a domain specific modeling language specifically dedicated to REA models and corresponding tool support to overcome these limitations. In this paper we present our REA DSL which supports the basic set of REA concepts.

Global Processes and Data: The Culture Journey at Hilti Corporation

The role of culture in business processes is often underestimated. Especially the success of Business Process Change depends to a large extent on the employees’ willingness to adapt to a new work environment and eventually accept short-term losses for long-term benefits. We, therefore, engage with the Hilti Corporation analyzing the role of culture in a specific change project. After introducing the Hilti business model, we take a closer look at the measures taken at Hilti to actively manage a global culture by means of the Culture Journey. Against this background, we examine the impact culture may have on Business Process Change. The IT-driven change project Global Processes and Data (GPD) at Hilti serves as an example for exploring the way in which culture affects process change. We conclude deriving some lessons learnt from the Hilti Case on the role of culture in BPM.

Living IT infrastructures — An ontology-based approach to aligning IT infrastructure capacity and business needs

Changes in organizational processes often interact with changes in the IT infrastructure. Accounting for the structural and economic consequences of changes to the modern IT infrastructure remains a challenge, as their complexity can affect more than one business process, and the need to share a common understanding between the IT and the business management challenges current IT governance practices. An integrative perspective of business processes and IT resources would help meet these challenges, but despite some progress such a perspective remains to be developed. This paper proposes a domain ontology – an Ontology for Linking Processes and IT infrastructure (OLPIT) – to model the relationship between IT resources and business processes for the purpose of measuring the business value of IT. The ontology was developed and evaluated in the context of a design research project conducted in the Hilti Corporation, an international manufacturing company, with the aim of defining how IT impacts the business and calculating the cost of IT services used.

The missing link between BPM and accounting: Using event data for accounting in process-oriented organizations

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to integrate business process management (BPM) and accounting on a conceptual level in order to account for the economic implications of process-state changes in process design-time and process run-time. Design/methodology/approach – The paper adopts a design science research paradigm. The research, grounded in an “events” approach to accounting theory, builds on the REA accounting model that has been adapted for the design of a process accounting model (PAM). Findings – The paper presents a PAM that can be used to structure event records in process-aware information systems (PAIS) to enable process-oriented accounting. The PAM is specified as a light weight data structure that is intended for the integration of PAIS and accounting information systems. Research limitations/implications – As this paper is technical in nature, more research is needed to evaluate more thoroughly its approach in naturalistic settings. Practical implications – The PAM can support traditio...

A Process Oriented Assessment of the IT Infrastructure Value: A Proposal of an Ontology Based Approach

The impact of IT infrastructure on organizations’ activities and performance is hard to evaluate since complex IT infrastructures affect multiple business processes. An integrated perspective on IT and business processes is required. Previous research dealing with process-based IT impact evaluations lacks practical applications of proposed methods. Adopting a value-based perspective, this paper focuses on the organizational impact of IT and introduces first results from an ongoing research. This paper introduces an ontology based approach to represent the relationships among business processes and IT infrastructure components.

Value-Orientation in Business Process Management

The purpose of business processes is to create value, and the purpose of business process management is to support this value creation. However, the concept of value is little understood in BPM, and a number of BPM initiatives have missed the opportunity to demonstrate value creation in practice. In fact, there is little understanding in the BPM discipline concerning how business processes become valuable and what kinds of value may arise from specific BPM initiatives. This chapter structures the value discussion in BPM by elaborating on the general notion of (economic) value and providing a frame of reference. Against this background we review extant contributions on value considerations in BPM and characterize the emerging field of value-oriented BPM. As an example, we present the Return on Process Transformation (ROPT) as a measure for evaluating the monetary effects of decisions on process (re-)design.

Value Assessment of Enterprise Content Management Systems: A Process-oriented Approach

Organisations are facing an incredibly increasing amount of content to be efficiently captured, organised and archived. As a result, Enterprise Content Management (ECM) has emerged as a top business priority during the past years. However, only a few academic reports present common guidelines for evaluating and justifying the choice for a certain ECM solution in terms of economic benefits. This paper is based on the perception that such guidelines particularly should take an organisation’s business process structure into account, since an ECM adoption causes significant changes in work procedures. Consequently, we consider an established business process-oriented framework for profitability analysis of IS and apply it to the context of ECM. An application example serves as an illustration of the concept.