Detlef Schoder

Building firm trust online

The recent proliferation of e-commerce has led to a great deal of analysis probing the who, what, where, when, and why’s of new opportunities for conducting business online. In this publication alone, articles have ranged from theoretical predictions of the economic forces that will mold the Internet market (see [1]) to invasion-of-privacy issues reflected in empirical analysis of online consumer preferences (see [5]). Cookies, clickstream data trails, and the ease of conducting online surveys have permitted unprecedented tracking of what consumers search for, click on, and ultimately buy. Aggregating that data results in an entrepreneur’s dream for extracting significant characterizations of the Internet consumer population. The consumer-side research has already repeatedly stated that existing risks in e-commerce pose substantial barriers to consumer participation online. Never before has our understanding of the consumer been both so intimate and so extensive. However, the firm side of e-commerce has comparatively been forgotten. Amazon.com, which operates primarily on a business-to-consumer level, is now the cliché shorthand for describing what the firm side of the online market is all about. Yet in many ways, Amazon.com is an extremely misleading representative of e-business: it is the exception, rather than the rule, for online commerce. The only characteristic it shares with the majority of firms Firm Trust Detlef Schoder and Pai-Ling Yin

Peer-to-peer prospects

The P2P design philosophy needs far more detail before we can appreciate a clear picture of its potential.

An Exploration of Enterprise Architecture Research

Management of the enterprise architecture has become increasingly recognized as a crucial part of both business and IT management. Still, a common understanding and methodological consistency seems far from being developed. Acknowledging the significant role of research in moving the development process along, this article employs different bibliometric methods, complemented by an extensive qualitative interpretation of the research field, to provide a unique overview of the enterprise architecture literature. After answering our research questions about the collaboration via co-authorships, the intellectual structure of the research field and its most influential works, and the principal themes of research, we propose an agenda for future research based on the findings from the above analyses and their comparison to empirical insights from the literature. In particular, our study finds a considerable degree of co-authorship clustering and a positive impact of the extent of co-authorship on the diffusion of works on enterprise architecture. In addition, this article identifies three major research streams and shows that research to date has revolved around specific themes, while some of high practical relevance receive minor attention. Hence, the contribution of our study is manifold and offers support for researchers and practitioners alike.

Finding Collaborative Innovation Networks Through Correlating Performance with Social Network Structure

This paper contributes to the ongoing stream of research correlating social network structure with individual and organizational performance. While teaching a course on optimizing online communication behaviour and social network analysis, we collected preliminary data on the relationship between dynamic social network structures and individual and team performance. Students from Helsinki University of Technology and University of Cologne, who had never met face to face, formed virtual interdisciplinary teams collaborating on a common task, the communication analysis of online communities. As part of their task, students correlated performance of the community they were analysing with social network structure. In this research, we compare social network structure and individual and team performance of participants in a multi-user online computer game with social network structure and performance among the student teams. While among computer gamers the number of communication links predicts performance, a balanced contribution index predicts performance of the student knowledge worker teams. We also give general recommendations for efficient virtual communication behaviour.

Forecasting the success of telecommunication services in the presence of network effects

Abstract Historical examples (ISDN, Teletex, telefax, telex) show us that forecasting efforts in the telecommunication sector can go awry – not only by a few percentage points but by large magnitudes. We maintain that with strong network effects it is not possible to forecast the success of telecommunication services with a high degree of confidence. This paper reviews the role played by network effects for the adoption of telecommunication services, which lead to diffusion phenomena including critical mass, lock-in, path dependency, and inefficiency. To improve forecasting practices, we propose the master equation approach as an appropriate modelling technique incorporating network effects. A case is made for “thinking in probability distributions” rather than deriving misleading linear extrapolations of trend patterns. At base, the paper argues why these phenomena require a shift, away from a static, to a dynamic analysis; the paper also identifies a formal method suitable for the dynamic analysis.

Enterprise architecture management and its role in corporate strategic management

A considerable number of organizations continually face difficulties bringing strategy to execution, and suffer from a lack of structure and transparency in corporate strategic management. Yet, enterprise architecture as a fundamental exercise to achieve a structured description of the enterprise and its relationships appears far from being adopted in the strategic management arena. To move the adoption process along, this paper develops a comprehensive business architecture framework that assimilates and extends prior research and applies the framework to selected scenarios in corporate strategic management. This paper also presents the approach in practice, based on a qualitative appraisal of interviews with strategic directors across different industries. With its integrated conceptual guideline for using enterprise architecture to facilitate corporate strategic management and the insights gained from the interviews, this paper not only delves more deeply into the research but also offers advice for both researchers and practitioners.

Analysis of Informal Communication Networks – A Case Study

The structure and dynamics of informal communication networks are of central importance for the functionality of enterprise workflows and for performance and innovation of knowledge-centric organizations. While most executives are aware of this fact, there is a general lack of (semi-) automated, IT-supported methods and instruments to make informal communication networks measurable. Although logging of electronic communications has made considerable progress over the past few years, it is still extremely difficult to map personal interaction; manual approaches in particular are extremely error-prone. The article shows how informal communication networks can be investigated by IT-based methods. At the same time, the authors will be presenting an instrument (“Social Badges”) that collects personal communications automatically and more precisely than legacy approaches allow. The practical applicability of the approach is evaluated through a case study.

Co-authorship networks in electronic markets research

This article examines co-authorship networks of researchers publishing in Electronic Markets—The International Journal of Networked Business (EM). The authors visualize the co-authorship network and provide descriptive statistics regarding the degree to which researchers are embedded in the co-authorship network. They develop and test seven hypotheses associating the researchers’ embeddedness in the co-authorship network with the number of the researchers’ citations. Results indicate that author who publish co-authored articles in EM have their EM articles (whether co-authored or not) cited more frequently than those who publish EM articles only in their own names, and that the more they co-author the more they are cited because they are located in the center of a co-authorship network.

Studying Microscopic Peer-to-Peer Communication Patterns

This paper describes first results of an ongoing research effort using real time data collected by social badges to correlate temporal changes in social interaction patterns with performance of individual actors and groups. Towards that goal we analyzed social interaction among a team of employees at a bank in Germany, and developed a set of interventions for more efficient collaboration. In particular, we were able to identify typical meeting patterns, and to distinguish between creative and high-executing knowledge work based on the interaction pattern.

Measuring social capital in creative teams through sociometric sensors

We describe the results of an experiment capturing the face-to-face ‘honest signals’ of knowledge workers through sociometric badges. We find that collective creativity of teams is a function of the aggregated social capital of members. The higher it is, the higher their creative output. We collected communication data of 14 graduate students and their instructor during a one-week seminar, comparing it against the creative output of their teamwork. As a second component of social capital we also measured the level of trust team members show to each other through surveys. We find that the more team members directly interact with each other face-to-face, and the more they trust other team members, the more creative and of higher quality the result of their teamwork is.